y, 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
wetting his own whistle with a pint of half-and-half, he again journeyed
onward, ruminating on the uncertainty and mutability of all earthly
affairs, the comparative merits of stag-, fox-, and hare-hunting, and
the necessity of getting rid of the day somehow or other in the country.

[Footnote 13: He might well be called a "travelling fox," for it was
said he had just travelled down from Herring's, in the New Road, by the
Bromley stage.]

Suddenly his reverie was interrupted by the discharge of a gun in the
field adjoining the hedge along which he was passing, and the boisterous
whirring of a great cock-pheasant over his head, which caused his horse
to start and stop short, and to nearly pitch Jorrocks over his head. The
bird was missed, but the sportsman's dog dashed after it, with all the
eagerness of expectation, regardless of the cracks of the whip--the
"comes to heel," and "downs to charge" of the master. Jorrocks pulled
out his hunting telescope, and having marked the bird down with the
precision of a billiard-table keeper, rode to the gate to acquaint the
shooter with the fact, when to his infinite amazement he discovered his
friend, Nosey Browne (late of "The Surrey"), who, since his affairs had
taken the unfortunate turn mentioned in the last paper, had given up
hunting and determined to confine himself to shooting only. Nosey,
however, was no great performer, as