I have just mentioned Dick Dunn, the bookmaker. This redoubtable penciller was of Irish nationality, his real name being O’Donoghue. He was an extremely good-looking, well-set-up fellow, and, casually encountered, one would never have believed him capable of the heights and depths of picturesque objurgation to which he rose and sank. But he was really a good-natured chap, with a fund of quaint and characteristic humour. I once attended a smoking-concert promoted at Hampton for a charitable purpose, at which Dick Dunn had been asked to preside. Things went very well until a local celebrity—an octogenarian—was called upon to sing. The old man began to intone a very long ballad in very slow time. The audience were getting tired, and the chairman was getting very fidgety. At last the vocalist gave the chairman his opportunity. He was trolling out a fresh verse commencing with the two lines: “He went into a barber’s shop, There for to get him shaved.” “Well!” roared out Dunn, bringing his hammer sharply down on the table, “what do you suppose he _would_ go in for—_to buy onions_?” The audience broke into laughter, and the abashed warbler sat down. They tell me that the present is an uncommonly bad time for bookmakers. At the Albert and Victoria they are betting with each other—a tame business, and comparable only (as one of the fraternity recently put it to me) to “kissing one’s sister.” The occupation of “Oh, yell, oh!” is gone. But in my early Press days he flourished like a green bay-tree. In the early seventies Steele and Peach of Sheffield were the magnates of the Ring. Steele was a big, heavy-faced, sleepy-looking man. He commenced his commercial career by hawking fish through the streets on a barrow. Peach, who was far smarter in appearance, was of equally low origin. The two leviathans of the Ring were closely related by marriage, and ended up by becoming owners of one of the richest steel-works in Sheffield. I can well remember Olney of Manchester and Steve Mundell of Durham. Olney was a stout, white-haired, red-faced man, who would have been a little one but for the extra weight in fat he carried. He was grumpy, but straight, and his prices were simply awful. Mundell was known as “the Durham Ox.” He was, as his sobriquet may suggest, a big, beefy man. His Durham acquaintances were very proud of him; and, indeed, he was not half a bad sort. He was fond of coursing, and kept a few greyhounds of his own.