All the preliminaries being arranged, off we started, I taking, of course, my twenty-five yards in advance. The exhibition and the gait were so singular, that Mrs Causand could scarcely stand for laughter, whilst the boys shouted, "Go it, Ralph!"--"Well done, peg!"--"Dot-and-go-one will beat him." In the midst of these exhilarating cries, what I had calculated upon happened. Rip, before we had gone half the distance, was close behind me; but lo! after three of his gigantic hops, that seemed to be performed with at least one seven-leagued boot turned into a slipper, he came down heavily upon his step with his wood among the rushes. The stiff clay there being full of moisture and unsound, he plunged up to his hip nearly, in the adhesive soil, and there he remained, as much a fixture, and equally astonished, as Lot's wife. First of all, taking care to go the distance, and thus win the wager, we, all frantic with laughter, gathered round the man thus firmly attached to his mother earth. Whilst the tears ran down Mrs Causand's cheeks, and proved that her radiant colour was quite natural, she endeavoured to assume an air of the deepest commiseration, which was interrupted, every moment, by involuntary bursts of laughter. For himself, no wretch in the pillory ever wore a more lugubrious aspect, and his sallow visage turned first to one, and then to another, with a look so ridiculously imploring that it was irresistible. "I am sorry, very sorry," said the lady, "to see you look so pale--I may say, so livid--but poor man, it is but natural, seeing already that you have _one foot in the grave_." The mender of pens groaned in the spirit. "I say," said the school-boy wag of the party, applying an old Joe Miller to the occasion, "why is Mr Riprapton like pens, ink, and paper?" "Because he is stationary," vociferated five eager voices, at once, in reply. The caster-up of sums cast a look at the delinquent, the tottle of the whole of which was, "you sha'n't be long on the debit side of our account." "But what is to be done?" was now the question. "I am afraid," said I, "we must dig him up like a dead tree, or an old post." "It is, I believe, the only way," said the tutor, despondingly; "I was relieved once that way before in the bog of Ballynawashy." "O, then you are from Ireland after all," said the lady. "Only on a visit, madam!" said the baited fixture, with much asperity. "But really," said she, "if I may judge from the present occasion, you must have made a _long stay_." "I hope he won't take cold in his feet," said a very silly, blubber-lipped boy. His instructor looked hot with passion. "But really, now I think of it," chimed in the now enraptured widow, "a very serious alarm has seized me. Suppose that the piece of wood, so nicely planted in this damp clay, were to take root and throw out fibres. Gracious me! only suppose that you should begin to vegetate. I do declare that you look quite _green_ about the eyes already!"