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The coach started from the door with much noise and confusion, with a good deal of plunging from the leaders, and some jibbing from the wheelers, accompanied by a very feeble performance on that much-abused instrument, the horn, by an amateur who occupied a back seat; and after it had departed, a humble train of neat broughams and victorias came trooping up in its wake.

There were quantities of carriages already arrived, every sort victorias, coaches, pony carts, charabancs, motor cars, and a few of the really odd kinds of shandrydans that one sees coming to country garden parties in England. There were also numbers of officers riding in uniform cuirassiers, chasseurs, dragons and they were to take part in the chase.

In that mild climate people remain alive, or, if you prefer it, asleep, longer than in any other part of England, and the visitors who came flocking to Lapton were, for the most part, in a stage of decrepit or suspended life. They drove through the steep and narrow lanes in all sorts of ancient vehicles, in jingles, victorias, barouches and enormous family drags.

A thin fringe of rather incurious but not unfriendly bystanders lined the curbstone, and looked at the people arriving in the carriages, victorias, hansoms, and four-wheelers; behind the bystanders loitered dignitaries of the church; and military and naval officers made their way through the fringe and crossed the street among the wheels and horses.

It is now provided with a long bridge-causeway of three arches, approached by a chapel, Nossa Senhora das Victorias, whose tiled and pillared porch reminds one of Istria.

They stood gazing each at the other for a space of time not to be computed before either spoke, and the sense of unreality which comes with a sudden fulfilment of intense desire or dread was upon Austen. Were there so many Victorias, that a new one and a strange one should confront him at every meeting?

The sidewalks are so narrow that the pedestrian naturally seeks the middle of the street as a pathway, and the half a dozen victorias and four volantes which form the means of transportation in Santiago, and which are constantly wandering about in search of a job, manage to meet or to overtake one perpetually; causing first a right oblique, then a left oblique, movement, with such regularity as to amount to an endless zig-zag.

He liked the yellow fore-and-aft buckboards, he enjoyed the shining buggies, especially when their wheels were painted red; dog-carts and victorias ranked high in his esteem. He knew, to be sure, very little about horses; their most salient "points" escaped him: he gave indiscriminate approval to every well-groomed animal attached to a "stylish" vehicle, and the more the merrier!

The 'noble and ancient city' San Cristobal de la Laguna was founded on June 26, 1495, St. Christopher's Day, by De Lugo, who lies buried in the San Miguel side-chapel of La Concepcion de la Victorias. The site is an ancient lava-current, the successor of a far older crater, originally submarine.

Now all about them from the brilliantly lighted verandas the gay tumult broke out like an uproarious welcome after the swift silence of their journey; the stir of jolly people keen for pleasure; the clatter of crockery; the coming and going of waiters, of guests, of hansoms, coupés, victorias, and scores of motor-cars wheeling and turning through the blinding glare of their own headlights.