Upon our return to our inn, we received a good-humoured lecture from
Blackstrap, who was just, as he phrased it, on the wing for Bristol and
Bath, "where" said he, "if you will meet me at old Matthew Temple's,
the Castle Inn, I will engage to give you a hearty welcome, and another
bottle of the old particular;" a proposition that was immediately agreed
to, as the route we had previously determined upon. One circumstance
had, during our sojourn in the west, much annoyed my friend Transit
and myself; we had intended to have been present at the Doncaster
race meeting for 1825, and have booked both the betting men and
their betters. Certainly a better bit of sport could never have been
anticipated, but we were neither of us endowed with ubiquity, and were
therefore compelled to cry content in the west when our hearts and
inclinations were in the ~269~~north. "If now your 'Spirit in the
Clouds,' your merry unknown, he that sometimes shoots off his witty
arrows at the same target with ourselves, should archly suspect that
old Tom Whipcord was not upon the turf, I would venture a cool hundred
against the field, that we should have a report from him, 'ready cut
and dried,' and quite as full of fun and whim as if you had been present
yourself, Master Bernard, aided and assisted by our ally, Tom Whipcord
of Oxford.
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