as just made for their matches to
come off in, and scarcely condescend to ask the leave of the landowners.

We saw an advertisement the other day, where a low publican, in a
manufacturing town, assured the subscribers to his coursing-club that he
would take care to select open ground, with 'plenty of stout hares,' as if
all the estates in the neighbourhood were at his command. Another
advertised a steeple-chase in the centre of a good hunting
country--'amateur and gentleman riders'--with a half-crown ordinary at the
end! Fancy the respectability of a steeple-chase, with a half-crown
ordinary at the end!

Our 'Aristocratic' was got up on the good-of-the-house principle. Whatever
benefit the Granddiddle Junction conferred upon the country at large, it
had a very prejudicial effect upon the Old Duke of Cumberland Hotel and
Posting House, which it left, high and dry, at an angle sufficiently near
to be tantalized by the whirr and the whistle of the trains, and yet too
far off to be benefited by the parties they brought. This once
well-accustomed hostelry was kept by one Mr. Viney, a former butler in the
Scattercash family, and who still retained the usual 'old and faithful
servant' _entree_ of Nonsuch House, having his beefsteak and bottle of wine
in the steward's room whenever he chose to call. Viney had done good at the
Old Duke of Cumberland; and no one, seeing him 'full fig,' would recognize,
in the solemn grandeur of his stately person, the dirty knife-boy who had
filled the place now occupied by the still dirtier Slarkey. But the days of
road travelling departed, and Viney, who, beneath the Grecian-columned
portico of his country-house-looking hotel, modulated the ovations of his
cauliflower head to every description of traveller--from the lordly
occupant of the barouche-and-four, down to the humble sitter in a gig--was
cut off by one fell swoop from all further traffic. He was extinguished
like a gaslight, and the pipe was laid on a fresh line.

Fortunately Mr. Viney was pretty warm; he had done pretty well; and having
enjoyed the intimacy of the great 'Jeames' of railway times, had got a hint
not to engage the hotel beyond the opening of the line. Consequently, he
now had the great house for a mere nothing until such times as the owner
could convert it into that last refuge for deserted houses--an academy, or
a 'young ladies' seminary.' Mr. Viney now, having plenty of leisure,
frequently drove his 'missis' (once a