The rain poured in a deluge. The entire park was trodden into a slough, or standing in pools of water—carts, carriages, and horsemen, with fifty thousand flying pedestrians, crowding every road and avenue. How to get home with a carriage! How the deuce to get home without one!
A gentleman who had been sent out on the errand of Noah’s dove by a lady whose carriage and horses were ordered at four the following morning, came back with the mud up to his knees, and reported that there was not a wheelbarrow to be had for love or money. After threading the crowd in every direction, he had offered a large sum, in vain, for a one-horse cart!
Night was coming on, meantime, very fast; but absorbed by the distresses of the shivering groups around me, I had scarce remembered that my own invitation was but to the banquet and ball—and my dinner, consequently, nine miles off, at Ardrossan. Thanking Heaven, that, at least, I had no ladies to share my evening’s pilgrimage, I followed the Queen of Beauty down the muddy and slippery staircase, and, when her majesty had stepped into her carriage, I stepped over ankles in mud and water, and began my wade toward the castle.
Six hours of rain, and the trampling of such an immense multitude of men and horses, had converted the soft and moist sod and soil of the park into a deep and most adhesive quagmire. Glancing through the labyrinth of vehicles on every side, and seeing men and horses with their feet completely sunk below the surface, I saw that there was no possibility of shying the matter, and that wade was the word. I thought at first, that I had a claim for a little sympathy on the score of being rather slenderly shod (the impalpable sole of a pattern leather boot being all that separated me from the subsoil of the estate of Eglinton;) but overtaking, presently, a party of four ladies who had lost several shoes in the mire, and were positively wading on in silk stockings, I took patience to myself from my advantage in the comparison, and thanked fate for the thinnest sole with leather to keep it on. The ladies I speak of were under the charge of a most despairing-looking gentleman, but had neither cloak nor umbrella, and had evidently made no calculations for a walk. We differed in our choice of the two sides of a slough, presently, and they were lost in the crowd; but I could not help smiling, with all my pity of their woes, to think what a turning up of prunella shoes there will be, should Lord Eglinton ever plough the chivalric field of the Tournament.
As I reached the castle, I got upon the Macadamised road, which had the advantage of a bottom somewhere, though it was covered with a liquid mud, of which every passing foot gave you a spatter to the hips. My exterior was by this time equally divided between water and dirt, and I trudged on in comfortable fellowship with farmers, coal-miners, and Scotch lasses—envying very much the last, for they carried their shoes in their hands, and held their petticoats, to say the least, clear of the mud. Many a good joke they seemed to have among them, but as they spoke in Gaelic, it was lost on my Sassenach ears.
I had looked forward with a faint hope to a gingerbread and ale-cart, which I remembered having seen in the morning established near the terminus of the railroad, trusting to refresh my strength and patience with a glass of anything that goes under the generic name of “summat;” but though the cart was there, the gingerbread shelf was occupied by a row of Scotch lasses, crouching together under cover from the rain, and the pedlar assured me that “there wasna a drap o’ speerit to be got within ten mile o’ the castle.” One glance at the railroad, where a car with a single horse was beset by some thousands of shoving and fighting applicants, convinced me that I had a walk of eight miles to finish my “purgation by” tournament; and as it was getting too dark to trust to any picking of the way, I took the middle of the rail-track, and set forward.
“Oh, but a weary wight was he
When he reached the foot of the dogwood tree.”
Eight miles in a heavy rain, with boots of the consistence of brown paper, and a road of alternate deep mud and broken stone, should entitle one to the green turban. I will make the pilgrimage of a Hadjii from the “farthest inn” with half the endurance.
I found my Liverpool friends over a mutton chop in the snug parlor of our host, and with a strong brew of hot toddy, and many a laugh at the day’s adventures by land and water, we got comfortably to bed “somewhere in the small hours.” And so ended (for me) the great day of the tournament.