It is a healthy life for all concerned, for the country is a bracing one and the hours are early. To each horse on these early morning trials is his attendant lad: apprentices of the training-stable, with everything possible to them in the way of professional prizes. They may develop as jockeys or as trainers on their own account, or may perhaps go to the Devil in many of the easy ways that racing affords. But there are few or no lads in any profession you like to name smarter in personal appearance or better disciplined than the apprentices and stable-boys of Newmarket. The modern trainer, with the consideration and income of an ambassador, the authority of the headmaster of a public school, and the domestic appointments of a prince of commerce, is the benevolent autocrat of his establishment. His lads have no excuse for outside pleasures, for he provides them with billiard-rooms, newspapers, and magazines, and every imaginable comfort of a well-appointed club, with the result that the well-known enthusiasm for and belief in horses trained at Newmarket in general becomes crystallised into an _esprit de corps_ for particular stables. The whole profession has been revolutionised in every grade and in most methods. The jockey who used to reduce the “too, too solid flesh” that troubled even Hamlet—who had not the jockey’s excuse for ridding himself of it—by the heroic and uncomfortable course of wearing two pairs of trousers, five or six waistcoats, two or more coats, and then walking seven or eight miles in all that clothing, now adopts other methods—greatly to the sorrow of the local tailors. Those old-time jocks who thus mortified the flesh must surely command our retrospective sympathy, for they did not merely so dress and so walk, but, coming to some inn at the end of the prescribed miles, took a seat by a roaring fire, and, piling on more clothes, sweated away the avoirdupois at a truly alarming rate until it was time to tramp home-along. Turkish baths nowadays perform the same office with little trouble, and jockeys more than usually keen on reducing weight take medicines in addition. It was through the severity of this self-adopted course that Archer brought himself into the low and feverish state in which he committed suicide.