Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/353

 start from the classic headquarters—Hatchett's, in Piccadilly—and stretch away from London toward a dozen different and well-selected goals, had been dedicated to the Epsom road. The body of the vehicle is empty, as no one thinks of occupying any but one of the thirteen places on the top. On the Derby day, however, a properly laden coach carries a company of hampers and champagne baskets in its inside places. The open coach door allows a glimpse of a kind of miniature reproduction of a superior grocery. The vehicle on which I went to the Derby was driven by a professional whip, who proved to be an entertaining companion. Other companions there were, perched in the twelve places behind me, whose social qualities I made less of a point of testing—though in the course of the expedition these qualities, under the influence of champagne, expanded so freely as greatly to facilitate the operation. We were a society of exotics—Spaniards, Frenchmen, and Germans. There were only two Britons, and these, according to my theory, were Australians—an antipodal bride and groom, on a wide wedding tour.

The drive to Epsom, when you get well out of London, is sufficiently pretty; but the part of it which most took my fancy was a suburban district—the classic neighborhood of Clapham. One has always heard of Clapham—of its respectable common, its evangelical society, and its goodly brick mansions of the Georgian era. I beheld these objects for the first time, and I thought them very charming. This epithet, indeed, scarcely applies to the evangelical society, which naturally, on the morning of the Derby day, and during the desecrating progress of the Epsom revellers, was not much in the foreground. But all around the verdant, if cockneyfied common, are ranged capacious houses, of a sober red complexion, from under whose neo-classic pediments you expect to see a nice-faced lady emerge—a lady in a cottage bonnet and mittens, distributing tracts from a little satchel. It would take an energetic piety, however, to stem the current of heterogeneous vehicles which at about this point takes up its metropolitan affluents and bears them in its rumbling, rattling tide. The concourse of wheeled conveyances of every possible order here becomes dense, and the spectacle from the top of the coach proportionately entertaining. You begin to perceive that the brilliancy of the road has in truth departed, and that well appointed elegance is not the prevailing characteristic. But when once you have grasped this fact your entertainment is continuous. You perceive that you are "in," as the phrase is, for something vulgar, something colossally, unimaginably, heroically vulgar; all that is necessary is to settle down to your point of view. Beside you, before you, behind you, is the mighty London populace, taking its chats. You get for the first time a sort of notion of what the London population really consists of. It has piled itself into carts, into omnibuses, into every possible and impossible species of "trap." A large proportion of it is of course on foot, trudging along the perilous margin of the wheel track in such comfort as may be gathered from a fifteen miles' dodging of broken shins. The smaller the vehicle, the more ratlike the animal that drags it, the more numerous and ponderous its human freight; and as every one is nursing in his lap a parcel of provisions as big as himself, wrapped in ragged newspapers, it is not surprising that roadside halts are frequent, and that the taverns all the way to Epsom (it is wonderful how many there are) are encompassed by dense groups of dusty pilgrims, indulging liberally in refreshment for man and beast. And when I say man I must by no means be understood to exclude woman. The female contingent on the Derby day is not the least remarkable part of the London multitude. Every one is prepared for an "outing," but the women are even more brilliantly-and