I wonder whether the reflections of other men in a railway-carriage, bowling through the midland counties at the rate of forty miles an hour, on such a day as I have described, are like my own. I honestly confess that a very few ideas, if they are favourite ones, are sufficient to fill my brain. As I speed along the level embankments, which give one such a commanding view of the surrounding country, I cannot help imagining myself on the back of a good horse, sailing away from field to field after a pack of hounds. How well I can see my way!—how easy the fences look!—how readily I distinguish the place I should make him take off at, and the exact spot on which he would land, choosing unhesitatingly the soundest ridge, on which I should increase my pace so confidently down to that glassy brook, that looks as if you could hop over it from here, but which memory tells me is at least fifteen feet of water! How easy to get a start from that spinny, shaped liked a cocked-hat, of which the three corners have puzzled me so often, never hitting the one the hounds came out at, though I have tried them all in turn! How contemptible the size of this woodland, in which I have yet known a fox hang for hours together! What a run I have in imagination! and how well I see it! Alas! like everything else coloured through that deceitful medium, how different from the “cold reality”! Nevertheless, much as I sympathise in his bride’s consternation, I cannot deny a fellow-feeling with that bridegroom of whom it is related that, on a wedding-trip of many hours by the side of his late-won treasure, during which he ceased not to scan the adjacent fences with a practical eye, he uttered never a word during the entire journey, save this one remarkable sentence, “There’s my place! Where would _you_ have it?” Some such ruminations as the above probably engrossed the whole of my friend’s intellects, till the courteous offer of _Punch_—containing, as usual, one of Leech’s inimitable hunting sketches—drew his attention to his fellow-traveller, under whose multiplicity of wrappers he had no difficulty in recognising the placid features of the gentleman he had that morning noticed in the boot-shop. It was, indeed, none other than the Honourable Crasher; by this time completely worn out, and who, to do him justice, was a gentlemanlike, well-featured fellow enough, if he had not always looked so dreadfully tired. The reply to such a courtesy, where there were no ladies in the carriage, could only be, “Have you any objection to smoking?” And as nobody ever _does_ object nowadays to that soothing practice, and the “forty-shilling penalty” is, I trust, simply a dead-letter and a fallacy, the Laranagas were produced, and a couple of them soon got very freely under way.