3 [ 6 Among Men and Horses. 



nervous, I cannot say— while he was thus speaking, looked so 

 forlorn with his anxious face, grey hair brushed off his fore- 

 head, and trembling hand upraised, as if in appeal for pity, 

 drew to him the sympathy of all the spectators, and won their 

 hearty applause when, in less than a quarter of an hour, the 

 savage one finding that it could in no other way escape the 

 constant flicks of the whip on its hind quarters, came up to 

 the Professor and allowed him to stroke its head and neck. 

 Despite the machine fiasco, the large majority of the com- 

 mittee voted for the American. When we three returned 

 home to supper, Sample promised to discard the machine for 

 the remainder of the contest, which in that case was a cer- 

 tainty for him. I tried to get further information out of him 

 respecting the purport of the paper which he had signed, and 

 after some pressure, he acknowledged that it was a secret 

 agreement between him and Leon with the Sporting Life, for 

 Leon to get back his own cheque; for Sample to receive 

 my cheque ; and for both of them to hold the newspaper free 

 from all responsibility in the matter. On hearing this I got 

 annoyed and refused to listen to what Sample called ' reason.' 

 Believing as I did then, and do now, that a match for return- 

 able, or, as I would call them, bogus cheques is a deception 

 on the public, I naturally resented having been made a parti- 

 cipator, even though an innocent one, in any such transaction. 

 Sample said that Leon would not have made the match on 

 any other terms, as it was purely a ' gate money ' affair ; that 

 the match would have come off whether or not I had ' put 

 up ' the money ; that he accepted my offer to be his backer, 

 because my name would be a ' draw * ; that I had better get 

 my cheque back ; and that he would substitute for it his own 

 cheque, which would be handed back to him to tear up at the 

 end of the contest. The editor of the Sporting Life returned 

 me my cheque, which, contrary to my expectation, had not 

 been ' presented ' ; I withdrew altogether from the competi- 

 tion ; the committee voted almost unanimously in favour of 

 Sample ; the public, probably because they thought it was not 



