The chase began, and was continued with great spirit. Reynard displayed his usual tact; and the hounds, Squire Hawthorn’s pack, were in fine blood. Nashon’s tally-ho was heard ringing loudest in the woods; his horse was the finest of the company; and he scoured on like the wind, heedless of the laugh that was attempted to be raised against him by Hawthorn, who had told several of his friends, that Springall, which once belonged to him, knew the touch of the heel of his old boots, and, if they did not take care, would carry the clown in at the death, and shame the whole Soho Club. This sportive sally was successful in more ways than one; for while its humour was well-calculated to produce cachination, there was a ratiocination in it which was calculated to produce a lugubrious reaction for, to the surprise and discomfiture of all the huntsmen, Nashon Heatherton was the individual who was in at the death—a feat, doubtless, as much owing to the speed of Springall as to the dauntlessness of the rider, who, however, displayed great power of horsemanship and surprising presence of mind, on grounds of great difficulty and danger. In the evening the club enjoyed the hospitality of the proprietor of Nashon’s underfittings, and, although the borrower had, during the day, suffered the gibes of the young fox-hunter, he did not think that either these or the relation in which that part of his dress stood to the lender, disqualified him from eating his meat or drinking his wine. That he would be dubbed the butt of the company, he knew before he went; but he felt himself under the obligations of a peculiar humour, that ruled him with a power paramount to other considerations; and, in the present instance, that humour was itself subservient to objects of ambition of high import—motives that led him to overlook the temporary buzz of an innocuous raillery on the part of men who were fast going to a destruction which he was taking active means to avoid. He, therefore, put on the appearance of enjoying the fox-hunters’ peculiar mode of draining the cup of pleasure to the dregs, laughed, sang, drank, and even essayed, on one or two occasions, a sturdy oath. His strength, robust health, and unsubdued constitution, enabled him to cope with the strongest of these Tricongii in their own element, wine; and when the _great cup_ was brought in—which was generally when all parties were in that intermediate state between sense and forgetfulness which demanded in charity a total finisher, to send them to entire oblivion and rest—he was as sober as a judge. A quarter of an hour after the emptying of that fearful goblet, the fox-hunters around him, who had been high in their humour of drawing “rises” out of him, according to the slang of aquatic sportsmen, or “baiting the badger,” in their more appropriate dialect, fell at his feet, singing as they descended, “with a hey ho chevy!” and all groaning in rough chorus. He alone sat