It's a curious object, that Study. Ponto's library mostly consists of
boots. He and Stripes have important interviews here of mornings,
when the potatoes are discussed, or the fate of the calf ordained, or
sentence passed on the pig, &c.. All the Major's bills are docketed on
the Study table and displayed like a lawyer's briefs. Here, too, lie
displayed his hooks, knives, and other gardening irons, his whistles,
and strings of spare buttons. He has a drawer of endless brown paper for
parcels, and another containing a prodigious and never-failing supply of
string. What a man can want with so many gig-whips I can never conceive.
These, and fishing-rods, and landing-nets, and spurs, and boot-trees,
and balls for horses, and surgical implements for the same, and
favourite pots of shiny blacking, with which he paints his own shoes
in the most elegant manner, and buckskin gloves stretched out on their
trees, and his gorget, sash, and sabre of the Horse Marines, with his
boot-hooks underneath in atrophy; and the family medicine-chest, and
in a corner the very rod with which he used to whip his son, Wellesley
Ponto, when a boy (Wellesley never entered the 'Study' but for that
awful purpose)--all these, with 'Mogg's Road Book,' the GARDENERS'
CHRONICLE, and a backgammon-board, form the Major's library. Under the
trophy there's a picture of Mrs.
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