rather than of vertu: fifty brass plates
inscribed with the name of Smith; a gamut of
knockers on which, he could play "God save
the Queen;" miles of bell-wire; ill-gotten area
railings like stands of spikes; brewers'
sign-boards enough to set up fifty publicans;
good women without heads; goldbeaters'
naked arms brandishing their auriferous
hammers fiercely, as though they would like
to be at their ravisher; glovers' stiff-fingered
hands; little dustpans, original teapots,
golden canisters, pounds of candles, sugar
loaves, and scarlet cocked hats and hessian
boots, adorned moreover with gold, and of
gigantic proportions. Not this Billy: the
Billy who positively had two of his front
teeth knocked out in order to be able to
imitate a peculiar whistle he had heard among
the refined denizens of Old Street, St. Luke's;
who made it his proud boast and
self-glorification, that calling one morning on a
friend who lived in an entresol in Regent
Street, and in a house otherwise occupied as
a fashionable millinery establishment, he did
then and there, in the absence of the fair
workwomen at dinner, sit upon and utterly
spoil and crush flat twenty-seven new bonnets,
all ready trimmed, ordered, and wanted for
the Chiswick Horticultural fête next day,
whereby Mademoiselle Guipure (the millinery
firm was Gimp, Guipure, and Gingham, and
they went bankrupt last year) was driven to a
state bordering on frenzy, and was only
appeased by a checque for a large amount.
Yet Billy—this Billy—kept hounds, I know,
and the odd half-couple has a pleasant savour
of his old familiar eccentricity. After that
duel of his with Captain Trigghair of the
Guards; after the two consecutive fevers he
caught at Pau in the Pyrenees; and, notably,
after that ugly wrestling-match in the coffee-room
of Flimmer's Hotel, where Jack Langham
(eight feet in height, and known as the
"baby" ) threw him, whereby he cut his hand
open, and got rather more of the sand off the
floor and a splintered Champagne glass or
two into the wound than was pleasant—Billy
sowed his wild oats, sold his museum, and,
marrying old Mrs. McMack (widow of General
McMack, H.E.I.C.S., who died at Brighton
of the modification of the East India
Company's charter and an excess of curry), retired
to Budgerow Park, near Godown, Dawkshire,
fully determined to subside into a country
gentleman. We heard of him at first as
exceedingly devoted to Mrs. McMack (late),
whose five poodle-dogs he much delighted to
array in martial attire, and to instruct in the
manual exercise: indeed—there was a report
in town that each poodle slept in a four-post
bed, and that Billy went round for the candlesticks.
But the Honourable Mrs. Buff (late
McMack) took to sitting under the Reverend
Lachrymose Snivel of St. Niobe's Chapel
(belonging to the primitive Weepers' connection),
an ecclesiastic of such a watery and
tearful nature and aqueous of doctrine, that
his ministry, combined with an over-zealous
attachment to the abstinence-from-any-food-
save-watermelon system, and the hydropathic
system, prompting her, as did this latter, to
the hankering after strange pumps, and taking
long journies in quest of artesian wells of
extraordinary repute, eventually brought on
dropsy, of which she died. Then Billy took
to hunting his part of the country, and keeping
hounds and the rest of it. I never had a
day with him, for, goodness help me! I ride
like a tailor's goose; but those who have
ridden with the Dawkshire hounds, of which
Billy was master, assure me that he did the
thing in first-rate style; that he had a kennel
built for his hounds in the cinque-cento
or renaissance style of architecture, which,
coupled with the fact of the dogs very nearly
eating a whipper-in one night, made Billy
quite fashionable among the gentlemen of the
country side. He it was also, I believe, who
made that sublime response to an indignant
farmer, who reproached him with riding
through a turnip-field, on the ground that it
was always customary to 'ware turnips—to
whom says Billy, "How the deuce was I to
know they were turnips, unless you stuck a
boiled leg of mutton in the middle of 'em?"
But alas! I heard one day that Billy had
been "carrying on shameful;" next, that he
was "shaky;" next, that he was "wanted;"
finally, that he was "done up;" and now who
shall say that my surmise is chimerical, if I
conjecture that the five-and-twenty couple and
a half of fox-hounds, to be sold at Tattersall's,
might once have formed the pack of the Honourable
Billy Buff, Lord Riffington's third son.

Poor Billy Buff, sorrowful sold-up scion of
aristocracy, where art thou now, I wonder?
Hast thou gone down to the cities of refuge
that are in Belgium? to sly little Spa,
nestling among quasi-Prussian trees; to "pale
Brussels;" or gaunt, grim, silent Ghent? Or
art thou at Kissingen, or Wiesbaden, or Aix,
making wry faces at some ill-smelling,
rusty-keys-tasting brunnen; or at Homburg,
pricking on a limp printed card how many
times rouge has turned up; or at Boulogne,
wistfully peering at the white cliffs of Albion
through a telescope; or at the prison of
Clichy in Paris, otherwise known as the Hôtel
des Haricots; or art thou languishing at the
suit of a Gasthof-keeper in the Constablerward
of some petty German principality? Certain
I am, that if in this country, thou wilt never
be at Tattersall's to see thy hounds sold. The
memories would come rushing over thee; it
would be too much for thee to contemplate
Flora and Hector, that ran so evenly together,
and that carried their tails so bravely parallel,
that, at a side view, they looked like one dog.
Nor unmoved couldst thou view Blucher, the
deep-mouthed hound, and Sandy, the old
liver-patched fellow that knew every move on
Reynard's board, and the half couple—that
young dog that would give tongue, for all a
fierce whipper-in nearly cut the dumb brute