the great races of
the year, we don't mean to deny, but that he lost such a sum as eighteen
hundred on the Derby, and seven on the Leger, we are in a condition to
contradict, for the best of all possible reasons, that he hadn't it to
lose. At the same time we do not mean to attribute falsehood to Mr.
Sponge--quite the contrary--it is no uncommon thing for merchants and
traders--men who 'talk in thousands,' to declare that they lost twenty
thousand by this, or forty thousand by that, simply meaning that they
didn't make it, and if Mr. Sponge, by taking the longest of the long odds
against the most wretched of the outsiders, might have won the sums he
named, he surely had a right to say he lost them when he didn't get them.

It never does to be indigenously poor, if we may use such a term, and when
a man gets to the end of his tether, he must have something or somebody to
blame rather than his own extravagance or imprudence, and if there is no
'rascally lawyer' who has bolted with his title-deeds, or fraudulent agent
who has misappropriated his funds, why then, railroads, or losses on the
turf, or joint-stock banks that have shut up at short notice, come in as
the scapegoats. Very willing hacks they are, too, railways especially, and
so frequently ridden, that it is no easy matter to discriminate between the
real and the fictitious loser.

But though we are able to contradict Mr. Sponge's losses on the turf, we
are sorry we are not able to elevate him to the riches the character of a
fox-hunter generally inspires. Still, like many men of whom the common
observation is, 'nobody knows how he lives,' Mr. Sponge always seemed well
to do in the world. There was no appearance of want about him. He always
hunted: sometimes with five horses, sometimes with four, seldom with less
than three, though at the period of our introduction he had come down to
two. Nevertheless, those two, provided he could but make them 'go,' were
well calculated to do the work of four. And hack horses, of all sorts, it
may be observed, generally do double the work of private ones; and if there
is one man in the world better calculated to get the work out of them than
another, that man most assuredly is Mr. Sponge. And this reminds us, that
we may as well state that his bargain with Buckram was a sort of jobbing
deal. He had to pay ten guineas a month for each horse, with a sort of
sliding scale of prices if he chose to buy--the price of 'Ercles' (the big