Mr. Sponges Sporting Tour | Page 6

colour; only to
a young gemman, you know, it's well to have 'em smart, and the ticket,
in short; howsomever, I must do the best I can for you, and if there's
nothin' in that tickles your fancy, why, you must give me a few days to
see if I can arrange an exchange with some other gent; but the present
is like to be a werry haggiwatin' season; had more happlications for
osses nor ever I remembers, and I've been a dealer now, man and boy,
turned of eight-and-thirty years; but young gents is whimsical, and it
was a young 'un wot got these, and there's no sayin' but he mayn't like
them--indeed, one's rayther difficult to ride--that's to say, the grey, the
neatest of the two, and he may come back, and if so, you shall have him;
and a safer, sweeter oss was never seen, or one more like to do credit to
a gent: but you knows what an oss is, Mr. Sponge, and can do justice to
me, and I should like to put summut good into your hands--that I

should.'
With conversation, or rather with balderdash, such as this, Mr.
Buckram beguiled the few minutes necessary for removing the
bandages, hiding the bottles, and stirring up the cripples about to be
examined, and the heavy flap of the coach-house door announcing that
all was ready, he forthwith led the way through a door in a brick wall
into a little three-sides of a square yard, formed of stables and loose
boxes, with a dilapidated dove-cote above a pump in the centre; Mr.
Buckram, not growing corn, could afford to keep pigeons.
CHAPTER III
PETER LEATHER
Nothing bespeaks the character of a dealer's trade more than the
servants and hangers-on of the establishment. The civiler in manner,
and the better they are 'put on,' the higher the standing of the master,
and the better the stamp of the horses.
Those about Mr. Buckram's were of a very shady order. Dirty-shirted,
sloggering, baggy-breeched, slangey-gaitered fellows, with the word
'gin' indelibly imprinted on their faces. Peter Leather, the head man,
was one of the fallen angels of servitude. He had once driven a
duke--the Duke of Dazzleton--having nothing whatever to do but dress
himself and climb into his well-indented richly fringed throne, with a
helper at each horse's head to 'let go' at a nod from his broad laced
three-cornered hat. Then having got in his cargo (or rubbish, as he used
to call them), he would start off at a pace that was truly terrific, cutting
out this vehicle, shooting past that, all but grazing a third,
anathematizing the 'buses, and abusing the draymen. We don't know
how he might be with the queen, but he certainly drove as though he
thought nobody had any business in the street while the Duchess of
Dazzleton wanted it. The duchess liked going fast, and Peter
accommodated her. The duke jobbed his horses and didn't care about
pace, and so things might have gone on very comfortably, if Peter one
afternoon hadn't run his pole into the panel of a very plain but very neat

yellow barouche, passing the end of New Bond Street, which having
nothing but a simple crest--a stag's head on the panel--made him think
it belonged to some bulky cit, taking the air with his rib, but who,
unfortunately, turned out to be no less a person than Sir Giles Nabem,
Knight, the great police magistrate, upon one of whose myrmidons in
plain clothes, who came to the rescue, Peter committed a most violent
assault, for which unlucky casualty his worship furnished him with
rotatory occupation for his fat calves in the 'H. of C.,' as the clerk
shortly designated the House of Correction. Thither Peter went, and in
lieu of his lace-bedaubed coat, gold-gartered plushes, stockings, and
buckled shoes, he was dressed up in a suit of tight-fitting yellow and
black-striped worsteds, that gave him the appearance of a wasp without
wings. Peter Leather then tumbled regularly down the staircase of
servitude, the greatness of his fall being occasionally broken by landing
in some inferior place. From the Duke of Dazzleton's, or rather from
the tread-mill, he went to the Marquis of Mammon, whom he very soon
left because he wouldn't wear a second-hand wig. From the marquis he
got hired to the great Irish Earl of Coarsegab, who expected him to
wash the carriage, wait at table, and do other incidentals never
contemplated by a London coachman. Peter threw this place up with
indignation on being told to take the letters to the post. He then lived on
his 'means' for a while, a thing that is much finer in theory than in
practice, and having about exhausted his substance and placed the bulk
of