He was to be taken up, on the other hand, by Joshua Thoroughbung.  Alas! alas! though he smiled and resolved to accept his brother-in-law with a good heart, this did not in the least salve the wound.  His own county was to him less than other counties, and his own neighborhood less than other neighborhoods.  Buntingford was full of Thoroughbungs, the best people in the world, but not quite up to what he believed to be his mark.  Mr. Prosper himself was the stupidest ass!  At Welwyn people smelled of the City.  At Stevenage the parsons’ set began.  Baldock was a caput mortuum of dulness.  Royston was alive only on market-days.  Of his own father’s house, and even of his mother and sisters, he entertained ideas that savored a little of depreciation.  But, to redeem him from this fault,—­a fault which would have led to the absolute ruin of his character had it not been redeemed and at last cured,—­there was a consciousness of his own vanity and weakness.  “My father is worth a dozen of them, and my mother and sisters two dozen,” he would say of the Ingoldsbys when he went to bed in the room that was to be burnt down in preparation for his exile.  And he believed it.  They were honest; they were unselfish; they were unpretending.  His sister Molly was not above owning that her young brewer was all the world to her; a fine, honest, bouncing girl, who said her prayers with a meaning, thanked the Lord for giving her Joshua, and laughed so loud that you could hear her out of the rectory garden half across the park.  Harry knew that they were good,—­did in his heart know that where the parsons begin the good things were likely to begin also.

He was in this state of mind, the hand of good pulling one way and the devil’s pride the other, when young Thoroughbung called for him one morning to carry him on to Cumberlow Green.  Cumberlow Green was a popular meet in that county, where meets have not much to make them popular except the good-humor of those who form the hunt.  It is not a county either pleasant or easy to ride over, and a Puckeridge fox is surely the most ill-mannered of foxes.  But the Puckeridge men are gracious to strangers, and fairly so among themselves.  It is more than can be said of Leicestershire, where sportsmen ride in brilliant boots and breeches, but with their noses turned supernaturally into the air.  “Come along; we’ve four miles to do, and twenty minutes to do it in.  Halloo, Molly, how d’ye do?  Come up on to the step and give us a kiss.”

“Go away!” said Molly, rushing back into the house.  “Did you ever hear anything like his impudence?”

“Why shouldn’t you?” said Kate.  “All the world knows it.”  Then the gig, with the two sportsmen, was driven on.  “Don’t you think he looks handsome in his pink coat?” whispered Molly, afterward, to her elder sister.  “Only think; I have never seen him in a red coat since he was my own.  Last April, when the hunting was over, he hadn’t spoken out; and this is the first day he has worn pink this year.”