The effect produced by Nashon on the whole company assembled at Eyrymount was extraordinary. The master and mistress were delighted with him, and devoted him in their imaginations, to a speedy immolation on the altar of the god of folly; the members of the Soho Club already marked him out as a good pigeon, whose tail-feathers would enable them to fly yet a little longer in the high regions of fashion; Dione sighed for a lost lover and ruined simpleton; and Benjamin Rice counted, in his imagination, his guineas, and congratulated himself on a gout that prevented him from engaging in sports that might tend to dissipate them, along with the remnant of a ruined constitution, which sack, and sago pudding, and panado, could scarcely support. Nashon bought Copperbottom, ran him, carried the prize, and sold him next day for ten pounds of profit; on which great occasion he informed his housekeeper, Esther Maclean, that he intended to entertain the whole Soho Club at Outfieldhaugh—a communication that produced a mixed feeling of terror and wonder on the part of the old housekeeper, which she had no words adequately to express. She wished him to be genteel, and like the other gentlemen of the neighbourhood; but she had heard hints that he was getting fast into the vortex of a sportsman’s dissipation; and the intelligence that he was to entertain the “Soho”—equal, in her estimation, to dining the Cham of Tartary and his staff—confirmed the report, and filled her with sorrow and regret. All her efforts to dissuade her master from his purpose were unavailing: cards were issued to forty gentlemen; the question put by Esther, where he was to find the necessary service of table apparatus, the wine, the cooks, and the waiters, required to be answered; and he was at no loss for an answer on a subject he had deeply considered. Mounting Springall, he hastened away to a town at some considerable distance, and procured an estimate from an innkeeper of the expense of his projected entertainment. The innkeeper undertook to supply everything, with livery servants, unknown to the company, and keep his engagement a profound secret, for so much a-head. The entertainment went off in great style; Nashon presided, with all the manners of a thorough-bred blood sportsman—drank, sang, and talked of races and steeple-chases, with all the slang and spirit of the craft. The wine, the plate, the service, the servants in livery, and all the appurtenances of a great establishment, apparently belonging to the merry master of the revels, were of the best kind, and produced universal admiration. The spirit and bounty of Nashon were extolled to the utmost, and Squire Hawthorn admitted, in a whisper to Græme, that the loan of the boots had been amply repaid. Nashon again drank them all out. The extent of the potations made no change on the expense, and a folly that was never to be repeated might be carried with impunity to the confines of madness.