The impetuous Hercules rushed and reared onwards as if to clear the wide expanse; and alighting still lower, shot Sponge right overhead in the middle.
[Illustration] '_That's_ cooked _your_ goose!' exclaimed his lordship, eyeing Sponge and his horse floundering about in the black porridge-like mess.
'Catch my horse!' hallooed Sponge to the first whip, who came galloping up as Hercules was breasting his way out again.
'Catch him yourself,' grunted the man, galloping on.
A peat-cutter, more humane, received the horse as he emerged from the black sea, exclaiming, as the now-piebald Sponge came lobbing after on foot, 'A, sir! but ye should niver set tee to ride through sic a place as that!' Sponge, having generously rewarded the man with a fourpenny piece, for catching his horse and scraping the thick of the mud off him, again mounted, and cantered round the point he should at first have gone; but his chance was out--the farther he went, the farther he was left behind; till at last, pulling up, he stood watching the diminishing pack, rolling like marbles over the top of Rotherjade Hill, followed by his lordship hugging his horse round the neck as he went, and the huntsman and whips leading and driving theirs up before them.
'Nasty jealous old beggar!' said Sponge, eyeing his lessening lordship disappearing over the hill too.

Sponge then performed the sickening ceremony of turning away from hounds running; not but that he might have plodded on on the line, and perhaps seen or heard what became of the fox, but Sponge didn't hunt on those terms.

Like a good many other gentlemen, he would be first, or nowhere.
If it was any consolation to him, he had plenty of companions in misfortune.

The line was dotted with horsemen back to the brick-fields.

The first person he overtook wending his way home in the discontented, moody humour of a thrown-out man, was Mr.Puffington master of the Hanby hounds; at whose appearance at the meet we expressed our surprise.
Neighbouring masters of hounds are often more or less jealous of each other.