to follow me in my brief excursion, because I am myself, and will demand no better reason.  If I choose to write for them, I do no injury to those for whom my personality is an object of indifference.  They will find on every shelf some publications which are not intended for them, and which they prefer to let alone.  No person is expected to help himself to everything set before him at a public table.  I will not, therefore, hesitate to go on with the simple story of our Old World experiences.

Thanks to my Indian blanket,—­my shawl, I mean,—­I found myself nothing the worse for my manifold adventures of the 27th of May.  The cold wind sweeping over Epsom downs reminded me of our own chilling easterly breezes; especially the northeasterly ones, which are to me less disagreeable than the southeasterly.  But the poetical illusion about an English May,—­

  “Zephyr with Aurora playing,
  As he met her once a-Maying,”—­

and all that, received a shrewd thrust.  Zephyr ought to have come in an ulster, and offered Aurora a warm petticoat.  However, in spite of all difficulties, I brought off my recollections of the Derby of 1886 in triumph, and am now waiting for the colored portrait of Ormonde with Archer on his back,—­Archer, the winner of five Derby races, one of which was won by the American horse Iroquois.  When that picture, which I am daily expecting, arrives, I shall have it framed and hung by the side of Herring’s picture of Plenipotentiary, the horse I saw win the Derby in 1834.  These two, with an old portrait of the great Eclipse, who, as my engraving of 1780 (Stubbs’s) says, “was never beat, or ever had occation for Whip or Spur,” will constitute my entire sporting gallery.  I have not that vicious and demoralizing love of horse-flesh which makes it next to impossible to find a perfectly honest hippophile.  But a racer is the realization of an ideal quadruped,—­

  “A pard-like spirit, beautiful and swift;”

so ethereal, so bird-like, that it is no wonder that the horse about whom those old story-tellers lied so stoutly,—­telling of his running a mile in a minute,—­was called Flying Childers.

The roses in Mrs. Pfeiffer’s garden were hardly out of flower when I lunched with her at her pretty villa at Putney.  There I met Mr. Browning, Mr. Holman Hunt, Mrs. Ritchie, Miss Anna Swanwick, the translator of AEschylus, and other good company, besides that of my entertainer.

One of my very agreeable experiences was a call from a gentleman with whom I had corresponded, but whom I had never met.  This was Mr. John Bellows, of Gloucester, publisher, printer, man of letters, or rather of words; for he is the author of that truly remarkable little manual, “The Bona Fide Pocket Dictionary of the French and English Languages.”  To the review of this little book, which is dedicated to Prince Lucien Bonaparte, the “London Times” devoted a full column.  I never heard any one who had used it speak of it except with admiration.  The modest Friend may be surprised to find himself at full length in my pages, but those who know the little miracle of typography, its conciseness, completeness, arrangement, will not wonder that I was gratified to see the author, who sent it to me, and who has written me most interesting letters on the local antiquities of Gloucester and its neighborhood.