Within the precinct of the White Horse Tavern, and coming up to the windows of the eating-room, was a bowling-green, with a table or two, where guests might sit and partake of punch or tea. The three gentlemen having come to an end of their dinner about the same time, Mr. Morris proposed that they should adjourn to the Green, and there drink a cool bottle. “Jack Morris would adjourn to the Dust Hole, as a pretext for a fresh drink,” said my lord. On which Jack said he supposed each gentleman had his own favourite way of going to the deuce. His weakness, he owned, was a bottle.

“My Lord Chesterfield’s deuce is deuce-ace,” says my Lord March. “His lordship can’t keep away from the cards or dice.”

“My Lord March has not one devil, but several devils. He loves gambling, he loves horse-racing, he loves betting, he loves drinking, he loves eating, he loves money, he loves women; and you have fallen into bad company, Mr. Warrington, when you lighted upon his lordship. He will play you for every acre you have in Virginia.”

“With the greatest pleasure in life, Mr. Warrington!” interposes my lord.

“And for all your tobacco, and for all your spices, and for all your slaves, and for all your oxen and asses, and for everything that is yours.”

“Shall we begin now? Jack, you are never without a dice-box or a bottle-screw. I will set Mr. Warrington for what he likes.”

“Unfortunately, my lord, the tobacco, and the slaves, and the asses, and the oxen, are not mine, as yet. I am just of age, and my mother, scarce twenty years older, has quite as good chance of long life as I have.”

“I will bet you that you survive her. I will pay you a sum now against four times the sum to be paid at her death. I will set you a fair sum over this table against the reversion of your estate in Virginia at the old lady’s departure. What do you call your place?”

“Castlewood.”

“A principality, I hear it is. I will bet that its value has been exaggerated ten times at least amongst the quidnuncs here. How came you by the name of Castlewood? — you are related to my lord? Oh, stay: I know — my lady, your mother, descends from the real head of the house. He took the losing side in ‘15. I have had the story a dozen times from my old Duchess. She knew your grandfather. He was friend of Addison and Steele, and Pope and Milton, I dare say, and the bigwigs. It is a pity he did not stay at home, and transport the other branch of the family to the plantations.”

“I have just been staying at Castlewood with my cousin there,” remarked Mr. Warrington.

“Hm! Did you play with him? He’s fond of pasteboard and bones.”

“Never, but for sixpences and a pool of commerce with the ladies.”

“So much the better for both of you. But you played with Will Esmond if he was at home? I will lay ten to one you played with Will Esmond.”

Harry blushed, and owned that of an evening his cousin and he had had a few games at cards.

“And Tom Sampson, the chaplain,” cried Jack Morris, “was he of the party? I wager that Tom made a third, and the Lord deliver you from Tom and Will Esmond together!”

“Nay; the truth is, I won of both of them,” said Mr. Warrington.

“And they paid you? Well, miracles will never cease!”

“I did not say anything about miracles,” remarked Mr. Harry, smiling over his wine.

“And you don’t tell tales out of school — the volto sciolto — hey, Mr. Warrington?” says my lord.

“I beg your pardon,” said downright Harry, “French is the only language besides my own of which I know a little.”

“My Lord March has learned Italian at the Opera, and a pretty penny his lessons have cost him,” remarked Jack Morris. “We must show him the Opera — mustn’t we, March?”

“Must we, Morris?” said my lord, as if he only half liked the other’s familiarity.

Both of the two gentlemen were dressed alike, in small scratch-wigs without powder, in blue frocks with plate buttons, in buckskins and riding-boots, in little hats with a narrow cord of lace, and no outward mark of fashion.

“I don’t care about the Opera much, my lord,” says Harry, warming with his wine; “but I should like to go to Newmarket, and long to see a good English hunting-field.”

“We will show you Newmarket and the hunting-field, sir. Can you ride pretty well?”

“I think I can,” Harry said; “and I can shoot pretty well, and jump some.”

“What’s your weight? I bet you we weigh even, or I weigh most. I bet you Jack Morris beats you at birds or a mark, at five-and-twenty paces. I bet you I jump farther than you on flat ground, here on this green.”

“I don’t know Mr. Morris’s shooting — I never saw either gentleman before — but I take your bets, my lord, at what you please,” cries Harry, who by this time was more than warm with Burgundy.

“Ponies on each!” cried my lord.

“Done and done!” cried my lord and Harry together. The young man thought it was for the honour of his country not to be ashamed of any bet made to him.

“We can try the last bet now, if your feet are pretty steady,” said my lord, springing up, stretching his arms and limbs, and looking at the crisp, dry grass. He drew his boots off, then his coat and waistcoat, buckling his belt round his waist, and flinging his clothes down to the ground.

Harry had more respect for his garments. It was his best suit. He took off the velvet coat and waistcoat, folded them up daintily, and, as the two or three tables round were slopped with drink, went to place the clothes on a table in the eating-room, of which the windows were open.

Here a new guest had entered; and this was no other than Mr. Wolfe, who was soberly eating a chicken and salad, with a modest pint of wine. Harry was in high spirits. He told the Colonel he had a bet with my Lord March — would Colonel Wolfe stand him halves? The Colonel said he was too poor to bet. Would he come out and see fair play? That he would with all his heart. Colonel Wolfe set down his glass, and stalked through the open window after his young friend.

“Who is that tallow-faced Put with the carroty hair?” says Jack Morris, on whom the Burgundy had had its due effect.

Mr. Warrington explained that this was Lieutenant-Colonel Wolfe, of the 20th Regiment.

“Your humble servant, gentlemen!” says the Colonel, making the company a rigid military bow.

“Never saw such a figure in my life!” cries Jack Morris. “Did you — March?”

“I beg your pardon, I think you said March?” said the Colonel, looking very much surprised.

“I am the Earl of March, sir, at Colonel Wolfe’s service,” said the nobleman, bowing. “My friend, Mr. Morris, is so intimate with me, that, after dinner, we are quite like brothers.”

Why is not all Tunbridge Wells by to hear this? thought Morris. And he was so delighted that he shouted out, “Two to one on my lord!”

“Done!” calls out Mr. Warrington; and the enthusiastic Jack was obliged to cry “Done!” too.

“Take him, Colonel,” Harry whispers to his friend.

But the Colonel said he could not afford to lose, and therefore could not hope to win.

“I see you have won one of our bets already, Mr. Warrington,” my Lord March remarked. “I am taller than you by an inch or two, but you are broader round the shoulders.”

“Pooh, my dear Will! I bet you you weigh twice as much as he does!” cries Jack Morris.

“Done, Jack!” says my lord, laughing. “The bets are all ponies. Will you take him, Mr. Warrington?”

“No, my dear fellow — one’s enough,” says Jack.

“Very good, my dear fellow,” says my lord; “and now we will settle the other wager.”

Having already arrayed himself in his best silk stockings, black satin-net breeches, and neatest pumps, Harry did not care to take off his shoes as his antagonist had done, whose heavy riding-boots and spurs were, to be sure, little calculated for leaping. They had before them a fine even green turf of some thirty yards in length, enough for a run and enough for a jump. A gravel walk ran around this green, beyond which was a wall and gate-sign — a field azure, bearing the Hanoverian White Horse rampant between two skittles proper, and for motto the name of the landlord and of the animal depicted.

My lord’s friend laid a handkerchief on the ground as the mark whence the leapers were to take their jump, and Mr. Wolfe stood at the other end of the grass-plat to note the spot where each came down. “My lord went first,” writes Mr. Warrington, in a letter to Mrs. Mountain, at Castlewood, Virginia, still extant. “He was for having me take the lead; but, remembering the story about the Battel of Fontanoy which my dearest George used to tell, I says, ‘Monseigneur le Comte, tirez le premier, s’il vous play.’ So he took his run in his stocken feet, and for the honour of Old Virginia, I had the gratafacation of beating his lordship by more than two feet — viz., two feet nine inches — me jumping twenty-one feet three inches, by the drawer’s measured tape, and his lordship only eighteen six. I had won from him about my weight before (which I knew the moment I set my eye upon him). So he and Mr. Jack paid me these two betts. And with my best duty to my mother — she will not be displeased with me, for I bett for the honor of the Old Dominion, and my opponent was a nobleman of the first quality, himself holding two Erldomes, and heir to a Duke. Betting is all the rage here, and the bloods and young fellows of fashion are betting away from morning till night.

“I told them — and that was my mischief perhaps — that there was a gentleman at home who could beat me by a good foot; and when they asked who it was, and I said Col. G. Washington, of Mount Vernon — as you know he can, and he’s the only man in his county or mine that can do it — Mr. Wolfe asked me ever so many questions about Col. G. W., and showed that he had heard of him, and talked over last year’s unhappy campane as if he knew every inch of the ground, and he knew the names of all our rivers, only he called the Potowmac Pottamac, at which we had a good laugh at him. My Lord of March and Ruglen was not in the least ill-humour about losing, and he and his friend handed me notes out of their pocket-books, which filled mine that was getting very empty, for the vales to the servants at my cousin Castlewood’s house and buying a horse at Oakhurst have very nearly put me on the necessity of making another draft upon my honoured mother or her London or Bristol agent.”

These feats of activity over, the four gentlemen now strolled out of the tavern garden into the public walk, where, by this time, a great deal of company was assembled: upon whom Mr. Jack, who was of a frank and free nature, with a loud voice, chose to make remarks that were not always agreeable. And here, if my Lord March made a joke, of which his lordship was not sparing, Jack roared, “Oh, ho, ho! Oh, good Gad! Oh, my dear earl! Oh, my dear lord, you’ll be the death of me!” “It seemed as if he wished everybody to know,” writes Harry sagaciously to Mrs. Mountain, “that his friend and companion was an Erl!”

There was, indeed, a great variety of characters who passed. M. Poellnitz, no finer dressed than he had been at dinner, grinned, and saluted with his great laced hat and tarnished feathers. Then came by my Lord Chesterfield, in a pearl-coloured suit, with his blue ribbon and star, and saluted the young men in his turn.

“I will back the old boy for taking his hat off against the whole kingdom, and France either,” says my Lord March. “He has never changed the shape of that hat of his for twenty years. Look at it. There it goes again! Do you see that great, big, awkward, pock-marked, snuff-coloured man, who hardly touches his clumsy beaver in reply. D—— his confounded impudence — do you know who that is?”

“No, curse him! Who is it, March?” asks Jack, with an oath.

“It’s one Johnson, a Dictionary-maker, about whom my Lord Chesterfield wrote some most capital papers, when his dixonary was coming out, to patronise the fellow. I know they were capital. I’ve heard Horry Walpole say so, and he knows all about that kind of thing. Confound the impudent schoolmaster!”

“Hang him, he ought to stand in the pillory!” roars Jack.

“That fat man he’s walking with is another of your writing fellows — a printer — his name is Richardson; he wrote Clarissa, you know.”

“Great heavens! my lord, is that the great Richardson? Is that the man who wrote Clarissa?” called out Colonel Wolfe and Mr. Warrington, in a breath.

Harry ran forward to look at the old gentleman toddling along the walk with a train of admiring ladies surrounding him.

“Indeed, my very dear sir,” one was saying, “you are too great and good to live in such a world; but sure you were sent to teach it virtue!”

“Ah, my Miss Mulso! Who shall teach the teacher?” said the good, fat old man, raising a kind, round face skywards. “Even he has his faults and errors! Even his age an............