THREE GENERATIONS.Outin 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.They came with those ill-featured ladies who, according to tradition, gave the name to theFrog Walkoutside the Palace walls—yes,outside—and the creams had nothing to do with them. Never, in the course of their aristocratic history, have they drawn anything but crowned heads and their most legitimate spouses, and for this the British nation reveres and respects them. And now these, their descendants in the paddock, have done with streets and crowds and uniforms—and even with sovereigns. Sometimes one old fellow will lift his head at the sound of the children’s crieson the swings in the Park, and wonder if he is once more being cheered by the populace, but his dim eyes can only see the chestnuts hanging out their red and white candles, and a crow laughs at him from the wall. By his side his comrades, wholly unmoved, with hanging heads and slowly switching tails, are busy cropping the sweet grass, with no thought beyond it. Old age does sometimes, in spite of evidence to the contrary, broaden and mellow the sympathies, and the Cream Colours, who have been above all things exclusive, have developed a very soft spot in their hearts for the old bay horse who shares their paddock. Possibly he, who, whatever he has done in private life, in royal processions has never aspired beyond princesses, knows how to keep his place. At all events, when a sudden spurt of renewed activity will carry him at a gallant pace across the paddock, the august Three will follow him at a feeble canter and with anxious whinnies, until at last, finding him on the other side, they will happily nuzzle their noses into his neck, with every sign of equine affection, which he must accept with mingled pride and resignation. Is he not theenfant gâté de la maison?Well, their great days are over, but they could have found no more dignified place of retirement than under the royal shadow of Hampton Court Palace, the accepted home of retirement and dignity.Meantime, out in the road, could they but know it, their successors on these summer mornings are taking part in a strange, rather pathetic mimicry of those greater pageants which have no place in war-time. For the Cream Colours of to-day cannot be allowed to idle like their parents. Much may yet, we hope, be expected of them, and they must not forget the manner of that service to which alone they owe their existence. So in the early morning, when trams are few and other traffic is non-existent, they may be met, eight of them, stepping proudly along, with arched necks and haughty expressions, quite unaware that the grooms holding to their bridles are in mufti, that their trappings are of plain wood, and that the royal coach they imagine to be rumbling behind them resembles nothing so much as an empty jail van! The King in the fairy tale was not better pleased with his imaginary fine raiment than the Cream Colours with their phantom state. But nobody troubles to undeceive them; the rooks flap cawing overhead in pursuit of their breakfasts, and the cuckoo monotonously calling from the Home Park is entirelyabsorbed in his own business. All is vanity, and in another few years they also will be cropping buttercups, with no higher aspiration.For the next generation is already knocking at the door. On the further side of the road from his forebears, a little dusky foal who will some day be of a correct highly polished cream colour is kicking up his heels in a paddock, a truly royal nursery with a golden floor. He is separated even at this early age from his black and bay contemporaries, whose lot, however, will certainly be more varied and interesting than any which he can look for. Let us hope that he may still be in the nursery when his sleek elders, now disappearing in their own dust along the road, will draw their sovereign in state to return thanks for the greatest of all victories, and the establishment of a righteous peace throughout the world.Rose M. Bradley.
Outin 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.
They came with those ill-featured ladies who, according to tradition, gave the name to theFrog Walkoutside the Palace walls—yes,outside—and the creams had nothing to do with them. Never, in the course of their aristocratic history, have they drawn anything but crowned heads and their most legitimate spouses, and for this the British nation reveres and respects them. And now these, their descendants in the paddock, have done with streets and crowds and uniforms—and even with sovereigns. Sometimes one old fellow will lift his head at the sound of the children’s crieson the swings in the Park, and wonder if he is once more being cheered by the populace, but his dim eyes can only see the chestnuts hanging out their red and white candles, and a crow laughs at him from the wall. By his side his comrades, wholly unmoved, with hanging heads and slowly switching tails, are busy cropping the sweet grass, with no thought beyond it. Old age does sometimes, in spite of evidence to the contrary, broaden and mellow the sympathies, and the Cream Colours, who have been above all things exclusive, have developed a very soft spot in their hearts for the old bay horse who shares their paddock. Possibly he, who, whatever he has done in private life, in royal processions has never aspired beyond princesses, knows how to keep his place. At all events, when a sudden spurt of renewed activity will carry him at a gallant pace across the paddock, the august Three will follow him at a feeble canter and with anxious whinnies, until at last, finding him on the other side, they will happily nuzzle their noses into his neck, with every sign of equine affection, which he must accept with mingled pride and resignation. Is he not theenfant gâté de la maison?
Well, their great days are over, but they could have found no more dignified place of retirement than under the royal shadow of Hampton Court Palace, the accepted home of retirement and dignity.
Meantime, out in the road, could they but know it, their successors on these summer mornings are taking part in a strange, rather pathetic mimicry of those greater pageants which have no place in war-time. For the Cream Colours of to-day cannot be allowed to idle like their parents. Much may yet, we hope, be expected of them, and they must not forget the manner of that service to which alone they owe their existence. So in the early morning, when trams are few and other traffic is non-existent, they may be met, eight of them, stepping proudly along, with arched necks and haughty expressions, quite unaware that the grooms holding to their bridles are in mufti, that their trappings are of plain wood, and that the royal coach they imagine to be rumbling behind them resembles nothing so much as an empty jail van! The King in the fairy tale was not better pleased with his imaginary fine raiment than the Cream Colours with their phantom state. But nobody troubles to undeceive them; the rooks flap cawing overhead in pursuit of their breakfasts, and the cuckoo monotonously calling from the Home Park is entirelyabsorbed in his own business. All is vanity, and in another few years they also will be cropping buttercups, with no higher aspiration.
For the next generation is already knocking at the door. On the further side of the road from his forebears, a little dusky foal who will some day be of a correct highly polished cream colour is kicking up his heels in a paddock, a truly royal nursery with a golden floor. He is separated even at this early age from his black and bay contemporaries, whose lot, however, will certainly be more varied and interesting than any which he can look for. Let us hope that he may still be in the nursery when his sleek elders, now disappearing in their own dust along the road, will draw their sovereign in state to return thanks for the greatest of all victories, and the establishment of a righteous peace throughout the world.
Rose M. Bradley.