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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.