The Doncaster Races lured us from our hotel at York, on the first day,
as I had dimly foreboded they would. In fact, if there had been no lure,
I might have gone in search of temptation, for in a world where sins are
apt to be ugly, a horse-race is so beautiful that if one loves beauty
he can practise an aesthetic virtue by sinning in that sort. So I
made myself a pretence of profit as well as pleasure, and in going to
Doncaster I feigned the wish chiefly to compare its high event with that
of Saratoga. I had no association with the place save horse-racing, and
having missed Ascot and Derby Day, I took my final chance in pursuit
of knowledge--I said to myself, “Not mere amusement”--and set out for
Doncaster unburdened by the lightest fact concerning the place.
I
I learned nothing of it when there, but I have since learned, from
divers trustworthy sources, that Doncaster is the Danum of Antoninus and
the Dona Ceaster of the Saxons, and that it is not only on the line of
the Northeastern Railway, but also on that famous Watling Street which
from the earliest Saxon time has crossed the British continent from sea
to sea, and seems to impress most of the cities north and south into a
conformity with its line, like a map of the straightest American railway
routes.
Unless my ignorance has been abused, nothing remarkable has happened
at Doncaster in two thousand years, but this is itself a distinction in
that eventful England where so many things have happened elsewhere.
It is the market town of a rich farming region, and has notable
manufactures of iron and brass, of sacking and linen, of spun flax and
of agricultural machines and implements. Otherwise, it is important only
for its races, which began there three hundred years ago, and especially
for its St. Leger Day, of which Lieutenant-General St. Leger became the
patron saint in 1778, though he really established his Day two years
earlier.
Doncaster is a mighty pleasant, friendly, rather modern, and
commonplacely American-looking town, with two-story trams gently ambling
up and down its chief avenues, in the leisurely English fashion, and
all of more or less arrival and departure at the race-grounds. In our
company the reader will have our appetites for lunch, and if he will
take his chance with us in the first simple place away from the station,
he will help us satisfy them very wholesomely and agreeably at boards
which seem festively set up for the occasion, and spread with hot
roast-beef and the plain vegetables which accompany the national dish
in its native land; or he can have the beef cold, or have cold lamb or
chicken cold. His fellow-lunchers will be, as he may like well enough
to fancy, of somewhat lower degree than himself, but they will all seem
very respectable, and when they come out together, they will all be
equalized in the sudden excitement which has possessed itself of the
street, and lined the curbstones up and down with spectators, their
bodies bent forward, and their faces turned in the direction of the
station.