which the dealers were to have a couple of hundred, when they were paid. Everything was in the same proportion.

Mr Waffles’ succession to the hunt made a great commotion among the fair -- many elegant and interesting young ladies, who had been going on the pious tack against the Reverend Solomon Winkeyes, the popular bachelor-preacher of St Margaret’s, teaching in his schools, distributing his tracts, and collecting the penny subscriptions for his clothing club, now took to riding in fan-tailed habits and feathered hats, and talking about leaping and hunting, and riding over rails. Mr Waffles had a pound of hat-strings sent him in a week, and muffatees innumerable. Some, we are sorry to say, worked him cigar-cases. He, in return, having expended a vast of toil and ingenuity in inventing a ‘button,’ now had several dozen of them worked up into brooches, which he scattered about with a liberal hand. It was not one of your matter-of-fact story-telling buttons -- a fox with ‘TALLY-HO,’ or a fox’s head grinning in grim death -- making a red coat look like a miniature butcher’s shamble, but it was one of your queer twisting lettered concerns, that may pass either for a military button, or a naval button, or a club button, or even for a livery button. The letters, two Ws, were so skilfully entwined, that even a compositor -- and compositors are people who can read almost anything -- would have been puzzled to decipher it. The letters were gilt, riveted on steel, and the wearers of the button-brooches were very soon dubbed by the non-recipients, ‘Mr Waffles’ sheep.’

A fine botton naturally requires a fine coat to put it on, and many were the consultations and propositions as to what it should be. Mr Slocdolager had done nothing in the decorative department, and many thought the failure of funds was a good deal attributable to that fact. Mr Waffles was not the man to lose an opportunity of adding another costume to his wardrobe, and after an infinity of trouble, and trials of almost all the colours of the rainbow, he at length settled the following uniform, which, at least, had the charm of novelty to recommend it. The morning, or hunt-coat, was to be scarlet, with a cream-coloured collar and cuffs; and the evening, or dress coat, was to be cream-colour, with a scarlet collar and cuffs, and scarlet silk facings and linings, looking as if the wearer had turned the-morning one inside out. Waistcoats, and other articles of dress, were left to the choice of the wearer, experience having proved that they are articles it is impossible to legislate upon with any effect.

The old ladies, bless their disinterested hearts, alone looked on the hound freak with other than feelings of approbation.

They thought it a pity he should take them. They wished he mightn’t injure himself -- hounds very expensive things -- led to habits of irregularity -- should be sorry to see such a nice young man as Mr Waffles led astray -- not that it would make any difference to them, but -- (looking significantly at their daughters). No fox had been hunted by more hounds than Waffles had been by the ladies; but though he had chatted and prattled with fifty fair maids -- anyone of whom he might have found difficult to resist, if ‘pinned’ single- handed by, in a country house, yet the multiplicity of assailants completely neutralised each other, and verified the truth of the adage that there is ‘safety in a crowd.’

If pretty, lisping Miss Wordsworth thought she had shot an arrow home to his heart over night, a fresh smile and dart from little Mary Ogleby’s dark eyes extracted it in the morning, and made him think of her till the commanding figure and noble air of the Honourable Miss Letitia Amelia Susannah Jemimah de Jenkins, in all the elegance of first-rate millinery and dressmakership, drove her completely from his mind, to be in turn displaced by someone more bewitching. Mr Waffles was reputed to be made of money, and he went at it as though he thought it utterly impossible to get through it. He was greatly aided in his endeavours by the fact of its being all in the funds -- a great convenience to the spendthrift. It keeps him constantly in cash, and enables him to ‘cut and come again,’ as quick as ever he likes. Land is not half so accommodating; neither is money on mortgage. What with time spent in investigating a title, or giving notice to ‘pay in,’ an industrious man wants a second loan by the time, or perhaps before he gets the first. Acres are not easy of conversion, and the mere fact of wanting to sell implies a deficiency somewhere. With money in the funds, a man has nothing to do but lodge a power of attorney with his broker, and write up for four or five thousand pounds, just as he would write to his bootmaker for four