24 



The first essentials are, therefore, something that can 

 gallop, jump and stay, and that is hardy enough and 

 sound enough to have come through the season without 

 accident or mishap. Run as it is in the boiling month of 

 March, by which time the Ballygunge Country has been 

 baked to the consistency of bricks, and when the ploughs 

 are little better than a collection of clods as solid and as 

 unbreakable as cannon balls, when the lanes and the roads 

 are deep in a choking dust, it gives those who have never 

 participated in one of these hard-fought battles a small 

 conception of what it is that the aspirant to fame has to 

 take on. Taking all these things into consideration, 

 imagine yourself on the back of a vigorous horse that 

 takes a lot of holding, wedged in the midst of a field that 

 certainly will number a couple of dozen, possibly more, 

 charging a fence that is so narrow that scarcely six of you 

 can have it abreast, a fall a certainty that you will have the 

 rear rank in the small of your back, and probably a 

 couple of them down on top of you, for it is quite im- 

 possible early in the race to pull out and avoid the '' slain"; 

 then a desperate jostle down a narrow lane with deep 

 ditches on both sides, a greasy turn by a tank at the end of 

 it, and a scramble through a belt of jungle where you will 

 probably get more than one vigorous sapling, or a good 

 imitation of the "wait-a-bit" thorn, tearing the nose off 

 you — and all the while a dust-storm, and a steam 

 bath from the sweating horses all round you — and you 

 have a fair idea of how it feels to ride well up amongst 

 the hard thrusters who go for this race I We have said 

 nothing about the other, and the principal anxiety of 

 keeping your weather eye open to see that you do not run 

 off the paper trail, or to take advantage of very little lapsus 

 on the part of the leaders in the event of their happening to 

 do so ! It is a saitve qui peut^ and the ** divil tak' the hind- 

 most" fight from the start to the finish ; quarter is neither 



