friends, we are sure, will allow him to be an enthusiastic member of the
brotherhood, and though we do not profess to put him in competition with
Musters, Osbaldeston, or any of those sort of men, we yet mean to say
that had his lot been cast in the country instead of behind a counter,
his keenness would have rendered him as conspicuous--if not as
scientific--as the best of them.

For a cockney sportsman, however, he is a very excellent fellow--frank,
hearty, open, generous, and hospitable, and with the exception of riding
up Fleet Street one Saturday afternoon, with a cock-pheasant's tail
sticking out of his red coat pocket, no one ever saw him do a cock tail
action in his life.

The circumstances attending that exhibition are rather curious.--He had
gone out as usual on a Saturday to have a day with the Surrey, but on
mounting his hunter at Croydon, he felt the nag rather queer under him,
and thinking he might have been pricked in the shoeing, he pulled up at
the smith's at Addington to have his feet examined. This lost him five
minutes, and unfortunately when he got to the meet, he found that a
"travelling[13] fox" had been tallied at the precise moment of throwing
off, with which the hounds had gone away in their usual brilliant style,
to the tune of "Blue bonnets are over the border." As may be supposed,
he was in a deuce of a rage; and his first impulse prompted him to
withdraw his subscription and be done with the hunt altogether, and he
trotted forward "on the line," in the hopes of catching them up to tell
them so. In this he was foiled, for after riding some distance, he
overtook a string of Smithfield horses journeying "foreign for Evans,"
whose imprints he had been taking for the hoof-marks of the hunters.
About noon he found himself dull, melancholy, and disconsolate, before
the sign of the "Pig and Whistle," on the Westerham road, where, after