arcely having shoes to his feet,
he very soon set up a gig.

CHAPTER LXVIII

HOW THE 'GRAND ARISTOCRATIC' CAME OFF

Steeple-chases are generally crude, ill-arranged things. Few sportsmen will
act as stewards a second time; while the victim to the popular delusion of
patronizing our 'national sports' considers--like gentlemen who have served
the office of sheriff, or church-warden--that once in a lifetime is enough;
hence, there is always the air of amateur actorship about them. There is
always something wanting or forgotten. Either they forget the ropes, or
they forget the scales, or they forget the weights, or they forget the
bell, or--more commonly still--some of the parties forget themselves.
Farmers, too, are easily satisfied with the benefits of an irresponsible
mob careering over their farms, even though some of them are attired in the
miscellaneous garb of hunting and racing costume. Indeed, it is just this
mixture of two sports that spoils both; steeple-chasing being neither
hunting nor racing. It has not the wild excitement of the one, nor the
accurate calculating qualities of the other. The very horses have a
peculiar air about them--neither hunters nor hacks, nor yet exactly
race-horses. Some of them, doubtless, are fine, good-looking,
well-conditioned animals; but the majority are lean, lathy, sunken-eyed,
woe-begone, iron-marked, desperately-abused brutes, lacking all the lively
energy that characterizes the movements of the up-to-the-mark hunter. In
the early days of steeple-chasing a popular fiction existed that the horses
were hunters; and grooms and fellows used to come nicking and grinning up
to masters of hounds at checks and critical times, requesting them to note
that they were out, in order to ask for certificates of the horses having
been 'regularly hunted'--a species of regularity than which nothing could
be more irregular. That nuisance, thank goodness, is abated. A
steeple-chaser now generally stands on his own merits; a change for which
sportsmen may be thankful.

But to our story.

The whole country was in a commotion about this 'Aristocratic'. The
unsophisticated looked upon it as a grand _reunion_ of the aristocracy; and
smart bonnets and cloaks, and jackets and parasols were ordered with the
liberality incident to a distant view of Christmas. As Viney sipped his
sherry-cobler of an evening, he laughed at the idea of a
son-of-a-day-labourer like himself raising such a dust. Let