1 86 A MIRROR OF THE TURK 



ascertain, by personally interviewing a number of 

 them, what manner of men they were. His idea 

 of the kind of persons he had supposed them to 

 be was at once corroborated, as the first of them 

 with whom he could obtain an interview he im- 

 mediately recognised as a bookmaker who had 

 welshed him at Ascot two years before ; another 

 of the fraternity was identified by a friend as a 

 "swell cabman," who used to have a lucrative 

 connection in the City, his customers being chiefly 

 stockbrokers and bankers' clerks ; but more 

 surprising than either of these was the discovery 

 that among the motley crowd, and evidently, from 

 the fact of two clerks in an outer office being 

 busily engaged in filling up telegraphic forms, 

 doing a roaring trade, there was a younger son of 

 a very well known and wealthy London citizen, 

 who, having failed at the University, and "gone 

 to the bad " in business, had taken to tipping. 



Well do I remember reading one morning 

 in The Standard that Bill Jones, one of "the 

 ruins " bookmakers, had been sent for ten days 

 to prison as a rogue and vagabond for betting, 

 the alderman who passed the sentence being the 

 uncle of the tipster to whom I have been 

 alluding ! 



Could a census be taken of these prophets, 

 embracing their antecedents, it would be found 

 that not a few of them were persons who had 

 lost money in backing horses or in laying the odds 

 against their chances, reminding us of the cele- 

 brated definition of the critics being " men who 

 have failed in literature and art." 



As has been remarked in the course of the 

 foregoing observations, the art of tipping is now 



