necks are not clothed with thunder; they say
not among the captains, ha! ha!—yet, on them
has hung, and will hang again, the Iives and
fortunes, not of scores but of hundreds, not
of hundreds, but of thousands and tens of
thousands. A wrinkle in the satin coat of
Sophronisba; a pail of water inadvertently or
maliciously administered to Columbine; an
ill-hammered nail in Rhodomontade's shoe:
these are sufficient to send clerks and shopboys
to the hulks, to bring happy households
to beggary and shame, and solid mercantile
firms down by the run. Sophronisba, Columbine,
Rhodomontade, though they know it not,
have swallowed up the patrimony of widows
and orphans; on their speed or tardiness
depend tedious law-suits; interminable mazes
of litigation in Chancery can be unravelled
by their hoofs. They are powerful—all
unconsciously—for more good and evil than ever
was stowed away in all Pandora's box. If
Sophronisba runs for the Cup, Charley Lyle
will marry the heiress. If Columbine is
scratched for the Trebor Handicap, young
Bob Sabbertash must sell his commission in
the Twenty-sixth Hussars. Stars and garters,
wealth and honours, life and death, hang on
the blind fiat of these horses.

And this is "Bell's Life" (called in the
sporting world the Life), and this is man's
life, too!

Great things are wrought from small
beginnings, and mighty edifices stand upon
comparatively slender foundations. According
to Hindoo theology, the world stands on
an elephant's back—which again stands on a
tortoise; though what that stands on is not
yet decided by the learned Pundits of the
unchanging East. So, on the slender fetlocks
and pasterns of these bay and chesnut horses
in Tattersall's sale-yard are erected the Great
National festivals of the English people—the
acknowledged British holidays: holidays for
the due and catholic enjoyment of which
grave legislative bodies suspend their sittings,
dinner-parties of the loftiest and most solemn
haut ton are postponed, and courtly thés
dansantes put off. There was a professor of
music I knew who was ruined through having
fixed his morning concert to take place on
the Derby Day.

The Derby Day! who would think these
quiet, meek-eyed scions of the hippic race
were the alls-in-all, the cynosures, the alphas
and omegas of that momentous day? Yet so
they are. Closely shrouded in checked or
gaily bordered horsecloths—as jealously
veiled from the prying public eye as was ever
favorite Odalisque of Osmanli Pacha of three
tails as on Sunday morning they take their
long expected, much talked of gallops—jealous
and anxious eyes watch their every movement;
a falter is eagerly foreshadowed as
the fore-runner of a "scratch," a stumble as
the inevitable precursor of a string-halt, an
over vigorous whinny impetuously translated
as a cold, fatal to next Wednesday's start.

Readers of "Bell's Life," how you pluck at your
long waistcoats; how you twitch at the brims
of your low-crowned hats; how many entries
and re-entries, and erasures, and
pencil-smudgings are made in those note-books of
yours with the patent metallic leaves and the
everlasting pencils, and all on the ups and
downs, the ongoings and short-comings of
these unconscious four-legged creatures. Early
on the Wednesday morning, Newman and
Quartermaine's retainers are as busy as hives
of bees multiplied by infinity. Pails of water—
resembling (in an inverse degree) the casks of
the Danaïdes, inasmuch as they are always
being emptied, and are never empty—dash
refreshing streams against wheels numerous
enough to furnish, it would seem, clockwork
for the world. Strange barouches, unheard of
britzkas, phaetons that should properly have
been sequestrated in the Greenyard of oblivion,
or broken up in the coach factory of forgetfulness
long since, suddenly start up from
remote coach-houses: their wheels screaming
horribly; their boxes anxious for the
accommodating man who "does not mind sitting
there the least in the world," and who always
manages to get more Champagne than anybody
else; their boots panting for hampers of
choice provisions, always securely tied up, and
always dropping sprinklings of lobster salad
and raised pie on the road in the "Hop o'my
thumb" manner—mad, in a word, to be down
to the Derby, and to run their poles through
adverse carriage panels. Small, weazen,
silver-haired men who have vegetated during the
winter in "watering houses," and down
strawy Mews, where the coachmen's wives
live, who take in washing, and the fifth footman
dwells over the harness room when he's
out of place—these patriarchs of the saddle
emerge in a weird and elf-like manner from
stable doors: their rheumatism-bowed frames
swathed in crimson silk jackets, white cords
on their shrunken legs, gamboge tops on their
spindle shanks, and great, white, fluffy hats,
a world too large for them, on their poor bald
heads—calling themselves, save us, Postboys
—cracking their knotty whips with senile
valour, and calling to Jim to "let his head
go," and to Tom to "take a squint at the
mare's off foot." And they get into the
saddle, these rare old boys! And they hold
up their whips warningly to their fellow boys
when there is a "dead lock" between Cheam
and Sutton; and they untie hampers, and eat
pies innumerable, and get very drunk indeed.
Yet drive home safely, and return the "chaff"
measured out to them with interest.

The Derby Day! do I require the limits of
this paper to describe it thoroughly? Say,
rather, a volume—say, rather, the space occupied
by the Encyclopedia Britannica, or Mr.
Alison's History of Europe. The rushing, roaring,
riving, rending, raving, railway station full
of the million of passengers, who, taking first-class
tickets, are glad to leap into third-class
carriages; the fifty thousand, who, wishing to