The enormous extent to which betting on horse-racing goes on all the year round is known to those only who make the matter a special study. It has been computed by persons who should know that not less than five thousand bookmakers are daily engaged throughout the United Kingdom in laying the odds against horses to stakes ranging from sixpence to perhaps, on some occasions, as much as five hundred or even a thousand pounds. Taking it, for illustrative purposes, that each layer of the odds deals only with a hundred customers, it becomes obvious that there must be at least five hundred thousand persons engaged in betting. The exact number, however, could it be ascertained, would doubtless prove much in excess of these figures. Were it said that at present there are over a million persons who take an interest in horse-racing or in some of the other sports and pastimes of the period to the extent of backing their opinions by a bet, it would not probably be an exaggeration. In one Scottish city there is, it has been calculated, a hundred bookmakers at work every day on the streets or in clubs or offices, doing business with all comers at market rates, and to stakes varying in amount from shillings and half-crowns to "tenners and ponies" (£25). As that city contains a population of over half a million individuals, it affords data for calculating that there may be two hundred bookmakers for each million of the population congregated in the great cities and larger towns of the kingdom, which for London alone would give more than one thousand layers of the odds, whilst Manchester, Liverpool, Bradford, Leeds, and Birmingham, will undoubtedly have a number correspondent to their population. "Here, every one bets," said a London club steward one evening to the writer, whilst busy entering names for the annual Derby sweep, "every one from the City to the West End; the cabman who brought you from the railway station, the porter who took your hat, the man who sold you that copy of the special _Standard_, all bet, and in hundreds of our public-houses and tobacconists' shops you can find a bookmaker if you want him." A glance at what takes place in large cities and big provincial towns every day, but more particularly on days set apart for the decision of important races, shows hundreds of people rushing about to interchange their tips and opinions and to learn what is being done. On such days telegraphic messages rain into the more important clubs, of which there are from six to twenty in each of the towns named, and in these places from three to thirty bookmakers will be found ready to bet with all comers.