By the time the Jockey Club and Tattersall’s came into existence, Newmarket had become too firmly established as the headquarters of racing for any greater or less measure of Royal favour to affect its fortunes. Wealth, quite irrespective of birth and rank, now counts. It is all one to the town and the trainers who provides the funds, whether it be a millionaire Austrian Jew banker, a German Israelitish financier, a rack-renting peer-landlord, a monarch of the licensed victualling trade, or a wholesale furnisher from Tottenham Court Road; and when the bacon-kings and the sovereigns of soup, and all the other geniuses of the factory and the Exchange, who pile up huge fortunes out of the labour of others, come here to spend a percentage of their hoards, they will be all sure of the same welcome—as why should they not? There is little or no snobbery in Newmarket, and it is perhaps the only place in the world where the King can depend upon being let alone. He can walk the High Street or the racecourse like any other sportsman, or look into the shop-windows without being mobbed. Here, at any rate, Addresses are never presented, and Royalty walks, for a change, upon pavements and mother earth, without the usual intermediary of red carpet. No one—at least none who are conversant with the manners and customs of the place—even takes off a hat to the Sovereign, who is thereby relieved from his invariable courtesy of returning the salute. In short, no one takes the least notice of him. XXII THE cemetery at Newmarket is the traveller’s melancholy introduction to this town of gay memories. It acts the part of that oft-quoted ancient Egyptian custom of seating a skeleton at the feast; for those who go to and from the racecourse, and the budding jockeys who daily exercise the horses on the Bunbury or others of the Heath gallops, can scarce fail to see it and its serried ranks of grandiose white marble monuments. It must inevitably be dispiriting to some, for it emphasises the shortness of our course, enacts the _rôle_ of mentor, and seems to hint, “Why toil and moil and live laborious days, and why in that toiling stoop to petty meannesses, when at last—and at no distant date—you too must lie with the many racing celebrities of a bygone day, as forgotten as they?” In some sort the roadside cemeteries that now so dolefully are set in the gates of every town _may_ thus be a moral force—although that is to be doubted—but certainly their suggestions of the fleeting nature of life and the essential futility of it are alien from public policy, as likely to sap the energy of the race. The time must needs come, and that soon, when cremation is made compulsory and the wayside cities of the dead abolished.