IN order to qualify properly for the patronage of sport, a man must finally abandon any vestiges of refinement which may remain to him after a youth spent mainly in the use of strong language, and the abuse of strong drink. The future patron, who has enjoyed for some years the advantages of a neglected training in the privacy of the domestic circle, will have been sent to a public school. Like a vicious book, he will soon have been "called in," though not until he has been cut by those who may have been brought in contact with him. Having thus left his school for his school's good, he will find no difficulty in persuading his parents that the high spirits of an ingenuous youth, however distasteful they may have been to the ridiculous prejudices of a pedantic Head Master, are certain to be properly appreciated by the officers of a crack Regiment. He will, therefore, decide to enter the Army, and after pursuing his arduous studies for some time at the various Music Halls and drinking saloons of the Metropolis, he will administer a public reproof to the Civil Service Commissioners, by declining on two separate occasions to pass the examination for admission into Sandhurst. He will then inform his father that he is heavily in debt, and, having borrowed money from his tailor, he will disappear from the parental ken, to turn up again, after a week, without his watch, his scarf-pin, or his studs. This freak will be accepted by his relatives as a convincing proof of his fitness for a financial career, and he will shortly be transferred to the City as Clerk to a firm of Stockbrokers. Here his versatile talents will have full scope. He will manage to reconcile a somewhat lax attention to the details of business with a strict regularity in his attendance at suburban race-meetings. Nothing will be allowed to stand in his way when he pursues the shadow of pleasure through the most devious windings into the lowest haunts. For him the resources of dissipation are never exhausted. Pot-houses provide him with cocktails, restaurants furnish him with elaborate dinners, tailors array him in fine clothes, hosiers collar him up to the chin, and cover his breast with immaculate fronts. The master-pieces of West-End jewellers, hatters, and boot-makers, sparkle on various portions of his person; he finds in a lady step-dancer a goddess, and in _Ruff's Guide_ a Bible; he sups, he swears, he drinks, and he gambles, and, finally, he attains to the summit of earthly felicity by finding himself mentioned under a nickname in the paragraphs of a sporting organ.