In such a throng the progress of our party was necessarily very slow, yet with none of the _tedium_ of a slow progress. The great crowd of people and of vehicles going all one way; the variety of individuals and characters; the total abandonment of all reserve; the hailings and the chaffings; the jests and the snatches of song; the grotesque decorations of some of the horses and carriages, and even of some of the people; the perfect novelty of the scene; and the exhilaration of all animated creatures that composed it, made every step of the progress charming to the unaccustomed minds and eyes of our new-comers. Drusilla and Anna were delighted. Little Lenny shouted. Pina was not a whit behind them in her ecstasies. Old General Lyon’s eyes twinkled and lips smiled, and sometimes he broke into a good hearty laugh. As for Dick, the oldest Derby goer on the road could not have got ahead of him in bandying back the jokes that were bandied at him on the way. Only that Jacob, hanging on behind, stared with “all his eyes,” and looked as if he thought he was enjoying a pleasant sort of nightmare. “I say, you jolly old howl (owl),” called a cockney from a neighboring carriage to General Lyon, “where did you get that gorilla you’ve got perched up behind there, heh?” “From a country where they muzzle monkeys sometimes,” retorted Dick, answering for the General. So it went on. “But this is nothing at all to what it will be when we are out of London and fairly on to the Epsom road,” shouted Henry Spencer from his gig behind. “I never saw the Carnival at Rome; but I should think it was not very unlike this,” said the General. “This is the Carnival of London! Old Rome has its Saturnalia; modern Rome has its Carnival; America has her Independence Day; but England has her Derby, equal to all these others rolled into one,” said Francis Tredegar. “If this is only the beginning it is worth crossing the Atlantic to see—not the Derby race only, but the Derby Day!” said the General. “Only wait till you get to Epsom!” exclaimed Henry Spencer. Once fairly upon the Epsom road, our friends found it as their guests had predicted. The crowd, great as it had been before, was even greater now. And it thickened with every mile; the numbers of passengers increasing twofold, tenfold, a hundred-fold, as they approached the bourne of their journey. The road was as one vast river of human beings and brute creatures, pouring its multitudes towards Epsom. And every cross country road was as a tributary stream helping to swell the flood.