horse-race to another or to some yacht-race or garden-party or whatever
corresponds in England to a church sociable. It is impossible to
enumerate the pleasures which must poison his life, as if the cares were
not enough. In the case of the present king, who is so much liked and is
so amiable and active, the perpetual movement affects the plebeian
foreigner as something terrible. Never to be quiet; never to have a
stretch of those long days and weeks of unbroken continuity dear to
later life; ever to sit at strange tables and sample strange cookeries;
to sleep under a different preacher every Sunday, and in a different bed
every night; to wear all sorts of uniforms for all sorts of occasions,
three or four times a day; to receive every manner of deputation, and
try to show an interest in every manner of object--who would reign on
such terms as these, if there were any choice of not reigning?

Evidently such a career cannot be managed without the help, the pretty
constant help, of armed men; and the movement of troops in London from
one point to another is one of the evidences of state which is so little
static, so largely dynamic. It is a pretty sight, and makes one wish one
were a child that one might fully enjoy it, whether it is the movement
of a great mass of blood-red backs of men, or here and there a flaming
squad, or a single vidette spurring on some swift errand, with his
pennoned lance erect from his toe and his horse-hair crest streaming
behind him. The soldiers always lend a brilliancy to the dull hue of
civil life, and there is a never-failing sensation in the spectator as
they pass afar or near. Of course, the supreme attraction in their sort
for the newly arrived American is the pair of statuesque warriors who
motionlessly sit their motionless steeds at the gates of the Horse-
Guards, and express an archaic uselessness as perfectly as if they were
Highlanders taking snuff before a tobacconist's shop. When I first
arrived in London in the earliest of those sad eighteen-sixties when our