There are every day busily at work at the present time an army of over two hundred and fifty advertising tipsters--pure adventurers, recruited from all sorts and conditions of men. The writer took pains, three or four years ago, to 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 immediately 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 celebrated 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 a business over which no disguise is thrown, although an occasional advertisement still crops up in the old style. One or two of the present-day tipsters correspond with "gentlemen only," but on being communicated with, these persons do not seem particularly anxious to restrict the number of their clients; what they really want is "a remittance." At the present time there are tipsters who carry on business in different fashions; some ask for a fee that will cover a week's work, others seek an all-day remittance, whilst not a few deal in single-horse wires or "paddock snips," as they designate their information. There are also tipsters who ask only to be paid by results. "Put one shilling on each of the horses I select for you to back, and if one wins, remit me the odds obtained," indicates the mode of doing business adopted by such prophets.