298 THE RACING WORLD 



most ridiculous reasons. How many occasional 

 racegoers — ladies frequently do such things — have 

 backed horses because of their possessing the 

 names of relatives ? Again, how frequently even 

 the hardened racegoer is guided by and acts on the 

 fact of a competitor bearing his wife's or his 

 child's name, or some such little influencing item ! 

 I know one particular case in which a man, who 

 only trod a racecourse about once a year, had his 

 maximum (>C5) ^^ Lucinda when she won at Hurst 

 Park last summer at 20 to i, although she was 

 held by all the clever followers of racing and 

 backers to have no possible chance. His reason 

 for the investment was that the last time he had 

 been racing he had seen Lucinda win " running 

 away " ; he was unaware of, and indifferent to, the 

 fact that when she scored previously it had been 

 in a selling hurdle-race, now she was competing 

 for a good flat-race handicap. The very fact of 

 his knowing so little won him X^oo- 



I once escorted a lady to Hurst Park on the first 

 occasion that she had ever seen any racing. 

 There were seven events, and she backed every 

 winner. The first, one of Mr. George Edwardes's, 

 because the colours, turquoise and white, were the 

 same as those in her hat ; the second, because the 

 jockey, Kempton Cannon, was " a nice-looking 



