Jorrocks' Jaunts and JollitiesSurtees, Robert Smith
General
Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities
Surtees, Robert Smith
England -- Fiction; Fox hunting -- Fiction; Hunting stories
stained with blood; "we killed this chap after an hour and forty-five
minutes' gallop; and accounted for another by losing her after running
upwards of-three-quarters of an hour." "Well, then, we have all had
sport," said Jorrocks, as he spurred his horse into a trot, and made for
Morton's stables--"and if the quarter of house-lamb is but right, then
indeed am I a happy man."
III. SURREY SHOOTING: MR. JORROCKS IN TROUBLE
Our readers are now becoming pretty familiar with our principal hero,
Mr. Jorrocks, and we hope he improves on acquaintance. Our fox-hunting
friends, we are sure, will allow him to be an enthusiastic member of the
brotherhood, and though we do not profess to put him in competition with
Musters, Osbaldeston, or any of those sort of men, we yet mean to say
that had his lot been cast in the country instead of behind a counter,
his keenness would have rendered him as conspicuous--if not as
scientific--as the best of them.
For a cockney sportsman, however, he is a very excellent fellow--frank,
hearty, open, generous, and hospitable, and with the exception of riding
up Fleet Street one Saturday afternoon, with a cock-pheasant's tail
sticking out of his red coat pocket, no one ever saw him do a cock tail
action in his life.
The circumstances attending that exhibition are rather curious.--He had
gone out as usual on a Saturday to have a day with the Surrey, but on
mounting his hunter at Croydon, he felt the nag rather queer under him,
and thinking he might have been pricked in the shoeing, he pulled up at
the smith's at Addington to have his feet examined. This lost him five
minutes, and unfortunately when he got to the meet, he found that a
"travelling[13] fox" had been tallied at the precise moment of throwing
off, with which the hounds had gone away in their usual brilliant style,
to the tune of "Blue bonnets are over the border." As may be supposed,
he was in a deuce of a rage; and his first impulse prompted him to
withdraw his subscription and be done with the hunt altogether, and he
trotted forward "on the line," in the hopes of catching them up to tell
them so. In this he was foiled, for after riding some distance, he
overtook a string of Smithfield horses journeying "foreign for Evans,"
whose imprints he had been taking for the hoof-marks of the hunters.
About noon he found himself dull, melancholy, and disconsolate, before
the sign of the "Pig and Whistle," on the Westerham road, where, after
wetting his own whistle with a pint of half-and-half, he again journeyed
onward, ruminating on the uncertainty and mutability of all earthly
affairs, the comparative merits of stag-, fox-, and hare-hunting, and
the necessity of getting rid of the day somehow or other in the country.
[Footnote 13: He might well be called a "travelling fox," for it was
said he had just travelled down from Herring's, in the New Road, by the
Bromley stage.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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