Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/356

 my observation. His companions on the top of the coach called down to the people herding under the wheels, to pick him up and put him away inside. These people were the grimiest of the rabble, and a couple of men who looked like coal-heavers out of work, undertook to handle this hapless youth. But their task was difficult; it was impossible to imagine a young man more drunk. He was a mere bag of liquor—at once too ponderous and too flaccid to be lifted or carried. He lay in a helpless heap under the feet of the crowd—the best intoxicated young man in England. His extemporized chamberlains took him in this fashion and that, but he was like water in a sieve. The crowd bustled over him; every one wanted to see; he was pulled, and shoved, and fumbled. The spectacle had a grotesque side, and this it was that seemed to strike the fancy of the young man's comrades. They had not done lunching, so they were unable to bestow upon the incident the whole of that consideration which its high comicality deserved. But they did what they could. They looked down very often, glass in hand, during the half hour that it was going on, and they stinted neither their generous, joyous laughter nor their appreciative comments. Women are said to have no sense of humor; but the young ladies with the gilded chignons did liberal justice to the beauty of the joke. Toward the last, indeed, their attention rather flagged; but even the best joke suffers by reiteration, and when you have seen a stupefied young man, infinitely bedusted, slip out of the embrace of a couple of clumsy paupers for the twentieth time, you may very properly deem that you have arrived at the furthest limits of the ludicrous.

After the great race had been run I quitted my perch and spent the rest of the afternoon in wandering about that grassy concave that I have mentioned. It was amusing and picturesque: it was like a huge Bohemian encampment. Here also a great number of carriages were stationed, freighted in like manner with free-handed youths and young ladies with gilded tresses. These young ladies were almost the only representatives of their sex with pretensions to elegance; they were often pretty and always ill dressed. Gentlemen in pairs, mounted on stools, habited in fantastic sporting garments, and offering bets to whomsoever listed, were a conspicuous feature of the scene. It was equally striking that they were not preaching in the desert, and that they found plenty of patrons among the vulgar sort. I returned to my place in time to assist at the rather complicated operation of starting for the drive back to London, Putting in horses and getting vehicles into line seemed in the midst of the general crush and entanglement a process not to be facilitated even by the most liberal swearing on the part of those engaged in it. But little by little we came to the end of it; and as by this time a kind of mellow cheerfulness pervaded the upper atmosphere—the region of drivers and travellers—even those interruptions most trying to patience were somehow made to minister to jollity. It was for people below to not get trampled to death or crunched between opposing wheel-hubs, if they could manage it. Above, the carnival of "chaff" had set in, and it deepened as the lock of vehicles grew denser. As they were all locked together (with a comfortable padding of pedestrians at points of acutest contact), they contrived somehow to move together; so that we gradually got away and into the road. The four or five hours consumed on the road were simply as I say, a carnival of "chaff, "the profusely good-humored savor of which, on the whole, was certainly striking. The chuff was not brilliant or subtle or particularly graceful; and here and there it was quite too tipsy to be even articulate. But as an expression of that unbuttoning of the popular straight-jacket of which I spoke awhile since, it had its wholesome and even innocent side.