Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/354

 prepared than the men; it is the best possible chance to observe the various types of the British female of the lower orders. Or rather, let me half retract my phrase. Is it, after all, the best possible chance? On the whole, charitably speaking, I think not. The lady in question is usually not ornamental. She is useful, robust, prolific, excellently fitted to play the somewhat arduous part allotted to her in the great scheme of British civilization. But she has not those graces which would enable her to make a harmonious figure on a day of bright festivity. A figure she certainly makes, but it is not exactly a graceful one. On smaller holidays—or on simple working days—in London crowds, I have often thought her handsome; thought, that is, that she had handsome "points," and that it was not impossible to see whereby it is that she helps to make the English race, on the whole, one of the comeliest in the world. But at Epsom she is too stout, too hot, too red, too thirsty, too crowded, too boisterous, and last, not least, accoutred with finery too violently infelicitous. Upon the aberrations of her taste in this respect I have neither the space nor the courage to linger. And yet I wish to do her justice; so I must add that if there is something to which an American cannot refuse a tribute of admiration in the gross plebeian jollity of the Derby day, it is not evident why these brave she-revellers should not get part ot the credit of it.

The striking thing, the interesting thing, both on the onward drive and on the return, was that the holiday was so completely, frankly, lustily, good-humoredly taken. The people that of all peoples is habitually the most governed by decencies, proprieties, rigidities of conduct, was, for one happy day, unbuttoning its respectable straight-jacket and letting its powerful, carnal, healthy temperament take the air. In such a spectacle there was inevitably much that was unlucky and unprofitable; these things came uppermost chiefly on the return, when demoralization was supreme, when the temperament in question had quite taken what the French call the key of the fields, and seemed in no humor whatever for coming back to give an account of itself. For the rest, to be dressed with a kind of brutal gaudiness, to be very thirsty and violently flushed, to laugh perpetually at everything and at nothing, to thoroughly enjoy, in short, a momentous occasion—all this is not, in simple persons of the more susceptible sex, an unpardonable crime.

The course at Epsom is in itself very pretty, and disposed by nature herself in sympathetic prevision of the sporting passion. It is something like the crater of a volcano, without the volcano. The outer rim is the course proper; the space within it is a vast, shallow, grassy concavity in which vehicles are drawn up and beasts tethered, and in which the greater part of the multitude—the mountebanks, the little vociferous betting-stands, and the myriad hangers-on of the scene—are congregated. The outer margin of the uplifted rim in question is occupied by the grand stand, the small stands, the paddock. The day was exceptionally beautiful; the charming sky was spotted over with little idle looking, loafing, irresponsible clouds; the Epsom downs went swelling away as greenly as in a colored sporting print, and the wooded uplands, in the middle distance, looked as innocent and pastoral as if they had never seen a policeman or a "Welsher." The crowd that spread itself over this immense expanse was the most prodigious assemblage of human life that I have ever looked upon. One's first fate after arriving, if one is perched upon a coach, is to see the coach guided, by means best known to the coachman himself, through the tremendous press of vehicles and pedestrians, introduced into a precinct roped off and guarded from intrusion save under payment of a substantial fee, and then drawn up alongside of the