but for goodness sake don't bother me.' So I decamped. I returned to Royston late in the evening but still no yeomanry." The yeomanry arrived about ten o'clock at night, however, and the writer gives an amusing account of the dispute over changing escorts, the yeomanry officer insisting that the change should be made at the Inn where the change of horses was made, and the writer states that he with all the dignity of a cornet of twenty years of age, said he would do no such thing, but that the change should be made on the confines of the county some distance outside the town. The yeomanry officer remonstrated saying that the Queen's carriage would then be travelling at a great rate and it would be difficult to change escorts as his men had never practised it. The young cornet said that that was his affair, and insisting upon the letter of his instructions, the change of escort was made at the county boundary, the leaders of the Queen's carriage were thrown down in the process, and the only consolation that could be offered to Prince Albert's inquiry for the cause was the instruction from the Horse Guards, and that the spot was the confines of the county of Cambridge, and the struggling mass of horsemen His Royal Highness saw were the yeomanry who had presented themselves! The writer adds "My orders being explicit there could be no answer to this. But query, ought I to have been so particular as to the letter of the law? Certainly the Lord Lieutenant of the County, Lord Hardwicke, thought _not_, as he slapped me on the back and called me an impudent young----(something)." {191} CHAPTER XVII. THEN AND NOW.--CONCLUSION. From our present stand-point there is just a touch of pathos in the thought of many aspiring Englishmen of the Georgian era passing away on the eve of momentous changes, privileged only to see indications of the coming times and not to enter into possession. But there is one element which qualifies this sentiment of regret in breaking with the anticipations of the good time coming. It must be so for all conditions of men. Have we not still to look forward, as we pass out of the age of steam into the more subtle and wonderful age of electricity, to a time when there may be greater wonders yet in store! And so to every man who reaps a harvest from other men's labours comes the old lesson of the responsibility for continuing the seed-sowing.