But, to my way of thinking, Charles Brewer was far and away the best of the old bookmakers. He had his offices in Charles Street, St. James’s. He was joint owner with Charles Blanton, the trainer of that famous racehorse, Robert the Devil. Thousands of the British public, as well as the owners, were bitterly disappointed when Robert the Devil failed to pull off the Derby in 1880. The race was won, it will be remembered, by the Duke of Westminster’s Bend Or. I saw that exciting finish. It was lost to Robert the Devil owing to the cock-sureness of Rossiter, the jockey. He took matters far too easy, and was imprudent enough to look over his shoulder at the psychological moment. Archer, that king of riders, saw his advantage in a flash, and caught his opponent at the post. And a curious consideration, not altogether unconnected with psychological ramifications, appeals to me here. When I have been deputed to go to a race-meeting for the purpose of making a column or so of descriptive “copy,” the Ring has always presented itself to me as a modern Inferno packed with raucous, foul-mouthed demons—rapacious, brutal, sordid. Again and again have I reeled off impressionist descriptions of what I conceived to be a very brutal exhibition. Yet, in looking back to those old times, the picture of the betting ring does not come back to me as a complete and vivid impression. Faces gaze out at me one by one, and they are all the faces of men who have made their last settlement. One becomes more charitable with the passing of the years, I suppose, and Time teaches us to differentiate. I fail altogether now to recall the Ring as a raging, seething pit. I only recall, with feelings not estranged, some of its members whom I have known, and with whom I have done a little business from time to time. Their manners may not have been those of a Chesterfield, but their principles of commercial morality were more commendable than those of the nobleman whose “Letters,” according to honest Samuel Johnson, inculcated the morals of a monkey and the manners of—well, of something even less respectable than our simian ancestor.