My father had a curious fancy for naming all his sons after subsequent winners of the Derby. No doubt it will be said that this is not always practical; nor is it--the Derby is occasionally won by a gee-gee of the sex which I have myself adopted, and in those cases the name is unsuitable for a boy. But if it could be generally done, it would absolutely preclude any betting on one of our classic races; it would probably also preclude the race. After all, we do have to be moral in the intervals, and reclaim factory-girls in the dinner-hour. But I fear it will never happen--so few men have dear papa's wonderful foresight. Spearmint, my eldest surviving brother, came much under the influence of Alexis Chopitoff, and entered the same profession. Simple and unassuming, no one would have supposed that in one year he had backed the winner in all the principal races. But such was veritably the case. "There's nothing in it, Marge," he said to me one evening. "There's only one sure way to win--back every horse in the race with another man's money. I tell a customer the tale that I was shaving a well-known trainer that morning, and that the trainer had given me a certainty; all I ask is that the customer will put half-a-crown on for me. I repeat the process, changing the name of the certainty, until I have got all risks covered. I know it's old fashioned, but I like it. It demands nothing but patience, and it cannot possibly go wrong." But it did go wrong. He was telling the tale of how the well-known trainer had given him the certainty to a new customer, whom Spearmint had never shaved before. By a disastrous coincidence it happened that the new customer actually was that well-known trainer. He seemed to think that Spearmint had taken a liberty with his name, and even to resent it. Spearmint did not lose the sight of the left eye, as was at one time feared, but his looks have never been quite the same since his nose was broken. My next brother, Orby, was born in 1870. He could do the most graceful and charming things. When his namesake won the Derby in 1907, he immediately acquired a complimentary Irish accent, and employed it in the narration of humorous stories. An accent acquired at the age of thirty-seven is perhaps liable to lack conviction, and I always thought that my brother was over-scrupulous in beginning every sentence with the word "Bedad." Like myself, he simply did not know what fear was, and in consequence told his Irish stories in his own Irish accent to a real Irishman. However, now that he has got his new teeth in you would never know that he had been hit. It was said of him by a great legal authority--I forget in which police-court--that he had the best manners and the least honesty of any taxi-driver on the Knightsbridge rank.