was selling some twopenny instrument that was supposed to imitate either the bark of a dog or the song of a nightingale—­one could not tell which from the noise he made with it; stand after stand packed to the sky with what are called serried ranks of human beings, who looked like immense banks of many-coloured shingle, and who, as they raised a million pairs of field-glasses to two million eyes, scintillated in the distance like a bank of shingle after a wave has broken on it on a tropical noon—­it was certainly an amazing medley of spectacle and odour.

It is said that an important horse-race took place.  It is even said that Polumetis ran in it.  I looked for him everywhere—­over people’s heads, under people’s heads, through motor-buses, round the corners of refreshment tents, in the sky above, and on the earth beneath.  But no Polumetis was to be seen anywhere—­except on my race-card, where I read about his lilac-coloured jockey.  A jockey in lilac—­how beautiful, how Japanese!  And, indeed, all the jockeys as they paraded down the field before the race seemed to have robbed a rainbow.

They brought meaning and beauty into an otherwise bald and unconvincing mob.  I assure you I love horse-racing—­if I could see it.  But of all the people who congregated the little crooked hills of Epsom, I doubt if ten people in a hundred saw it.  You knew that the horses had started only because, as you lay dreaming, the million people on the stands suddenly made you jump with a loud, sharp, and terrifying bark, which said:  “They’re off!” in one syllable.

Then there was deep silence, and somebody near me said:  “The favourite can’t be leading, or they would be shouting.”  Then from the stands came a murmur like bees, a muttering as of a man talking in his sleep, a growling as of wind in a cave.  This only served to intensify the silence of a defeated people.  One knew that something awful must be happening.  Perhaps even Polumetis was winning.

Above the heads of the crowd the heads of jockeys began to be visible.  A fool cried out:  “The favourite wins.”  Another:  “Allenby has it.”  Then one had a glimpse of three horses close—­well, fairly close—­on each other’s tails, and none of them the grey Tetratema.  I noticed that on one of them crouched a jockey in exquisite grass-green.  He passed like a fine phrase out of a poem of which one does not know the rest.  But I did not really know who had won till the numbers were put up on the board.  Then a badly shaven man in a bowler cried:  “Spion Kop has won!  Bravo!” and clapped his friend on the back.  The rest of us looked at him with contempt.  The tinker-nosed man who played the instrument that sang like a dog or barked like a nightingale began to squeak it into people’s ears.

The crowd began pouring itself through itself, and the dust from its feet rose like a cloud till it was difficult to see across the course.

And the motor-car broke down on the way home.