.REMINISCENCES OF SONEPORE. 



Best of the boiling, but slow to rouse to a sense of what 

 was wanted, was Albert Mangles, yet even he, like Bicrom, 

 seemed to fancy that to publish a programme and wait for 

 results began and ended the duties of a Secretary. Curiously 

 enough to a great extent Mofussil Secretaries and Stewards 

 still cling to this palpably false idea, and yet what went 

 far to ruin Sonepore in the eighties, when meets were 

 fewer and personal hospitality greater than in 1896, is 

 naturally more likely to do so now, when meetings on a 

 direct line of railway offer better purses, better gambling 

 facilities, and better accommodation to owner, trainer and 

 horse, than did or even still do our Behar Meetings. Search 

 the world and it will be harder to find any race meeting to 

 equal Sonepore in social enjoyment ; go to Lucknow, Calcutta, 

 Bombay, Meerut, Madras or any ordinary head centre, as 

 stranger and owner of horses, and what do you find, you have 

 to put up in a dirty hotel or lodging house noise, filth, vermir 

 and foul food being the luxuries you have to pay for ; nothing 

 to do when you come back from the course in the morning, 

 save to wait for every other day's racing. At Sonepore 

 from the moment visitors arrive, till the camps break up, there 

 is not one second free from fun. All owners want, is to have 

 once been asked there as guests, and they will go on patronis- 

 ing the meeting. But it was in this Mr. Abercrombie and his 

 stewards failed. What filled Jimmy's, Gwatkin's and Harry's 

 stables ? chiefly because they invariably asked as guests, to 

 their camps at Sonepore, the men who trusted them with their 

 horses. Coax owners and our Sonepore and Mozufferpore 

 .Meetings will be better in 1900 and on ahead than they have 

 hitherto been. The racing has never at Sonepore from 1883 

 to 1896 cost the Stewards, or visitors, one anna, for the 

 Secretary has invariably managed, so that a surplus has been 

 available from racing funds to keep going the ever-increasing 

 expenses of the ball room, bands and entertainments. Surely, 



