e
admiring ladies had well digested him in that dress, he would be seen
cantering away on a long-tailed white barb, in a pea-green duck-hunter,
with cream-coloured leather and rose-tinted tops. He was

'All things by turns, and nothing long.'

Such was the gentleman elected to succeed the silent, matter-of-fact Mr.
Slocdolager in the important office of Master of the Laverick Wells Hunt;
and whatever may be the merits of either--upon which we pass no opinion--it
cannot be denied that they were essentially different. Mr. Slocdolager was
a man of few words, and not at all a ladies' man. He could not even talk
when he was crammed with wine, and though he could hold a good quantity,
people soon found out they might just as well pour it into a jug as down
his throat, so they gave up asking him out. He was a man of few coats, as
well as of few words; one on, and one off, being the extent of his
wardrobe. His scarlet was growing plum-colour, and the rest of his hunting
costume has been already glanced at. He lodged above Smallbones, the
veterinary surgeon, in a little back street, where he lived in the quietest
way, dining when he came in from hunting,--dressing, or rather changing,
only when he was wet, hunting each fox again over his brandy-and-water, and
bundling off to bed long before many of his 'field' had left the
dining-room. He was little better than a better sort of huntsman.

Waffles, as we said before, had made himself conspicuous towards the close
of Mr. Slocdolager's reign, chiefly by his dashing costume, his reckless
riding, and his off-hand way of blowing up and slanging people.

Indeed, a stranger would have taken him for the master, a delusion that was
heightened by his riding with a formidable-looking sherry-case, in the
shape of a horn, at his saddle. Save when engaged in sucking this, his
tongue was never at fault. It was jabber, jabber, jabber; chatter, chatter,
chatter; prattle, prattle, prattle; occasionally about something, oftener
about nothing, but in cover or out, stiff country or open, trotting or
galloping, wet day or dry, good scenting day or bad. Waffles' clapper never
was at rest. Like all noisy chaps, too, he could not bear any one to make a
noise but himself. In furtherance of this, he called in the aid of his
Oxfordshire rhetoric. He would halloo _at_ people, designating them by some
peculiarity that he thought he could wriggle out of, if necessary, instead
of attacking them by name. T