The year 1834 witnessed the abolition of a time-honoured institution, namely, the squadron standards. A relic of feudal days, which had kept its significance and its value up to the first years of the great Civil War, the troop or squadron standard had long been obsolete. In fact it is rather surprising that such standards should ever have been issued to Light Dragoons. Nevertheless they survived to a time within the memory of living men in all cavalry regiments, and are fortunately still preserved, together with the blue dress and axes of the farriers and other historic distinctions, in that walking museum of the British cavalry, the Household Brigade. [Sidenote: 1837.] The year 1837 found the headquarters of the Seventeenth at Coventry for the first time since 1760, when it had but just sprung into existence. On this occasion we may hope that it was allowed to remain in the town during the race meeting. It is somewhat of a coincidence that the regiment should have opened the two longest reigns on record, those, namely, of King George III. and Queen Victoria, in the same quarters. In this same year Lord Bingham retired from the command, and was succeeded by Lieutenant-Colonel Pratt, who in his turn gave place after two years to Lieutenant-Colonel St. Quintin. [Sidenote: 1840.] In 1840 the Light Dragoons and Lancers discarded the scarlet which had been imposed upon them, and reverted once more to the blue jackets and the overalls of Oxford mixture, which had been ordained in 1829. [Sidenote: 1841.] In 1841 the Seventeenth, after a three years’ stay in Ireland, was moved to Scotland; its first visit to North Britain since 1764. [Sidenote: 1842.]Coming down to Leeds in the following year it received a new colonel in the person of Prince George of Cambridge, the present Colonel-in-Chief of the regiment and Commander-in-Chief of the Army. Under his command the regiment was employed in aid of the civil power to suppress serious riots in the manufacturing districts in August 1842. [Sidenote: 1843.] In the following year, headquarters and three troops of the regiment being stationed at Birmingham, there occurred an accident which, after fifty years, sounds almost incredible. The men had just left barracks, in watering order, for the exercise of the horses, and were about to pass under an arch of what in the infancy of railways was called the “Liverpool line,” when an engine, with its whistle shrieking loudly, passed over the arch at a high speed. In an instant every horse swung violently round, dismounting almost, if not actually, every man, and the whole hundred of them stampeded wildly back through the streets to their stables. Many of the men were injured, some so seriously that they had to be carried back to barracks; and all this came about through the now familiar whistle of a railway engine. The incident gives us a momentary glimpse of one feature in the England of half a century ago. [Sidenote: 1844.]