horses, with
the option of buying them, provided he (Mr. Sponge) could sell them for
more than he would have to give Mr. Buckram, exclusive of the hire. Mr.
Buckram's job price, we should say, was as near twelve pounds a month,
containing twenty-eight days, as he could screw, the hirer, of course,
keeping the animals.

Scampley is one of those pretty little suburban farms, peculiar to the
north and north-west side of London--farms varying from fifty to a hundred
acres of well-manured, gravelly soil; each farm with its picturesque little
buildings, consisting of small, honey-suckled, rose-entwined brick houses,
with small, flat, pan-tiled roofs, and lattice-windows; and, hard by, a
large hay-stack, three times the size of the house, or a desolate barn,
half as big as all the rest of the buildings. From the smallness of the
holdings, the farmhouses are dotted about as thickly, and at such varying
distances from the roads, as to look like inferior 'villas,' falling out of
rank; most of them have a half-smart, half-seedy sort of look.

The rustics who cultivate them, or rather look after them, are neither
exactly town nor country. They have the clownish dress and boorish gait of
the regular 'chaws,' with a good deal of the quick, suspicious, sour
sauciness of the low London resident. If you can get an answer from them at
all, it is generally delivered in such a way as to show that the answerer
thinks you are what they call 'chaffing them,' asking them what you know.

These farms serve the double purpose of purveyors to the London stables,
and hospitals for sick, overworked, or unsaleable horses. All the great
job-masters and horse-dealers have these retreats in the country, and the
smaller ones pretend to have, from whence, in due course, they can draw any
sort of an animal a customer may want, just as little cellarless
wine-merchants can get you any sort of wine from real establishments--if
you only give them time.

There was a good deal of mystery about Scampley. It was sometimes in the
hands of Mr. Benjamin Buckram, sometimes in the hands of his assignees,
sometimes in those of his cousin, Abraham Brown, and sometimes John Doe and
Richard Roe were the occupants of it.

Mr. Benjamin Buckram, though very far from being one, had the advantage of
looking like a respectable man. There was a certain plump, well-fed
rosiness about him, which, aided by a bright-coloured dress, joined to a
continual fumble in the pockets of