The country round was filled with the noise of their plaints, and the yowling and howling of canine defeat.

The grey old badger meanwhile sat proud in his hole, with all his badger kin around him, and laughed his well-known badger laugh at his disconsolate foes.

Such a brock had not for years been seen in the country-side; so cool, so resolute, so knowing in his badger ways, so impregnable in his badger hole, and so good-humoured withal.

He could bite full sore with those old teeth of his, and yet he never condescended to show them.

A badger indeed of whom the country might well be proud! But in the scramble of the fight some little curs had been permitted to run away with some little bones; and, in this way, Mr.Nogo, the member for Mile End, had been allowed to carry his motion for a committee to inquire as to the expediency of the Government's advancing a quarter of a million towards the completion of that momentous national undertaking, the building of a bridge from Limehouse to Rotherhithe.
Very much had been said about this bridge, till men living out of the light of parliamentary life, nine hundred and ninety-nine men, that is, out of every thousand in the Queen's dominions, had begun to think that it was the great want of the age.