Northerners must be aware, for
"First Families of Virginia"; others were in a line of motors and
heterogeneous horse-drawn vehicles, parked beside the course; and
scattered through the gathering, like brushmarks on an impressionist
canvas, one saw the brilliant color of pink coats. Handsome hunters
were being ridden or led about by negro grooms, and others kept
arriving, ridden in by farmers and breeders, while here and there one
saw a woman rider, her hair tightly drawn back under a mannish derby
hat, her figure slender and graceful in a severely-cut habit coat.
Jumbled together in a great green meadow under a sweet autumnal sun,
these things made a picture of what, I am persuaded, is the ultimate in
extravagant American country life. There was something, too, about this
blending of fashionables and farmers, which made me think of the
theater; for there is, in truth, a distinct note of histrionism about
many of the rich Americans who "go in for" elaborate ruralness, and
there is a touch of it very often, also, about "horsey" people. They
like to "look the part," and they dress it with no less care than they
exercise, at other seasons, in dressing the parts of opera-going
cosmopolites, or wealthy loungers at the beaches. In other words, these
fashionables had the overtrained New York look all over them, and the
local rustics set them off as effectively as the villainous young squire
of the Drury Lane melodrama is set off by contrast with honest old
Jasper, the miller, who wears a smock, and comes to the Great House to
beg the Young Master to "make an honest woman" of poor Rose, the fairest
lass in all Hampshire.

About the races themselves there was something fascinatingly
nonprofessional. They bore the same relation to great races on great
tracks that a very fine performance of a play by amateurs might bear to
a professional performance.

First came a two-mile steeplechase, with brush hurdles. Then, after a
couple of minor events, a four-mile point-to-point race for hunters
ridden by gentlemen in hunt uniform. This was as stiff a race for both
horses and riders as I have ever seen, and it was very picturesque to
watch the pink coats careering up hill and down dale, now over a tall
stone wall, now over a brook or a snake fence; and when a rider went
head over heels, and lay still upon the ground where he fell, while his
horse cantered along after the field, in that aimless and pathetic way
that riderless horses have,