174 THE BLUE RID HON OF THE TURF. 



or twenty pound note, and think nothing^ of it. Only 

 fools buck horses, sir ; wise men turn booJ^rnakers and 

 lay 'em, and as I know there are a thousand fools for 

 every wise man. so you see, sir, there's plenty of busi- 

 ness for me and such as me.' 



TL 



The rationale of bookmaking ma}' now be entered 

 upon, for the benefit of those who know nothing about 

 it. Persons unacquainted with the machinery of the 

 turf ate doubtless surprised when they learn fiom an 

 occasional paiagraph in their daily newspaper that 

 ' Mr. So-and-so has won £10,000 by the success of his 

 horse in such and such a race,' probably some handi- 

 cap ; and not knowing how the amount has been 

 gathered together, they at once hold up their hands 

 in horror at the awful sum of money wliicli some 

 \uifortunate person must have lost. Even Canon 

 Kingsley, of ' Westward Ho !' celebrity, wap so ignorant 

 of ihe mode in which the betting of the period is 

 carried on, that he fancied and wrote as if one man 

 betted with and lost thousands to his brother man — 

 the Canon (intelligent as he was) being apparently 

 iofnorant of the bookmaker and his functions as the 

 go-between, or intermediary, of the forty oi- fifty thou- 

 sand persons who lose a sovereign each, and the half- 

 dozen fortunate people who each gain a few hundreds, 

 or, it may be, thousands, by backing the winner of 

 some particular race. The mission of the bookmaker 

 is to gather in a. great sum of nioney in small or large 

 sums, as the case may be, over each race that is run, 

 and then to deal out the amount in portions to those 



