Impressed with that view of the situation, Gully speedily became a professional betting man, or "leg," as such persons were then termed, and, by paying intelligent attention to business, met with prompt and extraordinary success. He commenced at a fortunate time--just, indeed, as betting was beginning to be recognised as a business, and when men were awakening more and more to the fact that it was better for them to deal with a professional layer of the odds all round than to make bets with each other. Gully speedily attracted attention in the ring. Gentlemen who had taken notice of his native shrewdness and capacity for figures entrusted him with commissions to back their horses, so that, in a manner, fortune was thrust upon him, the many secrets he became possessed of in this line of business enabling him to work in a powerful light, whilst his less fortunate brethren of the ring had to carry on their betting work pretty much in the dark. The commissions with which he was so frequently entrusted showed Gully what were the expectations of owners, and not only which horses might win, but also some as well which were sure to be beaten; because on the turf there was then, as there is now, two kinds of "commissions"--one to back a given horse, or it might be two or three horses, for the same event, the other to lay against animals meant to lose. With "such dispositions of things" in his favour, he is a poor hand at the business who cannot, when the struggle is over, show a winning balance. The days of Gully were those of heavy betting, so far as individual speculation was concerned; that is to say, there might then be a hundred men on the turf who betted to stakes of hundreds or thousands; but at the present time, although individual bets are not perhaps made to such large amounts, the number of persons who bet is as hundreds to one to what the number was when John Gully was a prominent person in the ring.