s, Christmas is Christmas still in the heart of old England. We are
apt to talk of the good old days that are no more, lamenting the customs
and country sports that have passed away; but let us not forget that two
hundred years hence, when we who are living now will have long passed
"that bourne from which no traveller returns," our descendants, as they
sit round their hearths at Yuletide, may in the same way regret the
grand old times when good Victoria--the greatest monarch of all
ages--was Queen of England; those times when during the London season
fair ladies and gallant men might be seen on Drawing-room days driving
down St James's Street in grand carriages, drawn by magnificent horses,
with servants in cocked hats and wigs and gold lace; when the rural
villages of merrie England were cheered throughout the dreary winter
months by the sound of horse and hound, and by the sight of beautiful
ladies and red-coated sportsmen, mounted on blood horses, careering over
the country, clearing hedges and ditches of fabulous height and width;
when every man, woman, and child in the village turned out to see the
"meet," and the peer and the peasant were for the day on an equal
footing, bound together by an extraordinary devotion to the chase of
"that little red rover" which men called the fox--now, alas! extinct, as
the mammoth or the bear, owing to barbed wire and the abolition of the
horse; when to such an extent were games and sports a part of our
national life that half London flocked to see two elevens of cricketers
(including a champion "nine" feet high called Grace) fighting their
mimic battle arrayed in white flannels and curiously coloured caps, at a
place called Lords, the exact site of which is now, alas I lost in the
sea of houses; when as an absolute fact the first news men turned to on
opening their daily papers in the morning was the column devoted to
cricket, football, or horse-racing; when in the good old days, before
electricity and the motor-car caused the finest specimen of the brute
creation to become virtually extinct (although a few may still be seen
at the Zoological Gardens), horse-racing for a cup and a small fortune
in gold was only second to cricket and football in the estimation of all
merrie Englanders--the only races now indulged in being those of flying
machines to Mars and back twice a day. Two hundred years hence, I say,
the Victorian era--time of blessed peace and unexampled prosperity--will
be