268 THE RACING WORLD 



lost on the Turf. The thousands to sixties had 

 existed only in his imagination. 



" Why didn't he pull up ? Why did he go on 

 betting when he found what a bad game it was ? " 

 the wise man who has never been bitten by the 

 mania (do manias bite, by the way ? but never 

 mind, the colloquialism will serve) may ask. It is 

 the rarest thing in the world, the racing world, to 

 find anyone who ever does so. Look in what is 

 called the Silver Ring, where men wager their 

 scarce half-crowns, often suffer privations because 

 they lose them, and yet, mysterious and inexplic- 

 able as it is, always find money, somehow or other, 

 to take them to race meetings, to pay railway fares 

 and admission fees, and to enable them to back 

 horses ; look there and you will discover men who 

 used to belong to all the clubs, were accustomed to 

 bet ponies and fifties and hundreds, till all they had 

 passed over the rails and the bookmakers would let 

 them make no more hopelessly bad debts. They 

 have learnt the value of " good things," the 

 desperately precarious nature of " certainties " ; 

 and still they go on, convinced that their luck must 

 turn, and comforting themselves with the legends 

 of how somebody ran two sovereigns into £i^^2j 

 in one afternoon. 



Some racegoers are singularly silent men ; others 



