A LARGE CROWD.

Yet the crowd was large. Beyond the rails people gathered in close ranks, and on the lawns there were many as of old, though cloaked and coated and muffled and even goloshed. The splendours of the Royal procession were plainly forbidden, but when the King and Queen were seen in their box a great company had gathered to cheer. By that time it seemed probable that were to escape the worst of what the morning had threatened. The rain rained no more, there was even a pallid gleam in the grey sky, but the wind still blew bitterly. Ascot was plainly popular still, yet looked like anything but Ascot. This dark, muffled crowd took brisk walking exercise, and circulated in the paddock at high speed. A horse, Drake’s Drum, emerged from the paddock and deposited his jockey quietly but firmly on the turf. Active volunteers held up their arms at him and pranced over the course behind him. Thus encouraged, his jockey mounted again, but, as the fool says in the play, Drake’s Drum “scorned running with his heels.” He was persuaded to advance a few yards, and then again swerved and made his jockey bite the dust. If even a horse declares that it is no weather for racing you feel a new sympathy with the creatures.

But the racing, as the experts insisted, was good. To the ignorant, the worst of a horse-race as an amusement is that there is never enough of it. When you have begun to get interested it is all over. The Gold Cup, therefore, with its two miles and a half, has peculiar charms when it happens to be a race and not a procession. It did so happen yesterday. The experts who told you that the white jacket on the leader was going the pace could be believed. They seemed to be saying what was the actual fact, which is unusual with experts. He did make the pace, and kept the lead, though the others were going too, and many of them seemed to have a chance till in the straight the red jacket on Golden Myth came and challenged and conquered. A pleasant spectacle and, even for a few brief moments of thrill, warming. Then it was necessary to go down to the paddock and circumnavigate at the rate of knots, lest you became that “bluer blue,” which you saw with horror stealing over the faces of your friends.