eyond all measure, unsatisfactory. After the best-managed bag
fox-hunt, there is always a sort of suppressed joy, a deadly liveliness in
the field. Those in the secret are afraid of praising it too much, lest the
secret should ooze out, and strangers suppose that all their great runs are
with bag foxes, while the mere retaking of an animal that one has had in
hand before is not calculated to arouse any very pleasurable emotions.
Nobody ever goes frantic at seeing an old donkey of a deer handed back into
his carriage after a canter.

Our friends on this occasion soon exhausted what they had to say on the
subject.

'That's a nice horse of yours,' observed Mr. Waffles to Mr. Sponge, as the
latter, on the strength of the musty brush, now rode alongside the master
of the hounds.

'I think he is,' replied Sponge, rubbing some of the now dried sweat from
his shoulder and neck; 'I think he is; I like him a good deal better to-day
than I did the first time I rode him.'

'What, he's a new one, is he?' asked Mr. Waffles, taking a scented cigar
from his mouth, and giving a steady sidelong stare at the horse.

'Bought him in Leicestershire,' replied Sponge. 'He belonged to Lord
Bullfrog, who didn't think him exactly up to his weight.'

'Up to his weight!' exclaimed Mr. Caingey Thornton, who had now ridden up
on the other side of his great patron, 'why, he must be another Daniel
Lambert.'

'Rather so,' replied Mr. Sponge; 'rides nineteen stun.'

'What a monster!' exclaimed Thornton, who was of the pocket order.

'I thought he didn't go fast enough at his fences the first time I rode
him,' observed Mr. Sponge, drawing the curb slightly so as to show the
horse's fine arched neck to advantage; 'but he went quick enough to-day, in
all conscience,' added he.

'He did _that_,' observed Mr. Thornton, now bent on a toadying match. 'I
never saw a finer lepper.'

'He flew many feet beyond the brook,' observed Mr. Spareneck, who, thinking
discretion was the better part of valour, had pulled up on seeing his
comrade Thornton blobbing about in the middle of it, and therefore was
qualified to speak to the fact.

So they went on talking about the horse, and his points, and his speed, and
his action, very likely as much for want of something to say, or to keep
off the subject of the run, as from any real admiration of the animal.

The true way to make a man take a fancy to a horse is to make believe that
you don't want to sell him--at