Boxing-day on the river: The silent street is almost deserted. There is no rush for the Express boat to-day. It is literally the streets--muddier and sloppier than the Thames itself--that are the attraction. Some little boys are making the trip from Westminster to London Bridge as a treat; and it is an intense joke with them to pretend to be dreadfully seasick. Boxing-day in the City is synonymous with stagnation. It is a howling wilderness, with nobody to howl. On the Metropolitan Railway I verily believe travellers were tripping it like the little boys on board the penny boat. And so theatre time draws on, and the interest of Boxing-day grows to a climax. Soon after five o'clock groups furtively collect outside the playhouses, half-ashamed of being so early, but gathering courage from numbers to form the disorderly queue, so unlike that of a Parisian theatre. Boxing-night in the theatres others will describe. It is too much to expect of one whose mission has been the whole day long on the streets. CHAPTER XVIII. THE VIGIL OF THE DERBY. In those days--happily now gone by--when public strangulation was the mode in Merry England, there was always an evident fascination appertaining to the spot where, on the morrow, some guilty wretch was to expiate his crimes on the gallows. Long before the erection of that elegant apparatus commenced, and generally on a Sunday evening, when decent citizens had newly come from houses of God, where they had heard the message of life, crowds began to collect on that central spot in the heart of the great City dedicated to sudden and violent death. The coming event seemed to cast its shadow before; and throughout the night the roisterer or belated traveller made a detour to visit the human shambles. I confess to having felt the attraction. I could not then bring myself to be present at the strangulation proper; so, as the nearest approach to a "sensation," sometimes visited Newgate on the eve of the victim elect's last morrow. In the same way, being unfortunate enough to be London-bound on the day of our great annual holiday, and having heard graphic accounts of the Downs on the eve of the Derby, I determined that year, as I could not go to the race by day, to visit the racecourse by night. Let me own the soft impeachment: I am not a racing man--not in any degree "horsey." When I do go to the Derby it is to see the bipeds rather than the quadrupeds; to empty the hamper from Fortnum and Mason's, rather than to study the "names, weights, and colours of the riders" on the "c'rect card." If you prefer to have the sentiment in Latin--and there is no doubt Latin does go much farther than English--I am not one of those "quos pulverem Olympicum collegisse juvat," except in so far that "homo sum; nihil humanum alienum a me puto." It was to see humanity under a new aspect, I took the last train to Epsom on the eve of the Derby.