"Catch me at it," cried Tod. "You can do as you please, Johnny: I shall go to the course on foot." "I will also," I said--though you, naturally, understand that I had never expected to sit elsewhere than behind. And I knew it would be easier for me to lose Tod in the crowd, and so get away to keep the appointment, than it would have been to elude the Squire's questioning as to why I could want to leave the carriage. Lunch over, Tod said he would go to the Bell, to see whether the Letstoms had come in; and we started off. No; the waiter had seen nothing of them. Onwards, down Broad Street we went, took the Quay, and so got on that way to Pitchcroft--as the racecourse is called. The booths and shows were at this end, and the chief part of the crowd. Before us lay stretched the long expanse of the course, green and level as a bowling-green. The grand-stand (comparatively speaking a new erection there) lay on the left, higher up, the winning-chair and distance-post facing it. Behind the stand, flanking all that side of Pitchcroft, the beautiful river Severn flowed along between its green banks, the houses of Henwick, opposite, looking down upon it from their great height, over their sloping gardens. It was a hot day, the blue sky dark and cloudless. "True and correct card of all the running horses, gentlemen: the names, weights, and colours o' the riders!" The words, echoing on all sides from the men who held these cards for sale, are repeated in my brain now; as are other sounds and sights. I was somewhat older then than I had been; but it was not very long since those shows, ranged round there side by side, a long line of them, held the greatest attraction for me in life. "Guy Mannering," the past night, had been very nice to see, very enjoyable; but it possessed not the nameless charm of that first "play" I went to in Scowton's Show on the racecourse. _That_ charm could never come again. And I was but a lad yet. The lightning with which the play opened had been real lightning to me; the thunder, real thunder. The gentleman who stood, when the curtain rose, gorgeously attired in a scarlet doublet slashed with gold (something between a king and a bandit), with uplifted face of terror and drawn sword, calling the war of the elements "tremendious," was to me a greater potentate than the world could almost contain! The young lady, his daughter, in ringlets and spangles, who came flying on in the midst of the storm, and fell at his feet, with upraised arms and a piteous appeal, "Alas! my father, and will you not consent to my marriage with Alphonso?" seemed more lovely to me than the Sultanas in the "Arabian Nights," or the Princesses in Fairyland. I sat there entranced and speechless. A new world had opened to me--a world of delight. For weeks and weeks afterwards, that play, with its wondrous beauties, its shifting scenes, was present to me sleeping and waking.