And now I come to relate how I went to the
Derby the other day as a swell. That carriage
and pair, I will confess at once, was a joint-stock
affair. It happened this way: Mr. Gandy,
who is addicted to fashion, and with whom I
have the honour to be acquainted, said to me
one day, " Will you go down to the Derby with
us?" meaning by the plural personal pronoun
Mrs. Gandy and himself. I rashly said " Yes,"
and found afterwards that I was expected to
pay half the charges. " How will you go?" I
asked. " Oh, in a carriage and pair, of course,"
replied Mr. Gandy, with a flourish of his hand
waving off all suspicion of rail, cabs, omnibuses,
and other vulgar kinds of conveyance. " Very
well," I said.

Mr. Gandy undertook to engage the vehicle,
but leaving it until nearly the last moment, experienced
some difficulty, owing to the unprecedented
demand. At length, however, a phaeton
and pair was secured. It would be a slap-up
turn-out, the man said, with a spanking pair of
horses, and would be at the door at nine o'clock.

I was at the Gandy mansion before that hour,
and found Mr. and Mrs. Gandy packing the
hamper. " We shall do the thing in style,"
Mr. Gandy whispered to me, as he popped the
last foil-topped bottle into the basket.

Mrs. Gandy hoped so; but Mr. Gandy had
been rash enough to invite Miss Croucher, who,
though a person of good family, and accomplished,
would insist upon wearing one-and-elevenpenny
gloves, which were necessarily
thumby, and calculated to detract from style.

Mrs. Gandy had been assured that the phaeton
and pair would be all right. Judge, then, of
the fall that took place in Mrs. Gandy's countenance
when the phaeton and pair dashed up to
the door, discovering what might, without libel,
be described as a shandrydan, a couple of horses
that did not match, and a driver who had arrayed
himself for the occasion in chocolate-coloured
corduroys and a speckled straw hat, swathed in
a wisp of green blind. It only required the
arrival of Miss Croucher in a pair of open-work
silk gloves, in which her hands were caught like
two red mullets in bag-nets, to reduce Mrs.
Gandy to that depressed condition when the
female spirits require burnt feathers and cognac.
It was clear that we never could allow ourselves
to be driven to Epsom by a man in a speckled
straw hat; so Mr. Gandy rigged him out with a
hat of his own, adorned with a silver band
hastily obtained from a shop in the neighbourhood.
To be sure Mr. Gandy's hat was a little
too large for the man, but with a padding of
brown paper it fitted pretty well until it came
down over his eyes with the exertion of driving,
when the vulgar people on the vans and omnibuses
told him "to come out of it." There was
no doing anything with Miss Croucher, for,
though she wore black net gloves, she had
money, and no relations but the Gandys. So we
started, and tried to look as like swells as we
possibly could under the circumstances.

Mr. and Mrs. Gandy sat on the back seats,
and lolled as genteelly as anybody could loll,
and Miss Croucher and I sat on the narrow
front seat as uncomfortably as anybody could
sit. We didn't talk much, that not being
genteel; and we didn't have anything to eat the
whole way, that also not being genteel; and
when the driver suggested the necessity of washing
out the horses' mouths, he was told that it
could not be permitted. I had a little flask of
brandy-and-water in my pocket, and would have
given the world to take a pull at it; but I felt
that it would not be genteel and proper. I
should have liked to smoke, but that was altogether
out of the question.

Our driver, finding that we were very genteel,
took us by short cuts, and avoided as much as
possible the stream of vulgar life. This was
favourable to the maintenance of our dignity;
but every now and then, when we were driven
to join the crowd at a convergence of roads,
we were taken down a peg by those vulgar
fellows on the 'busses asking our driver to
come out of that hat. I will say this of our
driver, that he was better known, and had a
larger circle of acquaintance, than any of us.
Twenty times, at least, between London and
Epsom persons in vehicles (generally on the box
seat) nodded their heads or jerked up the
handles of their whips in token of recognition.
Several persons called him familiarly George,
and one asked him " Where he had dug it from?"
which I understood to refer to the pheeayton, as
George called it. This mystery was cleared up
afterwards, when we learned that George was by
normal profession a cabman, who, on Derby and
other high days and holidays, did a little livery
business on his own account, using his own
horses, and digging up a " pheeayton" where he
could find one in any mound devoted to the
shooting of vehicular rubbish.

We paid a guinea to go upon the course,
and, the horses having been removed, we
were seized upon by a dozen half-naked
clamorous fellows, who dragged the pheeayton
this way and that way, and shoved, and
pushed, and pulled, until I thought the pheeayton
would have been deprived of its head.
Each one of the dozen fellows declared that to
him belonged the sole merit of having pulled us
about, and demanded money, and wouldn't go
away until he got it. Then, other fellows, seeing
that we were swells, insisted upon brushing
us, and when we resisted, and exhibited our
own clothes-brush, they cried, " Yah! shabby!"
at us, and brought down upon the pheeayton the
attention of all the drags by which it was
surrounded, and which completely shut out our
view of the race-course. We were so blocked
in among the mass of carriages on the hill, that
it was impossible to get out even on foot; so
Mr. Gandy and I, who had designed to walk
about with the view of being seen by our
friends, were obliged to remain in the carriage.
By comparison with others, our hamper was not
such a grand affair as it had promised, when
Mr. Gandy was packing the " sparkling."
Beside the hampers from Fortnum and Mason's,
neatly packed with paper shavings, ours showed