Out in the quiet paddock, with the mellow brick walls screening them from the common life in Bushey Park, they are browsing gently through the last days of their existence. It is not so many years since, gay with trappings, led by a groom apiece to restrain their Hanoverian tempers, these old cream-coloured horses drew the wonderful glass coach through the streets of London, haughtily accepting for themselves the acclamations of the people. At how many pageants, could they but tell us, have they not assisted? Are they old enough to have drawn Queen Victoria to her Diamond Jubilee, and did they drag that heavy gun-carriage with its pathetically small burden through the mourning streets on a Queen’s last journey? Certainly in their own estimation they were the central figures on the chilly August day when they at last carried King Edward to Westminster Abbey amid the joyous thanksgiving of a whole Empire. Their reminiscences would not probably take them very far into the present reign. It must be some little time since the next generation callously ousted them from between the royal shafts, stripped them once for all of their gay trappings, and set them on a back shelf of history. So now they browse and slumber among the buttercups, and perhaps wonder vaguely at their unshorn and generally disordered condition, and at their prolonged days of idleness. They know and care nothing about the war. They are aliens who have no need to be registered, naturalised as they have been by long generations of royal service. For it is just two hundred years since the first George, in a spirit of arrogance which, as a race, they appear to have assimilated, brought their ancestors from Hanover to draw his royal coach in his adopted country.