nd though our friends with their wounded feelings determined to have one,
they had yet to smooth over old Tom to get him to come into their views.
That was now the difficulty.

CHAPTER VIII

OLD TOM TOWLER

[Illustration]

There are few more difficult persons to identify than a huntsman in
undress, and of all queer ones perhaps old Tom Towler was the queerest. Tom
in his person furnished an apt illustration of the right appropriation of
talent and the fitness of things, for he would neither have made a groom,
nor a coachman, nor a postillion, nor a footman, nor a ploughman, nor a
mechanic, nor anything we know of, and yet he was first-rate as a huntsman.
He was too weak for a groom too small for a coachman, too ugly for a
postillion, too stunted for a footman, too light for a ploughman, too
useless-looking for almost anything.

Any one looking at him in 'mufti' would exclaim, 'what an unfortunate
object!' and perhaps offer him a penny, while in his hunting habiliments
lords would hail him with, 'Well, Tom, how are you?' and baronets ask him
'how he was?' Commoners felt honoured by his countenance, and yet, but for
hunting, Tom would have been wasted--a cypher--an inapplicable sort of man.
Old Tom, in his scarlet coat, black cap, and boots, and Tom in his
undress--say, shirt-sleves, shorts, grey stockings and shoes, bore about
the same resemblance to each other that a three months dead jay nailed to a
keeper's lodge bears to the bright-plumaged bird when flying about. On
horseback, Tom was a cockey, wiry-looking, keen-eyed, grim-visaged,
hard-bitten little fellow, sitting as though he and his horse were all one,
while on foot he was the most shambling, scambling, crooked-going crab that
ever was seen. He was a complete mash of a man. He had been scalped by the
branch of a tree, his nose knocked into a thing like a button by the kick
of a horse, his teeth sent down his throat by a fall, his collar-bone
fractured, his left leg broken and his right arm ditto, to say nothing of
damage to his ribs, fingers, and feet, and having had his face scarified
like pork by repeated brushings through strong thorn fences.

But we will describe him as he appeared before Mr. Waffles, and the
gentlemen of the Laverick Wells Hunt, on the night of Mr. Sponge's arrival.
Tom's spirit being roused at hearing the boastings of Mr. Leather, and
thinking, perhaps, his master might have something to say, or thinking,
perhaps, to partake