162 JOCKEYS 
have won, and you receive the heartfelt condolence of your 
friends on your bad luck. If, nettled at the result, you 
venture a remonstrance, the youth, with a confident audacity 
will lay the blame upon the horse, and will add with supreme 
indifference, “If I had not minded what I was about, I 
should have gone the wrong side of a post or two, I was 
” 
shut in and run against;” and will wind up by affirming 
with the utmost complacency, “I managed to keep him 
straight, and made a good effort to win at the proper time.” 
If this be not the excuse, he will probably look you in the face 
and declare that your horse was not fit, and that beat him. 
This is the result of trials and months of watchfulness at 
home. Your calculations are upset by the woful exhibitions 
of these pigmies when your horse, in primest condition, comes 
to run in public. And nothing that I can see will alter this 
lamentable state of things, until the scale of weights be 
raised, when the services of men may be secured in lieu of 
those of boys. 
It must certainly be said for these unfortunates who ruin 
themselves in the destruction they thus deal broadcast on 
others, that they are but boys. A portion of the blame is 
their own; but another, and the greater part of it, falls to 
others. Lord Byron says :— 
‘‘ The youth who trains to ride or run a race, 
Must bear privations with unruffled face.” 
It would be well if this couplet were borne in mind by 
employers, friends, and backers ; for often the lads, intoxi- 
cated with the success that in reality they have done so 
little to achieve, will, at the invitation of fortunate backers, 
drink champagne and smoke cigars, until the indulgence in 
these things becomes a confirmed habit. Then they forget 
themselves, and lose their position by leaving, with the joy 
