Rag, and the 'lurking' or raffish Military
Snob, Ensign Famish. Indeed you are fully sure to meet them lounging
on horseback, about five o'clock, under the trees by the Serpentine,
examining critically the inmates of the flashy broughams which parade up
and down 'the Lady's Mile.'
Tagg and Rag are very well acquainted, and so the former, with that
candour inseparable from intimate friendship, told me his dear friend's
history. Captain Rag is a small dapper north-country man. He went when
quite a boy into a crack light cavalry regiment, and by the time he got
his troop, had cheated all his brother officers so completely, selling
them lame horses for sound ones, and winning their money by all manner
of strange and ingenious contrivances, that his Colonel advised him to
retire; which he did without much reluctance, accommodating a youngster,
who had just entered the regiment, with a glandered charger at an
uncommonly stiff figure.
He has since devoted his time to billiards, steeple-chasing, and the
turf. His head-quarters are 'Rummer's,' in Conduit Street, where
he keeps his kit; but he is ever on the move in the exercise of his
vocation as a gentleman-jockey and gentleman-leg.
According to BELL'S LIFE, he is an invariable attendant at all races,
and an actor in most of them. He rode the winner at Leamington; he was
left for dead in a ditch a fortnight ago at Harrow; and yet there he
was, last week, at the Croix de Berny, pale and determined as ever,
astonishing the BADAUDS of Paris by the elegance of his seat and the
neatness of his rig, as he took a preliminary gallop on that vicious
brute 'The Disowned,' before starting for 'the French Grand National.
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