cars looked like baskets full of roses. It was
delightful to see them: at first like grave and stolid little
Anglo-Saxons, occupied seriously with the new Sensation; then here and
there beaming with thawing jollity; then smiling like sudden sun-gleams;
and then laughing, until all were in one grand chorus, as the speed
became greater, and the organ roared out its notes as rapidly as a
runaway musical locomotive, and the steam-engine puffed in time, until a
high-pressure scream told that the penn'orth of fun was up.

As we went home in the twilight, and looked back at the trees and roofs
of the village, in dark silhouette against the gold-bronze sky, and heard
from afar and fitfully the music of the Great Sensation mingled with the
beat of a drum and the shouts of the crowd, rising and falling with the
wind, I felt a little sad, that the age, in its advancing refinement, is
setting itself against these old-fashioned merry-makings, and shrinking
like a weakling from all out-of-doors festivals, on the plea of their
being disorderly, but in reality because they are believed to be vulgar.
They come down to us from rough old days; but they are relics of a time
when life, if rough, was at least kind and hearty. We admire that life
on the stage, we ape it in novels, we affect admiration and appreciation
of its rich picturesqueness and vigorous originality, and we lie in so
doing; for there is not an aesthetic prig in London who could have lived
an hour in it. Truly, I should like to know what Francois Villon and
Chaucer would have thought of some of their modern adorers, or what the
lioness Fair-sinners of the olden time would have had to say to the
nervous weaklings who try to play the genial blackguard in their praise!
It is to me the best joke of the age that those who now set themselves up
for priests of the old faith are the men, of all others, whom the old
gods would have kicked, _cum magna injuria_, out of the temple. When I
sit by Bill Bowers, as he baskets, and hear the bees buzz about his
marigolds, or in Plato Buckland's van, or with a few hearty and true men
of London town of whom I wot, _then_ I know that the old spirit liveth in
its ashes; but there is little of it, I trow, among its penny
prig-trumpeters.

IV. THE MIXED FORTUNES.

"Thus spoke the king to the great Master: 'Thou didst bless and ban
the people; thou didst give benison and curse, luck and sorrow, to
the evil or the good.'