form; and now and then one saw the venerable convention of the cockaded
footman's and coachman's silk hat mocked in straw. No concession more
extreme could be made to the heat, and these strange cylinders, together
with the linen liveries which accompanied them, accented the excesses in
which the English are apt to indulge their common-sense when they decide
to give way to it. They have apparently decided to give way to it in the
dress of both sexes on the bridle-paths of the Park, where individual
caprice is the sole law that obtains amid a general anarchy.

[Illustration: ROTTEN ROW.]

The effect, upon the whole, is exhilarating, and suggests the daring
thought that, if ever their race decides to get on without government of
any sort, they will rid themselves of it with a thoroughness and
swiftness past the energy of dynamite, and cast church and state, with
all their dignities, to the winds as lightly as they have discarded the
traditional costumes of Rotten Row. The young girls and young men in
flapping panamas, in tunics and jackets of every kind and color, gave
certainly an agreeable liveliness to the spectacle, which their elders
emulated by expressions of taste as personal and unconventional. A lady
in the old-fashioned riding-habit and a black top-hat with a floating
veil recalled a former day, but she was obviously riding to lose weight,
in a brief emergence from the past to which she belonged. One man
similarly hatted, but frock-coated and not veiled, is scarcely worthy
of note; but no doubt he was gratifying an individual preference as
distinct as that of the rest. He did not contribute so much to the sense
of liberation from the heat as the others who, when it reached its
height, frankly confessed its power by riding in greatly diminished
numbers. By twelve o'clock scarcely one left of all those joyous youths,
those jolly sires and grandsires, those happy children, matched in size