which,
by common voice, are proclaimed impracticable or improper. With a sort
of prescriptive right to outrage the ordinances of society, such people
accept no law but their own inclination, and seem to declare that they
are altogether exempt from the restraints that bind other men. In a
small way, and an humble sphere, Father Tom enjoyed this privilege,
and there was not in his whole county to be found one man churlish or
ungenerous enough to dispute it; and thus was he suffered to throw his
line, snap his gun, or unleash his dog in precincts where many with
higher claims had been refused permission.

It was not alone that he enjoyed the invigorating pleasure of field
sports in practice, but he delighted in everything which bore any
relationship to them. There was not a column of "Bell's Life" in which
he had not his sympathy,--the pigeon match, the pedestrian, the Yankee
trotter, the champion for the silver sculls at Chelsea, the dog "Billy,"
were all subjects of interest to him. Never did the most inveterate
blue-stocking more delight in the occasion of meeting a great celebrity
of letters, than did he when chance threw him in the way of the jock
who rode the winner at the Oaks, or the "Game Chicken" who punished the
"Croydon Pet" in the prize ring. But now for the letter, which will
as fully reveal the man as any mere description. It was a narrative of
races he had attended, and rowing-matches he had witnessed, with little
episodes of hawking, badger-drawing, and cock-fighting intermixed.

"I came down here--Brighton--to swim for a wager of five-and-twenty
sovereigns against a Major Blayse, of the Third Light Dragoon Guards; we
made the match after mess at Aldershot, when neither of us was anything
to speak of too sober; but as we were backed strongly,--he rather the
favorite,--there was no way of drawing the bet. I beat him after a hard
struggle; we were two hours and forty minutes in the water, and netted
about sixty pounds besides. We dined with the depot in the evening,
and I won a ten-pound note on a question of whether there ought to be
saffron in the American drink called 'greased lightning;' but this was
not the only piece of luck that attended me, as you shall hear. As I was
taking my morning canter on the Downs, I perceived that a stranger--a
jockey-like fellow, not quite a gentleman but near it--seemed to keep me
in view; now riding past, now behind me, and always bestowing his whole
attention on my nag