Page:Romance & Reality 1.pdf/87

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ROMANCE AND REALITY.
81

in the season, one of those sights whose only demerit is its want of novelty.

The carriage, entering at Stanhope Gate, first wound its way through a small but brilliant crowd—vehicles, from which many a face glanced fair

———"As the maids
Who blushed behind the gallery's silken shades."

in Mokanna's gathering from Georgia and Circassia, and drawn by horses whose skins were soft as the silks and satins of their owners—steeds like the one which owes its immortality to its Macedonian victor, curbed by the slight rein and yet slighter touch of some patrician-looking rider, whose very appearance must be a consolation to those melancholy mortals who prose over the degeneracy of the human race—cabriolets guided apparently as the young prince was waited on in the palace of the White Cat, by hands only, or rather gloves, varying from delicate primrose to pale blue.

Then the scene itself—the sweep of light verdure, the fine old trees which in Kensington Gardens formed the background of the distance, the light plantation of flowering shrubs on one side, the fine statue of Achilles, looking