The son of a small London baker, devoted to errandry at the age of fourteen, ‘Jimmy’ Shrewin owed his profession to a certain smartness at sums, a dislike of baking, and an early habit of hanging about street corners with other boys, who had their daily pennies on an ’orse. He had a narrow, calculating head, which pushed him towards street corner books before he was eighteen. From that time on he had been a surreptitious nomad, till he had silted up at Oxford, where, owing to Vice-Chancellors, an expert in underground life had greater scope than elsewhere. When he sat solitary at his narrow table in the back room near the ‘Corn’--for he had no clerk or associate--eyeing the door, with his lists in a drawer before him, and his black shiny betting-book ready for young ‘bloods,’ he had a sharp, cold, furtive air, and but for a certain imitated tightness of trouser, and a collar standing up all round, gave no impression of ever having heard of the quadruped called horse. Indeed, for ‘Jimmy’ ‘horse’ was a newspaper quantity with figures against its various names. Even when, for a short spell, hanger-on to a firm of Cheap Ring bookmakers, he had seen almost nothing of horse; his racecourse hours were spent ferreting among a bawling, perspiring crowd, or hanging round within earshot of tight-lipped nobs, trainers, jockeys, anyone who looked like having ‘information.’ Nowadays he never went near a race-meeting--his business, of betting on races, giving him no chance--yet his conversation seldom deviated for more than a minute at a time from that physically unknown animal, the horse. The ways of making money out of it, infinite, intricate, variegated, occupied the mind in all his haunts, to the accompaniment of liquid and tobacco. Gin and bitters was ‘Jimmy’s’ drink; for choice he smoked cheroots; and he would cherish in his mouth the cold stump of one long after it had gone out, for the homely feeling it gave him, while he talked, or listened to talk on horses. He was of that vast number, town bred, who, like crows round a carcase, feed on that which to them is not alive. And now he had a horse! The dog-cart travelled at a clinking pace behind Pulcher’s bobtail. ‘Jimmy’s’ cheroot burned well in the warm July air; the dust powdered his dark clothes and pinched, sallow face. He thought with malicious pleasure of that young spark ‘Cocoon’s’ collapse--high-’anded lot of young fools, thinking themselves so knowing; many were the grins, and not few the grittings of his blackened teeth he had to smother at their swagger. ‘Jimmy, you robber!’ ‘Jimmy, you little blackguard!’ Young sparks--gay and languid--well, one of ’em had gone out!