makes me perfectly wild.  A red coat throws me into a scarlet fever.  Never throughout life have I had a good night’s rest before an ’unting morning.  But werry little racing does for me; Sadler’s Wells is well enough of a fine summer evening—­especially when they plump the clown over head in the New River cut, and the ponies don’t misbehave in the Circus,—­but oh!  Newmarket’s a dreadful place, the werry name’s a sickener.  I used to hear a vast about it from poor Will Softly of Friday Street.  It was the ruin of him—­and wot a fine business his father left him, both wholesale and retail, in the tripe and cow-heel line—­all went in two years, and he had nothing to show at the end of that time for upwards of twenty thousand golden sovereigns, but a hundredweight of children’s lamb’s-wool socks, and warrants for thirteen hogsheads of damaged sherry in the docks.  No, take my adwice, and have nothing to say to them—­stay where you are, or, if you’re short of swag, come to Great Coram Street, where you shall have a bed, wear-and-tear for your teeth, and all that sort of thing found you, and, if Saturday’s a fine day, I’ll treat you with a jaunt to Margate.”

“You are a regular old trump,” said the Yorkshireman, after listening attentively until Mr. Jorrocks had exhausted himself, “but, you see, you’ve never been at Newmarket, and the people have been hoaxing you about it.  I can assure you from personal experience that the people there are quite as honest as those you meet every day on ’Change, besides which, there is nothing more invigorating to the human frame—­nothing more cheering to the spirits, than the sight and air of Newmarket Heath on a fine fresh spring morning like the present.  The wind seems to go by you at a racing pace, and the blood canters up and down the veins with the finest and freest action imaginable.  A stranger to the race-course would feel, and almost instinctively know, what turf he was treading, and the purpose for which that turf was intended”.

  “There’s a magic in the web of it.”

“Oh, I knows you are a most persuasive cock,” observed Mr. Jorrocks interrupting the Yorkshireman, “and would conwince the devil himself that black is white, but you’ll never make me believe the Newmarket folks are honest, and as to the fine hair (air) you talk of, there’s quite as good to get on Hampstead Heath, and if it doesn’t make the blood canter up and down your weins, you can always amuse yourself by watching the donkeys cantering up and down with the sweet little children—­haw! haw! haw!—­But tell me what is there at Newmarket that should take a man there?” “What is there?” rejoined the Yorkshireman, “why, there’s everything that makes life desirable and constitutes happiness, in this world, except hunting.  First there is the beautiful, neat, clean town, with groups of booted professors, ready for the rapidest march of intellect; then there are the strings of clothed horses—­the finest in the world—­passing