I must say something about the race I had taken so much pains to see.  There was a preliminary race, which excited comparatively little interest.  After this the horses were shown in the paddock, and many of our privileged party went down from the stand to look at them.  Then they were brought out, smooth, shining, fine-drawn, frisky, spirit-stirring to look upon,—­most beautiful of all the bay horse Ormonde, who could hardly be restrained, such was his eagerness for action.  The horses disappear in the distance.—­They are off,—­not yet distinguishable, at least to me.  A little waiting time, and they swim into our ken, but in what order of precedence it is as yet not easy to say.  Here they come!  Two horses have emerged from the ruck, and are sweeping, rushing, storming, towards us, almost side by side.  One slides by the other, half a length, a length, a length and a half.  Those are Archer’s colors, and the beautiful bay Ormonde flashes by the line, winner of the Derby of 1886.  “The Bard” has made a good fight for the first place, and comes in second.  Poor Archer, the king of the jockeys!  He will bestride no more Derby winners.  A few weeks later he died by his own hand.

While the race was going on, the yells of the betting crowd beneath us were incessant.  It must have been the frantic cries and movements of these people that caused Gustave Dore to characterize it as a brutal scene.  The vast mob which thronged the wide space beyond the shouting circle just round us was much like that of any other fair, so far as I could see from my royal perch.  The most conspicuous object was a man on an immensely tall pair of stilts, stalking about among the crowd.  I think it probable that I had as much enjoyment in forming one of the great mob in 1834 as I had among the grandeurs in 1886, but the last is pleasanter to remember and especially to tell of.

After the race we had a luncheon served us, a comfortable and substantial one, which was very far from unwelcome.  I did not go to the Derby to bet on the winner.  But as I went in to luncheon, I passed a gentleman standing in custody of a plate half covered with sovereigns.  He politely asked me if I would take a little paper from a heap there was lying by the plate, and add a sovereign to the collection already there.  I did so, and, unfolding my paper, found it was a blank, and passed on.  The pool, as I afterwards learned, fell to the lot of the Turkish Ambassador.  I found it very windy and uncomfortable on the more exposed parts of the grand stand, and was glad that I had taken a shawl with me, in which I wrapped myself as if I had been on shipboard.  This, I told my English friends, was the more civilized form of the Indian’s blanket.  My report of the weather does not say much for the English May, but it is generally agreed upon that this is a backward and unpleasant spring.