undergoes the most unlooked-for variations. A lot of money is won and lost before the real favorites have revealed themselves; that is to say, before the last week preceding the race. The winner of the Omnium is hardly ever a horse of the first rank, and the baron d'Etreilles undertakes to tell us why. The object of the handicap, he says, being to equalize the chances of several horses of different degrees of merit, the handicapper is in a manner obliged to make it next to impossible for the first-rate horses to win; otherwise, the owners of the inferior animals, seeing that they had no chance, would prefer to pay forfeit, and the harmony, as it were, of the contest--the even balancing of chances, which is of the very essence of the handicap--would be lacking. On the other hand, the handicapper cannot bring the chances of the really bad horses up to the mean average, no matter how much he may favor them in the weights, and thus it nearly always turns out that the Omnium, like every other important handicap, is won by a horse of the second class, generally a three-year-old, whose real merits have been hidden from the handicapper. This concealment is not so difficult as it might seem. There are certain owners who, when they have satisfied themselves by trials made before the spring races that they have in their stables a few horses not quite good enough to stand a chance in the great contests, but still by no means without valuable qualities, prefer to reserve them for an important affair like the Omnium, on which they can bet heavily and to advantage, especially if they have a "dark horse," or one that is as yet unknown. Otherwise, to what use could these second-rate horses be put? If one should run them in the spring they might get one or two of the smaller stakes, after which everybody would have their measure. Their owners, therefore, show wisdom in keeping them out of sight, or perhaps, as some of the shrewder ones do, by running them when rather out of condition, and thus ensuring their defeat by adversaries really inferior to themselves. In this way the handicapper is deceived as to their true qualities, and is induced to weight them advantageously for the Omnium.