Cambridgeshire is one of the so-called ugly counties; which means that
it is observably flat. It is for this reason that Newmarket is, in its
own peculiar fashion, so thriving a locality. The country is like a
board of green cloth; the turf presents itself as a friendly provision
of nature. Nature offers her gentle bosom as a gaming-table;
card-tables, billiard-tables are but a humble imitation of Newmarket
Heath. It was odd to think that amid this gentle, pastoral scenery,
there is more betting than anywhere else in the world. The large, neat
English meadows roll away to a humid-looking sky, the young partridges
jump about in the hedges, and nature does not look in the least as if
she were offering you odds. The gentlemen do, though--the gentlemen whom
you meet on the roads and in the railway carriage; they have that
indefinable look--it pervades a man from the cut of his whisker to the
shape of his boot-toe--which denotes a familiarity with the turf. It is
brought home to you that to an immense number of people in England the
events in the _Racing Calendar_ constitute the most important portion of
contemporary history. The very air about Newmarket appears to contain a
vague echo of stable-talk, and you perceive that this is the landscape
depicted in those large coloured prints of the "sporting" genus which
you have admired in inn-parlours.
The destruction of partridges is, if an equally classical, a less
licentious pursuit, for which, I believe, Cambridgeshire offers peculiar
facilities. Among these is a certain shooting-box, which is a triumph of
accidental picturesqueness (the highest order) and a temple of delicate
hospitality. The shooting belongs to the autumn, not to this vernal
period; but as I have spoken of echoes, I suppose that if I had listened
attentively I might have heard the ghostly crack of some of the famous
shots that have been discharged there. The air, I believe, had vibrated
to several august rifles, but all that I happened to hear by listening
was some excellent talk.
In England, I said just now, a couple of places may be very near
together, and yet have what the philosophers call a connotation
strangely different. Only a few miles beyond Newmarket lies Bury St.
Edmunds, a town whose tranquil antiquity makes horse-racing, and even
partridge-shooting, appear a restless and fidgety mode of passing the
time. I confess that I went to Bury St. Edmunds simply on the strength
of its name, which I had often encountered, and which had always seemed
to me to have a high value for the tourist I knew that St. Edmund had
been an Anglo-Saxon worthy, but my conviction that the little town that
bore his name would afford entertainment between trains had nothing
definite to rest upon. The event, however, rewarded my faith--rewarded
it with the sight of a magnificent old gatehouse of the thirteenth
century, the most substantial of many relics of the great abbey which
once flourished there. There are many others; they are scattered about
the old precinct of the abbey, a large portion of which has been
converted into a rambling botanic garden, the resort at Whitsuntide of a
thousand very modern merrymakers. The monument I speak of has the
proportions of a triumphal arch; it is at once a gateway and a fortress;
it is covered with beautiful ornament, and is altogether the lion of
Bury.