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Spatterdash was no other than mine host who had just vacated! "What, do you really think he is in for it?" said the second oldest captain who sat next me; and as he spoke he drew his leg from beneath the table, and, turning out his dexter heel, seemed to contemplate the site of the prospective fixed spur. "I do, indeed," quoth Dr Plaget. He died within three days!
From heavy guns, ammunition-wagons and draught-horses, down to the last buckle of a spatterdash, things are all ticketed and ready in his Majesty's country; things, and still more evidently men. On the 15th day of September, if Fate's almanac hold steady, there will be 44,000 of them ready there. Such a mass of potential-battle as George or the Hanover Officiality are ready to fight?
"If he had but a little more brains," she thought to herself, "I might make something of him"; but she never let him perceive the opinion she had of him; listened with indefatigable complacency to his stories of the stable and the mess; laughed at all his jokes; felt the greatest interest in Jack Spatterdash, whose cab-horse had come down, and Bob Martingale, who had been taken up in a gambling-house, and Tom Cinqbars, who was going to ride the steeplechase.
After he had finished, and we had all hammered on the table to his honour and glory, until every thing danced again as if it had been a matter of very trivial concern, he said, "Sorry I was away so long; but old Spatterdash has got a damned thick skin, I can tell you could scarcely get the lancet into him I thought I should have had to send for a spring phleme to tip him the veterinary, you know and he won't take physic: so I fear he will have but a poor chance."
His boots, to which he had been accustomed from his infancy, and which form a distinctive part of the national costume, were to be taken off, and to be substituted by the tight German spatterdash and the shoe, the one pinching the leg, and the other perpetually falling off the foot, wherever the march happened to be in the wet.
He carried a heavy cane in his right hand, and the right foot was enclosed in a sort of moccasin or spatterdash which might have belonged to one of the conductors on an avenue railroad, for use in very severe weather. In shoe-makers' measurement this foot-gear would probably have been rated about number sixteen.
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