A very excellent reason was recently given for the adoption of a ready money system of betting by one of the "big bookmakers" of the day; it was pithily expressed to a gentleman who was complaining of the small odds now laid to bettors. "Look you," said the layer of the odds, "I have thirty-three per cent. of bad debts to contend with every season, and so have some of my friends. When we have ready money betting there will be no bad debts, and the odds will then extend by twenty or thirty per cent." An extension of the odds, say all backers of horses, is certainly much needed; of late years prices have been growing small by degrees and beautifully less. FOOTNOTES: [4] "Public Form," I regret to learn, died in the autumn of 1891, at his residence near Glasgow. [5] This note and the preceding are abridged from a magazine sketch about "Public Form." RACING ADVENTURERS. It is not the writer's intention to venture on a full gallery of racing adventurers, but to present three or four portraits only by way of sample of the fifty or sixty which might be painted by the pen in black and white, and he has selected Messrs. Crockford, Gully, Ridsdale, Swindell, and Davis "the Leviathan" as being typical of the whole body. DAVIS THE LEVIATHAN. Among the racing adventurers who flourished sixty years since, the names of Davis, Crockford, Gully, and Ridsdale were prominent in turf affairs; these men and others like them were much trusted and betted to win or lose large amounts; "their mere word," as a certain noble baronet who did business with them said, "is better than other men's bonds." They paid sums of five, ten, or twenty thousand pounds when they lost them without the slightest hesitation, not infrequently indeed before they were due according to betting etiquette. Sixty years ago, racing adventurers began to come to the front and some of them soon acquired fortunes; several of the number who did so had not the wit, however, to keep the money they earned, and so fell back to their original condition. Such was the fate of Ridsdale, at one time racing partner with John Gully and a man of wealth. Crockford, as shall presently be narrated, began life as a fishmonger, and in the course of his career became a millionaire. In his young days Gully was a butcher and afterwards a professional pugilist; Davis again was a carpenter by trade, and flourished every day after becoming a betting man, the excitement of which career suited his temperament. Others of the bookmaking and betting fraternity had beginnings equally humble: some of them had been helpers in stables; one prominent man in turf affairs had driven a hackney coach; another had been footman at one time in a gentleman's family, but by the aid of turf chicanery became wealthy, and able himself in time to keep a couple of footmen. It is not possible within the limits of the present volume, to include more than three or four brief biographical sketches of the more prominent of