266 BETTING AS IT MIGHT BE. 
and in the case of the winner as much as 166 to I was taken 
and offered. Where is any such list of quotations to be seen in 
which half the number of the horses entered in any large handi- 
cap is backed at onetime? Here are sixty-four dogs, against 
sixty of which liberal odds are offered ; the bookmakers only 
refusing to lay against four out of the whole (this I take 
to be the meaning of the term “no betting,” placed against 
certain names) whilst in most of the other instances the offers 
are very liberal, and many of the animals heavily backed, 
I have ventured to give the list 2 extenso to confirm my 
theory that as much speculation as, if not more than, now 
exists might be expected if the system were adopted in 
racing. 
The extraordinarily long odds laid against so many nomi- 
nations for months before “the draw,” must be a boon to all 
owners; the prices laid subsequently cannot be otherwise 
than agreeable to the public; and in both cases the result 
must be satisfactory to the bookmakers, or they would not 
be so unusually liberal in their offers. Owners of racehorses 
do not, as a body, object to other people backing their horses. 
What they do dislike and resent, is being forestalled in the 
market, which is, and always has been, a never-failing source 
of unpleasantness and worse. 
Though a lover of the “leash,” I am but a novice at the 
sport, scarcely initiated in what appears to me a difficult 
science ; but from information derived through the press, it 
would seem all the betting is on the nomination up to and 
before the “draw:” this being the case with the Waterloo 
Cup also, so far as I can see, with but one exception. This 
one exception was Coomassie, the winner in the previous year, 
and one is almost tempted to add “ of course she was an 
absentee.” I know nothing of those concerned with the 
