Old Isaac pretended not to understand. Mr. Tiptop, with many flourishes, rose to explain. “You go to exercise,” said he, “a little before it’s light, in the big close just outside the town. Put a fourteen-pound saddle on your nag; and don’t say nothing to nobody. I’ll be there in good time, just to give our mare a turn up the close. Nobody needn’t be a ha’porth the wiser. Once we know the rights of it exactly, we can do what we like. You’re game to the back-bone, old cock, _I_ know! _You_ won’t split!” “But master’s going to hunt the bay horse to-morrow,” interposed Isaac, preserving his appearance of puzzled integrity with admirable composure. “Never mind,” answered Mr. Tiptop: “you come all the same.” And, leering grimly at the tallow candle, Mr. Tiptop made his exit, and betook himself heavily to bed. In the meantime, the hunting gentlemen, at their hotel, had been talking over the probabilities of getting up a steeple-chase, and the chances of the different horses and riders, whose merits they discussed with considerable freedom, and no small amount of that playful _badinage_ which moderns term “chaff.” Struggles, who rode over sixteen stone, was repeatedly entreated to enter, and cordially assured that he would carry all the money of the party; but Struggles, besides his enormous weight, was too good a sportsman to take pleasure in such a mongrel affair as a horse-race across a country. “I’d sooner go to a badger-bait,” said he, “or a cockfight. I’d sooner hunt a cat in a kitchen, or a rat in a sewer. It’s neither one thing nor the other; and I’ll have nothing to do with it!” an announcement which was received with derisive cheers by his companions, amongst which Struggles calmly lit a fresh cigar, and filled his tumbler once more with brandy-and-soda. The Committee, as they called themselves, had met, according to custom, for their nightly _weed_. They were indulging freely in the use of narcotics and stimulants, to the detriment of their digestions, and the destruction of their nerves. They lived by rule, these choice spirits, and restricting themselves, as they believed, with considerable self-denial, to about a bottle-and-a-half of wine apiece at dinner, considered that such abstinence entitled them to smoke any quantity of cigars, and drink any amount of pale brandy, choice Hollands, and such alcoholic fluids diluted with soda-water, out of glasses the size of stable-buckets.