Sporting notions of present days and past

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186 SPORTING NOTIONS
ment followed. The live one took the dead one
to safe anchorage, where it was pegged down to
await developments—a word you may translate
into offers of reward. If what seemed a fair
premium was advertised, then the derelict
remains would be discovered with great
promptitude and punctuality. Otherwise no
unseemly haste was shown in the matter; the—
what shall we call them?—salvage corps could
wait. The longer the interval the more would
be friends' and relations' anxiety indicated by a
rising scale of rewards. Anyhow, there were
men—I daresay are—with good practices in
this very much superior Rogue Riderhood
profession, and interesting, if somewhat grue-
some, reading could be furnished on the subject.
To go back to ruins for a moment, our
tideway veteran wants someone to confirm or
correct his uncertain impression that in the
interval between
the
Ruins being disestablished
as an open-air betting market and its being
legally occupied by the holders, who had done
nothing with
it
for so long, a crop of corn was
grown there—which is to say within a stone's
throw of 'Obun 'III—and in due course was to
be seen standing in shocks. This is one of those
confoundedly misleading propositions calculated
to get a conscientious citizen into trouble, because
if you do not actually recollect, you cogitate until
the idea seems to seize on you. Like me you
may conjure up the pastoral scene, an oasis of
rusticity in a weary waste of concentrated smoke
and-bricks-and-mortar desert. Unless you are
very strong-minded, indeed, the unique situation
gets such a hold that you innocently lie that you
saw what you only heard about rather than