An accustomed eye could see a more than ordinary stir in the streets that morning.  Riding-masters and their assistants might be seen going along with strings of saddled and side-saddled screws; flys began to roll at an earlier hour, and natty tigers to kick about in buckskins prior to departing with hunters, good, bad, and indifferent.

Each man had told his partner at Miss Jumpheavy’s ball of the capital trick they were going to play the stranger; and a desire to see the stranger, far more than a desire to see the trick, caused many fair ones to forsake their downy couches who had much better have kept them.

The world is generally very complaisant with regard to strangers, so long as they are strangers, generally making them out to be a good deal better than they really are, and Mr. Sponge came in for his full share of stranger credit.  They not only brought all the twenty horses Leather said he had scattered about to Laverick Wells, but made him out to have a house in Eaton Square, a yacht at Cowes, and a first-rate moor in Scotland, and some said a peerage in expectancy.  No wonder that he ‘drew,’ as theatrical people say.

Let us now suppose him breakfasted, and ready for a start.

He was ‘got up’ with uncommon care in the most complete style of the severe order of sporting costume.  It being now the commencement of the legitimate hunting season—­the first week in November—­he availed himself of the privileged period for turning out in everything new.  Rejecting the now generally worn cap, he adhered to the heavy, close-napped hat, described in our opening chapter, whose connexion with his head, or back, if it came off, was secured by a small black silk cord, hooked through the band by a fox’s tooth, and anchored to a button inside the haven of his low coat-collar.  His neck was enveloped in the ample folds of a large white silk cravat, tied in a pointing diamond tie, and secured with a large silver horse-shoe pin, the shoe being almost large enough for the foot of a young donkey.

His low, narrow-collared coat was of the infinitesimal order; that is to say, a coat, and yet as little of a coat as possible—­very near a jacket, in fact.  The seams, of course, were outside, and were it not for the extreme strength and evenness of the sewing and the evident intention of the thing, an ignorant person might have supposed that he had had his coat turned.  A double layer of cloth extended the full length of the outside of the sleeves, much in the fashion of the stage-coachmen’s greatcoats in former times; and instead of cuffs, the sleeves were carried out to the ends of the fingers, leaving it to the fancy of the wearer to sport a long cuff or a short cuff, or no cuff at all—­just as the weather dictated.  Though the coat was single-breasted, he had a hole made on the button side, to enable him to keep it together by means of a miniature snaffle, instead of a button.  The snaffle passed