When young Naggett’s education was supposed to be completed, and he came home to live with his father as a lad of sixteen, there was not probably a more finished young blackguard to be found within a circle of fifty miles. The old man tried hard to make him work, but it was hopeless; whilst at races, fairs, village feasts, anything in the shape of a junketing, he was safe to attend and safe to get into mischief. Then he always kept two or three greyhounds, much to the disgust of the Earl of Castle-Cropper, his father’s landlord; and though he generally had a pretty good nag of the old man’s to ride when he chose, he never won the Earl’s respect by any display of daring in the field. Young Naggett’s heart was not in the right place to ride well over a country, and although he liked the excitement and display of hunting, it was not for the sake of the sport that he attended at the covert-side.
His father died the year his son came of age, and the just old Earl, though much against the grain, on his usual principle let the latter continue the farm. Then began a career of extravagance that necessarily ran itself out in a brief space of time. Late breakfasts, silver forks, six-o’clock dinners, port, sherry, and punch till all the hours of the night, with three or four riding-horses in the stable, and a box of cigars always open in the hall, made Apple-tree Farm the most popular resort in the neighbourhood for every “good-for-nothing” in the country-side. This style of living went on for eighteen months. Then came a bad harvest, the failure of a county bank, and a sale at the farm, with Richard Naggett’s name amongst the list of bankrupts, and a loss to the Earl of Castle-Cropper of more than he cared to think about. Nevertheless, his old landlord never quite turned his back on his tenant, and therefore we may fairly suppose that, beyond reckless imprudence, there was nothing tangible against the latter, and that in the main, and when confronted with a Waterborough lawyer, he acted what is called “on the square.”
After this crisis, young Naggett was not much heard of, for some time. There _was_ indeed an ugly poaching story in which the Earl was supposed to have dealt very leniently with the offender in consideration of certain old associations, and which, if possible, increased that nobleman’s popularity, to the detriment of the culprit he had screened; and there was likewise a very disagreeable show-up on Waterborough race-course in regard to a horse called Cat’s Cradle, who was entered, weighted, and described wrong for the Tally-ho Stakes, and then most indubitably pulled by young Naggett, riding as a tenant-farmer, without occupying one foot of land. There is a horse-pond at the end of the course, and it was only the good-nature of some of the townspeople, and the excitement created at the same moment by the detection of a _maladroit_ pickpocket, that saved the adventurous jockey from involuntary immersion therein.