So it is that the sport is played in Hampshire; and so also at Westminster--with a difference, however. In Hampshire the two brutes retain ever their appointed natures. The badger is always a badger, and the bull-dog never other than a bull-dog. At Westminster there is a juster reciprocity of position. The badger when drawn has to take his place outside the hole, and fight again for the home of his love; while the victorious bull-dog assumes a state of badgerdom, dons the skin of his enemy, and, in his turn, submits to be baited. The pursuit is certainly full of interest, but it is somewhat deficient in dignity. The parliamentary committee, which was to sit with reference to the Limehouse and Rotherhithe Bridge, had been one of the effects of a baiting-match such as that above described. In this contest the enemies of the proud occupier of the den on the mountain-side had not been contented to attempt to expel him with a single bull-dog. A whole pack had been let loose at his devoted throat. Bull-dogs had been at him, and terriers, mastiffs, blood-hounds, lurchers, and curs; but so accustomed was he to the contest, so knowing in his fence, so ready with all the weapons given to him by nature, that, in spite of the numbers and venom of his enemies, he had contrived to hold his own. Some leading hounds had fallen to rise no more; others had retreated, yelping to their kennels, to lie quiet for a while, till time might give them courage for a new attack. The country round was filled with the noise of their plaints, and the yowling and howling of canine defeat. The grey old badger meanwhile sat proud in his hole, with all his badger kin around him, and laughed his well-known badger laugh at his disconsolate foes. Such a brock had not for years been seen in the country-side; so cool, so resolute, so knowing in his badger ways, so impregnable in his badger hole, and so good-humoured withal. He could bite full sore with those old teeth of his, and yet he never condescended to show them. A badger indeed of whom the country might well be proud! But in the scramble of the fight some little curs had been permitted to run away with some little bones; and, in this way, Mr. Nogo, the member for Mile End, had been allowed to carry his motion for a committee to inquire as to the expediency of the Government's advancing a quarter of a million towards the completion of that momentous national undertaking, the building of a bridge from Limehouse to Rotherhithe.