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Strange was the pageant of that wedding on Sunday, the 17th of August, 1572. The outward seeming was magnificent, when all that was princely in France stood on the splendidly decked platform in front of Notre-Dame, around the bridegroom in the bright promise of his kingly endowments, and the bride in her peerless beauty.
The whole picture appears as a sacred pageant in which the saints, the angels and the blessed take the place of nobles, ladies and clerics, as they were seen during the festivities and processions arranged at the ducal court. Angels singing and playing.
Lastly came one of the main features of the pageant, and which, together with the Fool, contributed most materially to the amusement of the spectators. This was the Hobby-horse. The hue of this, spirited charger was a pinkish white, and his housings were of crimson cloth hanging to the ground, so as to conceal the rider's real legs, though a pair of sham ones dangled at the side.
Thither were drawn the French nobility, who, if shorn of all political power, were now exempted from disagreeable taxes and exalted as essential parts of a magnificent social pageant. The king must have noblemen as valets-de-chambre, as masters of the wardrobe or of the chase or of the revels. Only a nobleman was fit to comb the royal hair or to dry off the king after a bath.
Now, after many years, I saw it first quietly by moonlight after watching the sunset from the summit of the great pylon. That was a pageant worth more than the Khedive's. I was in the air; had something of the released feeling I have often known upon the tower of Biskra, looking out toward evening to the Sahara spaces.
The Ramblin' Kid's attitude, whole appearance, matched perfectly the mood of his horse. He sat loosely in the saddle and carelessly smoked a cigarette. The truth was his mind was far from the pageant of which he and the little stallion were a part. He scarcely heard the music nor did he seem to see the thousands of human beings, packed tier above tier, under the mammoth roof of the grandstand.
He was not insensible to the piquancy of the pageant of life, but his mind was preoccupied with grave and heavy matters. He had left school that day, and what his eyes saw as he leaned on the bridge was not a willing beast and a gladdened infant, but the puzzling world and the advance guard of its problems bearing down on him.
Somehow I'll bet there's goin' to be hell." Beyond the store were some rather pretty and comfortable homes, little ranch houses back in the coves of the hills. The road turned west and Jean saw his first sunset in the Tonto Basin. It was a pageant of purple clouds with silver edges, and background of deep rich gold. Presently Jean met a lad driving a cow.
I mean that it ought to be possible and delightful for people to live lives full of activity and perception and kindliness and joy, on very simple lines indeed; to take up their work day by day with an agreeable sense of putting out their powers, to find in the pageant of nature an infinite refreshment, and to let art and poetry lift them up into a world of hopes and dreams and memories; and thus life may become a meal to be eaten with appetite, with a wholesome appreciation of its pleasant savours, rather than a meal eaten in satiety or greediness, with a peevish repining that it is not more elaborate and delicate.
It was in London that I first encountered the vulgar little creature who has made my life a sore trial ever since, and with whom I am still coping to the best of my powers. Starting out early in the morning of June 21, last summer, to witness the pageant of her Majesty Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, I secured a good place on the corner of Northumberland Avenue and Trafalgar Square.
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