318 WAYFARING NOTIONS 



not at all on the map. More, if you go a couple 

 of miles away from it on the great Plain, you 

 might almost fancy that you were not only off 

 the map, but out of the live world — when, that 

 is, the horses are not out, or the soldiery about. 

 Save for marks of military occupation hardly a 

 sign of life is there in the human way, and scarce 

 a bird, only great overmastering silence, which 

 would worry the life out of yours truly, because 

 in any vast solitude with a boundless contiguity 

 of still, inanimate scene, I invariably fall to 

 "making up" the worst that can befall. Put 

 me for a week before the Derby — which Heaven 

 forbid — at Shrewton, I would be doing the amiable 

 philosopher all upside-down ways, finding books 

 full of miasmic fogs in the running brook — which 

 as a matter of fact was all dried up, and made 

 you wonder how the big flood of 1849 could ever 

 happen — sermons on accidents in all the stones 

 on Sceptre's roads to her gallops, and no good 

 in anything but possibility of upsetting the 

 favourite. Give me my choice of vocations — 

 owning Derby favourites, with vast winnings 

 ahead, and making holiday notes on very 

 humble scale of assured remuneration, I jolly 

 well know which choice would be mine. Go for 

 the favourites ? you say. Why, yes ; most 

 certainly I would, and as soon as I was granted 

 my wish, pay to get out and be my readers' free 

 and unfettered servant. Uneasy lies the head 

 that wears a crown. I would sleep easier on a 

 plank and in a nasty spiky crown — all points and 

 knob — than furnished with the cosiest bed in the 

 world, and a big race favourite next door and on 

 my mind. I might, too, happen to shoot the 

 head lad by mistake, and possibly disturb Sceptre 



