they may gamble without being obliged to trouble themselves about the nobler animals on which they bet. The crowd on a racecourse is always a hideous spectacle. The class of men who swarm there are amongst the worst specimens of the human race, and, when a stranger has wandered among them for an hour or so, he feels as though he had been gazing at one huge, gross, distorted face. Their language is many degrees below vulgarity; in fact, their coarseness can be understood only by people who have been forced to go much amongst them--and that perhaps is fortunate. The quiet stoical aristocrats in the special enclosures are in all ways inoffensive; they gamble and gossip, but their betting is carried on with still self-restraint, and their gossip is the ordinary polished triviality of the country-house and drawing-room. But what can be said of the beings who crowd the betting-ring? They are indeed awful types of humanity, fitted to make sensitive men shudder. Their yells, their profanity, their low cunning, their noisy eagerness to pounce upon a simpleton, their infamous obscenity, all combine to make them the most loathsome collection of human beings to be found on the face of the broad earth. Observe that all of this betting crew appear to be what is called rolling in money. They never do a stroke of useful work; they merely howl and make bets--that is their contribution to the prosperity of the State. Yet they are dressed with vulgar richness, they fare sumptuously, and they would not condescend to taste any wine save the finest vintages; they have servants and good horses, and in all ways they resemble some rank luxurious growth that has sprung from a putrid soil. Mark that these bookmakers, as they are called, are not gentlemen in any sense of the word; some of them are publicans, some look like prize-fighters, some like promoted costermongers, some like common thieves. There is not a man in the company who speaks with a decently refined accent--in short, to use plain terms, they are the scum of the earth. Whence then comes the money which enables them to live in riotous profusion? The explanation is a sad one, and I trust that these words may warn many young people in time. Here is the point to be weighed upon--these foul-mouthed persons in the betting-ring are able to travel about all spring, summer, and autumn, staying in the best hotels and lacking nothing; in winter they can loll away their time in billiard-rooms. Once more, who supplies the means? It is the senseless outside public who imagine they know something about "sport."