"They were now about three hundred yards from the post. Fred had never used the spur; he needed but to slack the reins--away dashed the little grey, gaining at every stride upon the old horse. It is our turn to cheer! The Major begins to think seriously of his fifty dollars, when, in an instant, the fate of the game is changed. The little grey stumbles; he has put his foot in a hole--he staggers, and with difficulty recovers himself. The big horse must win. Now for whip and spur! Neck and neck, in they come--and which has won the race? 'Well, sir!' said the Major, 'slick work wasn't it? what is your opinion?' I might have known by this deferential question what his opinion was; but, to tell the truth, I could not decide which horse was the winner, and so I said. He jumped at this favourable decision on my part, and 'calculated' forthwith that it was a dead heat. I learned afterwards that he had confessed we had won, and thought little of our 'smartness' for not finding it out. My little grey was thenceforth an object of general admiration; and the utilitarian minds of the Yankees could not understand why I was not travelling through the States with such a pony, and making my fortune by backing him against everything of its size." Mr Coke is a good appreciator of the Yankees, and so lively and successful in his sketches of their national traits and peculiarities, that it is to be regretted he does not talk rather more about them. His stay at New York he passes over in a couple of pages. "I am not ambitious," he says, "of circulating more American notes, nor do I care to follow in the footsteps of Mrs Trollope. Enough has been written to illustrate the singularities of second-rate American society. Good society is the same all the world over. General remarks I hold to be fair play. But to indulge in personalities is a poor return for hospitality; and those Americans who are most willing to be civil to foreigners, receive little enough encouragement to extend that civility, when, as is too often the case, those very foreigners afterwards attempt to amuse their friends on one side the Atlantic, at the expense of a breach of good faith to their friends on the other.... I have a great respect for almost everything American. I do not mean to say that I have any affection for a thorough-bred Yankee, in our acceptation of the term; far from it. I think him the most offensive of all bipeds in the known world."