“He either fears his fate too much, Or his deserts are small, Who dares not put it to the touch To win or lose it all!” One or other of these romantic stanzas was continually on Mr. Sawyer’s lips. After their enunciation, he was used to sigh deeply, shake his head, and light a cigar, which he would smoke vehemently for a quarter of an hour or so, in a brown study. Our friend’s reflections, however, were not wholly dipped in the roseate hues of hope. Stern misgivings would come across him, as to the imprudence of the career on which he had embarked. He was spending a deal of money, that was the fact; and he had always, hitherto, been of a saving disposition, rather than otherwise. In the prosecution of his schemes against Miss Mexico, his outlay, indeed, had been principally in cheap jewellery and lavender-water—articles of fascination for the purchase of which he would have been handsomely reimbursed by that lady’s thirty thousand pounds, _if he had got it_. But in the present case, not only was his extravagance much greater, but it is mere justice to state, that he had never weighed Miss Dove’s fortune or the want of it in the balance with her attractions. The former flame had half a plum; the present might not have half-a-crown. Bah! what of that? Those eyelashes alone were worth all the money! Nevertheless, a stud of horses, though consisting only of the modest number of four hunters and a hack, are not to be kept for nothing, more particularly when away from home. Independent of stable-rent, forage, subscriptions to hounds, and necessary _douceurs_ to different individuals, any man who has ever paid a groom’s book will bear witness to the extraordinary rapidity with which its different items accumulate. _Naphtha_ alone is as dear as claret, and consumed with equal liberality; sponges, rubbers, currycombs, and dandy-brushes require to be replaced with astonishing frequency; and, what with shoeing and removing, the blacksmith’s bill is as long as his stalwart arm. When you add to all this an everyday dinner of the best, with champagne and claret _à discrétion_—if such a quality, indeed, can be said to exist in a bachelor party—you will not share Mr. Sawyer’s surprise at discovering that his present expenditure far exceeded his calculations. The four hundred he had paid to Mr. Varnish for two horses completed a good round sum; and, for a minute or two, he thought he had better have remained at The Grange.