The Life of a Great Sportsman 



weighing-out process. At no other meeting in the world 

 would such a state of things be tolerated for a moment, and 

 why the powers that be should allow it in this case, especially 

 after the number of complaints that have been made year after 

 year, beats the writer's comprehension entirely. 



Another drawback which I have always wondered has 

 never given rise to a formal complaint from owners of race- 

 horses is the exit from the paddock through which the horses 

 make their way to the start. The horses have to pick their 

 way down a slope, along broken, chalky ground, which, in hard 

 or wet weather, is bound to be more or less greasy, and, con- 

 sequently, exceedingly dangerous for a high-spirited or nervous 

 horse, who might very easily slip, with disastrous consequences 

 to itself, to say nothing of its backers. Somehow one does not 

 see so many characteristic figures in the paddock as of old, 

 and one misses the stalwart figure of Mr. George Lane-Fox — 

 always a sure find on the Derby Day ; " Ginger " Stubbs, too, 

 looking exactly as if he had just been turned out of a bandbox, 

 with his elaborately folded, snowy-white cambric neckcloth, at 

 the smoothness of which we should have marvelled, had we 

 not happened to know that he used to make his son iron it for 

 him every morning after it was on. " Ginger " was one of the 

 best judges of a horse in England, and his criticism of the 

 favourites as they passed in review before him was always 

 worth listening to. For many years he would take a dislike 

 to one of the Derby favourites, and this he would pepper to 

 win him a thousand or so, and very well it answered, until in 

 an evil moment he conceived a wrong impression of Thor- 

 manby, when Tattersall's knew him no more. Old D'Orsay 

 Clarke, too, with his blue umbrella, who, originally a waiter at 

 a fashionable Bond Street hotel, acted for a time as jackal to 

 Crockford, and eventually blossomed forth into an owner of 



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