which I am parleying while I am getting round to add that such part of
the levee as I saw in plain day, though there was vastly more of it, was
much less filling to the imagination than a glimpse which I had of a
court one night. I am rather proud of being able to explain that the
late queen held court in the early afternoon and the present king holds
court at night; but, lest any envious reader suspect me of knowing the
fact at first-hand, I hasten to say that the glimpse I had of the
function that night only revealed to me in my cab a royal coach driving
out of a palace gate, and showing larger than human, through a thin
rain, the blood-red figures of the coachmen and footmen gowned from head
to foot in their ensanguined colors, with the black-gleaming body of the
coach between them, and the horses trampling heraldically before out of
the legendary past. The want of definition in the fact, which I beheld
in softly blurred outline, enhanced its value, which was so supreme that
I could not perhaps do justice to the vague splendors of inferior
courtward equipages, as my cab flashed by them, moving in a slow line
towards the front of Buckingham Palace.

[Illustration: SUNDAY AFTERNOON, HYDE PARK]

The carriages were doubtless full of titles, any one of which would
enrich my page beyond the dreams of fiction, and it is said that in the
time of the one-o'clock court they used to receive a full share of the
attention which I could only so scantily and fleetingly bestow. They
were often halted, as that night I saw them halting, in their progress,
and this favored the plebeian witnesses, who ranged along their course
and invited themselves and one another to a study of the looks and
dresses of the titles, and to open comment on both. The study and the
comment must have had their limits; the observed knew how much to bear
if the observers did not know how little to forbear; and it is not