I left my home, and have never since revisited it. When I next heard the sound of the clanking iron, although it affected me with irresistible terror, I little anticipated the influence of the event with which it was associated. Before many years had elapsed, my foster-mother’s prevision of my fall from a horse in the street of a city, was fulfilled: this, too, was immediately preceded by the ominous sound, easily distinguishable by me from the innumerable strokes of iron-shod hoofs upon the stones around me. But both of these occasions are connected with a period of my history involving such events, that the thought of writing it makes me tremble. Roundabout Papers—No. III. ON RIBBONS. [Illustration] The uncle of the present Sir Louis N. Bonaparte, K.G., &c., inaugurated his reign as Emperor over the neighbouring nation by establishing an Order, to which all citizens of his country, military, naval, and civil—all men most distinguished in science, letters, arts, and commerce—were admitted. The emblem of the Order was but a piece of ribbon, more or less long or broad, with a toy at the end of it. The Bourbons had toys and ribbons of their own, blue, black, and all-coloured; and on their return to dominion such good old Tories would naturally have preferred to restore their good old Orders of Saint Louis, Saint Esprit, and Saint Michel: but France had taken the ribbon of the Legion of Honour so to her heart that no Bourbon sovereign dared to pluck it thence. In England, until very late days, we have been accustomed rather to pooh-pooh national Orders, to vote ribbons and crosses tinsel gewgaws, foolish foreign ornaments, and so forth. It is known how the Great Duke (the breast of whose own coat was plastered with some half-hundred decorations) was averse to the wearing of ribbons, medals, clasps, and the like, by his army. We have all of us read how uncommonly distinguished Lord Castlereagh looked at Vienna, where he was the only gentleman present without any decoration whatever. And the Great Duke’s theory was, that clasps and ribbons, stars and garters, were good and proper ornaments for himself, for the chief officers of his distinguished army, and for gentlemen of high birth, who might naturally claim to wear a band of garter blue across their waistcoats; but that for common people your plain coat, without stars and ribbons, was the most sensible wear.