without end, fancy flowers,
elegant shawls labelled 'Very chaste,' 'Patronized by Royalty,' 'Quite the
go!' and white kid-gloves in such profusion that there seemed to be a pair
for every person in the place.

Mr. Leather established himself at the 'Eclipse Livery and Bait Stables,'
in Pegasus Street, or Peg Street, as it is generally called, where he
enacted the character of stud-groom to perfection, doing nothing himself,
but seeing that others did his work, and strutting consequentially with the
corn-sieves at feeding time.

After Leather's long London experience, it is natural to suppose that he
would not be long in falling in with some old acquaintance at a place like
the 'Wells,' and the first night fortunately brought him in contact with a
couple of grooms who had had the honour of his acquaintance when in all the
radiance of his glass-blown wigged prosperity as body-coachman to the Duke
of Dazzleton, and who knew nothing of the treadmill, or his subsequent
career. This introduction served with his own easy assurance, and the
deference country servants always pay to London ones, at once to give him
standing, and it is creditable to the etiquette of servitude to say, that
on joining the 'Mutton Chop and Mealy Potato Club,' at the Cat and
Bagpipes, on the second night after his arrival, the whole club rose to
receive him on entering, and placed him in the post of honour, on the right
of the president.

He was very soon quite at home with the whole of them, and ready to tell
anything he knew of the great families in which he had lived. Of course, he
abused the duke's place, and said he had been obliged to give him 'hup' at
last, 'bein' quite an unpossible man to live with; indeed, his only wonder
was, that he had been able to put hup with him so long.' The duchess was a
'good cretur,' he said, and, indeed, it was mainly on her account that he
stayed, but as to the duke, he was--everything that was bad, in short.

Mr. Sponge, on the other hand, had no reason to complain of the colours in
which his stud-groom painted him. Instead of being the shirtless strapper
of a couple of vicious hack hunters. Leather made himself out to be the
general superintendent of the opulent owner of a large stud. The exact
number varied with the number of glasses of grog Leather had taken, but he
never had less than a dozen, and sometimes as many as twenty hunters under
his care. These, he said, were planted all over the kingdom; some at