In these days people have so many irons in the fire! Look at even the _first_ flight, with a crack pack of hounds; ten to one amongst the half-a-dozen who compose it you will find a soldier, a statesman, a poet, a painter, or a Master in Chancery, whilst “maddening in the rear” through the gates come a posse of authors, actors, amateurs, artists, of every description, till you think of Juvenal’s stinging lines, and his Protean Greek, who was “Grammaticus, rhetor, geometres, pictor, aliptes, Augur, schœnobates, medicus, magus,” &c., and vote a fox-hunter the conglomeration of all these different accomplishments. But Mr. Sawyer did not trouble himself much about Juvenal or his opinions. Finding his classical career a failure, and, what was more disappointing, his anticipated season with Mr. Drake cut short in consequence of his misadventure with the bull, he gave up the little reading which he had been compelled to take in hand, and confined his studies exclusively to _Bell’s Life_, _The Field_, with its questions and answers to correspondents, suggestive alike of inventive ingenuity as of exhaustive research, and the _Sporting Magazine_. The fact is, what with hunting three and four times a week, talking of it the remaining days, and thinking of it all the seven, with constant visits to the stable and a perpetual feud with his blacksmith, Mr. Sawyer’s mind was completely filled with as much as that receptacle could be thought capable of containing. My hero, like the champions of the Round Table, is perhaps seen to the greatest advantage on horseback. Let me introduce him to my reader, riding like a knight through the wilds of Lyonnesse, up a deep muddy lane, as he returns from hunting in the dull November twilight. “Capital bit of stuff,” says Mr. Sawyer, knocking off the ashes of his cigar with his dogskin-clad finger, and apostrophising his “mount,” a very little grey horse, with an arched neck and light mouth, and a tail set on high on his quarters. “Capital bit of stuff,” he repeats, dangling his feet out of the stirrups; “as game as a pebble, and as neat as a pin.” “Two hundred—two hundred and fifty! You’re worth two hundred and fifty, every shilling of it” (he had bought him of a fishmonger for forty pounds and a broken-winded pony). “Worth as much as any horse _can_ be to carry thirteen stone. Hang it; you’d _fetch_ all the money at Tattersall’s if any of _the customers_ could only have seen you go to-day!” Then Mr. Sawyer placed his feet in the stirrups, and fell to thinking of his day’s sport.