This moralizing strain reminds me of the appearance of Robert Buchanan, the poet, as a backer of horses. Some graceless men were inclined to regard the contact of Buchanan with the Ring as something in the nature of a joke. To me it constituted a pitiful and sordid tragedy. Buchanan was another of those men who always wanted money, and who was ever on the lookout for some easy way of getting it. I do not know who it was that introduced him to the turf as a likely method of adding to his resources. But I should not care to be the man with that sin on my soul. If Buchanan knew a horse from a cow, it was about as much as he knew. As to the significance of the weights in a handicap he was entirely ignorant. He had got into his head that by luck and good advice large sums might be made out of the Ring. About twenty years ago I first came across him while he was thus engaged. It was at Epsom the day after the Derby. The grand-stand was but sparsely inhabited. In the interval between the last race and the last but one, I saw Buchanan coming across the course. I went down to meet him. He was in a flurried and excited condition. He had experienced a “rotten” day. Nor was I surprised when he proceeded to explain to me his _modus operandi_. It was this: He had engaged the services of an infallible tipster. This infallible young person I afterwards discovered to be one of the notorious “boys” of the American Bar of the Criterion, the rendezvous from which the hero of Ardlamont, it will be recollected, chose his associates. For himself and this egregious seer he had taken rooms for the week at the Sun in Kingston, the pair of them driving over to the course each morning in an open landau. As he eagerly explained to me the unsuspected occurrences which had upset the calculations of his adviser, and within how very little he came of pulling off some uncommonly good things, I was profoundly moved. Here was the author of a work of fiction of the quality of “God and the Man,” and of poems like “Fra Giacomo,” plunging on a race-course with the most sordid motives and with the most ridiculous equipment, and associating with an adviser with whom no self-respecting sportsman would care to be seen talking.