Wight. Many a fox thereby lives, who ought most assuredly to have died. Much allowance must therefore be made; nor should the merits of the Vectis* hounds be measured by the common standard of the chase, or reckoned by the numbers of the slain; although of the latter, during last season, (a season everywhere proverbially unfavourable) they could give a tolerably good account.

So much pleased was I with what I had seen of the hunting in the Isle of Wight, with the courtesy of the "Master," and with the more than civility I had-as quite a stranger-experienced from the whole field, that I proposed to my friend to make the island, for the present, our head-quarters, where for a time we should establish our sporting camp.

Jones, who was here perfectly at home, and had, moreover, stumbled on several old military acquaintances at Parkhurst, felt nothing loath. The extreme mildness of temperature of the Isle of Wight, was moreover, most favourable to one, who like myself, had suffered much from long residence in hot and unhealthy climes. I thus, during the remainder of last season, managed agreeably to combine, with most beneficial effects, the worship of Hygeia with the exhilarating pursuits of the chase; and most strongly would I advise my sporting valetudinarian friends to pitch their tents for a winter in the Isle of Wight.†

*The appellation of the Isle of Wight in the time of the Romans.

†The mildness and salubrity of the "back" of the Island is now proverbial. Ventnor is quite a second Madeira; but at the latter place there are no "foxhounds ;" and their music, combined with the beneficial effects of a soft and geneil climate, would-to the ailing sportsman-be perhaps of more avail than solitary banishment beyond the seas, or than all the doctor's stuff he could imbibe. Throw, therefore, "physic to the dogs" and try "fox-hunting" in its stead, in the Isle of Wight!

When a man goes off, pulling double, with a quotation like this from the veritable King Alfred of the female sex, he has no right to wonder at his readers if they hint their fears that he is full of " Anna Matilda" twaddle, and likely to make strong running through "regions of memory," &c. Now I really do not intend to do any thing of the kind. I own that it was very nice to have a slim waist, to weigh about 9st. 5lb. ; to have no weightier earthly care than the composition of Greek iambics, to be able to jump a five-foot gate, and to fancy oneself in love with a new object (invariably one's senior) every six weeks; and that it is by no means nice to be gradually losing sight of one's shoes, to pull down fifteen stone odd on the scales, to be bored about consols and railway shares, to have no more notion left of gate jumping than a hippopotamus, and not only to see your three last tossing about in bed, but to have it gently intimated to you that another is "expected." Still it is a savage sort of consolation to think that if you do get old, all your boyish companions are getting old too, and that the lad who ran races with you round the school field, or played you at single wicket, will be ordering his brown-wig and gouty shoes as soon, if not sooner than you have to order yours. All my retrospective glances at my school days are concentrated into a comparison between what my schoolfellows were then, and what they are now; and by the way, I have made one great corollary for myself: it is this-that boys who are looked upon as very fine fellows at school, "cut up" worst in after life; and that those who have been summarily set down as "muffs" by their orange-loving censors, turn out the "bravest" men, both in the Wellington and the Thomas Carlyle acceptation of the adjective." Featherbed dandies make the best officers, said the former eminent authority.

My public and private school-days furnished me with at least 1500 to 2000 school-fellows, and I am always reading of their deaths in the newspapers, or tumbling on to them in outlandish places, when I least expect it. Some of them were barely four feet high when I knew them, and now I sometimes recognize the traces of their boyish features on frames that must measure six feet one at the least. There's poor Swho defeated me (though I gallantly disabled his left arm for six weeks) after a "merry mill" of 25 minutes, all brought on by my having styled his father-when I didn't think S. was within earshot-" a vulgar old bit of goods." He punished me powerfully then, but he has been dead

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of consumption these twelve years. I went to look at his grave the other day, in cemetery; and when I found that horrid stanza, "A pale consumption gave," &c., doing duty on his head-stone, I thought that I had suffered heavily at the hands of the corpse that was mouldering beneath, for making a very true remark. Then there's poor Ewho nearly knocked my eye out by surreptitiously introducing hard substances into his pillow, when I challenged him to single combat with that weapon. He quarrelled with his governor one unhappy evening; and as his mother, poor woman, had not enough of Sir Henry Bulwer in her composition to arrange the "little difficulty," he ran away before it was light, and enlisted as a private. Poor fellow! the Sikhs were not contented with killing him, but they must needs cut off his nose and ears that very nose which I tapped, and those cars which I boxed in my eye-fury. And "handsome Bob" too, who fancied that a whole boarding-school of all ages, from eighteen to ten, were in love with him simultaneously, and quarrelling fiercely for the possession of his best affections. He became a melancholy wretch, because the beautiful Mrs. the mother of some five or six equally beautiful children, wouldn't, after bringing matters to the very verge, quit her husband (as worthy, but as prosy a justice of the peace as ever stepped) for his sake; and so***—but never mind—his friends chose to call it an internal hemorrhage, and no famishing jury debated over his coffin. "Dandy Tom" had the same turn of mind in his youth too, but love (or what he mistook for love) bowled over his ambition. He has espoused his mother's lady's-maid, and a nice life she leads him. Then there's "Tippitiwichet," he wasn't very spruce in his person, and he took such a general dislike to collars, and wore such short shirtsleeves, that we often felt it a sacred duty incumbent upon us to examine him forcibly, to see if he really had any linen on at all. He was a dreadfully bungling construer then, and perpetually refusing his fences even when there was no anacolouthon, or leading word understood in the sentence. Now he wears a silk gown, and there isn't a greater dandy in the front benches; and as for powers of speech, it was only the other day that I heard him riot like a rhinoceros in a jungle, when his cue was, to call no witnesses for the defence, but simply to abuse the plaintiff and cut down damages: and he turned that unhappy plaintiff inside out and back again in such a way, when he got him into the box, that I wonder he didn't pack up all his household stuff at once, and hide his head in America by the next Cunard steamer. A word for R alias the Slasher, who won that Latin prize poem, on Rhenus Flumen, at school, and ran such a capital second for an Oxford scholarship, and believes to this very day that if he had'nt made a careless false quantity in his last paper, he would have won it too. He is sitting somewhere in India, as a judge, with a hookah in his mouth, and a straw hat on his head, and hearing natives perjure themselves frightfully in every other sentence they utter. I'll swear that he used to larrup me many a time for nothing, and I'll lay a pony to a fiver he doesn't spare those dusky liars now. Stunning Pshould'nt be forgotten. How often have I heard him told by Dr. that an attack upon the most sensitive part of his person was a possibility which loomed in the future," if he didn't show livelier symptoms of mental improvement in the course of the next fortnight; and how often when he had failed to improve the shining hours

of that fortnight, have I heard him singing out for protection in a certain little study! Yet it is scarcely six months since I listened to him on a certain hustings, fiercely demanding protection, not for himself, but his country, and all her interests, mercantile, naval, and agricultural; and treating of the illimitable perspective of "that distinguished statesman (cheers and uproar) Mr. D'Israeli," in language which made me suspect that he sat for Mr. Dickens's honorable friend, the member for Verbosity.

These are half a dozen out of my school-boy sketches from memory; but there are some few others which have been daguerreotyped on my brains quite as firmly as any of them, and perhaps more so, as they are directly or indirectly connected with Turf associations.

race.

First and foremost amongst them, is the stalwart Yorkshireman, IRONMOULD, as fine a specimen of a Bachelor-squire as could ever claim descent from" the grand old gardener," since the years and the hours were. A bachelor he will be to the end of time; let widows and maids, of every age and country, set their caps at him as they like. The only girl he ever was engaged to, died within six weeks of the wedding, and as he knows for a fact that there never was anything like her, he will not marry ("fall away" is his word), to be bothered by making comparisons. The Horse-guards measure would pronounce him six two in his stockings, and he has gradually run up the weight gamut, from 12st. 5lbs. to 16 stone, since the days when out of mortal fear of a rich old aunt, who disliked" undue publicity" in general, and aquatics in particular, he used to pull stroke oar under an assumed name in the University boat This aunt, he told me, had "run to earth" without ever getting a notion as to the identity of "E. Smith, 12st. 5lbs., Trin.; Stroke;" on those memorable Saturdays. The honest fellow's sides shook again as he recounted how he always spent the following day in Camberwell with the old lady herself, and heard her express her pleasure, as she leant on his arm from church, that his name was not among the list of "reckless boys," which she had that morning read in her favourite Observer. "Poor old girl," he added, in a half laughing half melancholy tone, "didn't I just open on to her with some reflections on the injury they were doing their healths and characters?" Once well clear of the university, he had anchored for a year or two in a pleader's chambers, and got that insatiable longing for law, which is such a painful characteristic of the British Lion, most happily quenched therein. He certainly left the Temple in a brighter state than the celebrated Milesian student (who, after two years spent in that cool retreat, told his pleader that," By Jasus, he should just like a little talk with him, in the Long Vacation, about the difference between an indorser and an indorsee—if any !"), and, in fact, does not now remember quite enough law to make him quarrelsome or nervous, but just enough to keep him out of mischief. He is now nearly 20 years older, but he looks twice as hale and fresh as he ever did in those days of boat training and John Doe probation.

While he was quavering between 15 and 16 stone, he still continued to hunt on his grey President mare; and did fearful execution among padlocks, with his iron-headed hunting whip; but the old grey had got very shaky at last, as he gradually approached, what he calls " Boxweight," and she has been ever since suckling an annual edition of herself and Picaroon in the little paddock behind the house. This pad

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dock is the Valhalla of Ironmould's Saxon heart. Often does he invoke the ancient deity, Jingo, to bear witness to him, that no country but England could have produced such a paddock. STARBUCK, the parish schoolmaster has measured it to be something over five statute acres; and while the verandahed windows of his rustic two-storied cottage open into it at one end, a row of beech trees secures privacy on each side, and at the bottom of it runs the little river Brawl. The music of the otter hounds is heard in those quiet waters once a fortnight at least during the season, and many a subscriber to the Ainsford hunt has pricked up his ears with pleasure, as he sits with his cigar and his milk-punch in that verandah in the summer twilight, and hears the low sharp bark of the foxes in Ironmould's twenty-acre wood, which comes down to the opposite edge of the stream. If he had caught one of them carrying off one of his finest South-down lambs, Ironmould would have scorned to pull a trigger. They're devilish stinking things," he is wont to remark, as he gets a wind-scent of one among his laurels in the evenings, and then gives him an excited view-halloo, which soon sends "Charles James, " with a heavy splash, to his native haunts again; "but they're great sweeteners of society for all that." Would that all country gentlemen would philosophize so soundly! He is of course honorary earthstopper to that wood, and the night before the Ainsford hounds draw it, is quite a carnival to him. He looks upon the foxes as his especial protegés, and has christened an old grey fellow, who has lived before hounds for four seasons, after his prime favourite, Van Tromp. Voltigeur, I am sorry to say, got killed in his second run; and Clothworker is the only one left out of three well-grown cubs of the greyhound breed, which he imported out of the Highlands last summer, to improve the stock which had been sadly spoiled by some "Frenchmen." No wonder he knows them so well by sight, as many a summer evening does he cross the Brawl, and taking up his seat, cigar in mouth, behind a little knoll, watch their family parties come out to play in the ridings. He has set his face against cub-hunting in this wood, since his poor Beeswing fell a victim to it, when she was weak from nursing, and not a soul can turn him, when he does take up an idea. He always chaffs me about hallooing a cock pheasant on the run, as I sat there with him, under the firm impression that it was a fox; but I fancy that older sportsmen than myself have made that mistake, when they have viewed them crossing a riding. The grey mare had not the paddock to herself-here roamed his brown mare by Physician, who bred a good third for the St. Leger, and was perpetually in an " interesting situation" to that lucky piece of horseflesh, Irish Birdcatcher, along with a white-faced chesnut Velocipede who kept her in countenance, by being faithful, season after season, to the sturdy but somewhat coarse-necked Lanercost. Flatcatcher is her "fancy man" now. To superintend the confinements of these matrons, and to break the yearlings in this paddock, was the greatest joy of his heart, especially if one of the crack Yorkshire jocks happened to be there to look on.

He had run two or three of them in his time, but like many other coun try gentlemen, he had taken a notion into his head, that his trainer had "thrown him over," in a race which of all others he had hoped to win, and hence his colours have been reposing ignobly in the wardrobe with his scarlet coat, for some years back. Now all that he does for his