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"Come on here and make your bets," yelled the book-makers, with whom business had begun to grow slack; "they 're at the post they 'll be off in a minute." I accepted the invitation. Rushing up to the nearest stand, I handed up two silver dollars. "Peytonia," I said, with all the nonchalance I could assume.
His approach was hailed by the book-makers either with jeers or with shouts of welcome. Those who had lost demanded a chance to regain their money. Those with whom he had not bet, found in that fact consolation, and chaffed the losers. Some curtly refused even the smallest part of his money. "Not with me!" they laughed. From stand to stand the layers of odds taunted him, or each other.
I had no money and no friends; I had sent to America for a remittance, but in the interval of six weeks required for a reply, must eat and drink and lodge, and London was wide and pitiless, even if I dared stoop to beg assistance. Let no young man be tempted to put the sea between his home and himself, how seductive soever be the experiences of book-makers and poetic pedestrians.
"It's like candy from a baby," Danny's manager proclaimed. Danny shook his head. "I've been in the game too long," he explained. "I'm not casting reflections on the referee, or the present company. I'm not sayin' nothing about book-makers an' frame-ups that sometimes happen. But what I do say is that it's poor business for a fighter like me. I play safe.
Ruskin seems to me one of the few genuine writers, as distinguished from book-makers, of this age. That pure and severe mind you ascribed to him speaks in every line. He writes like a consecrated Priest of the Abstract and Ideal.
If one spoke about "the course" to-day, it would be understood to mean the racecourse, but in those days it meant the venue of the evening drive, There was then, as now, a racecourse in Calcutta, but, though on the present site, it was, as might be expected, nothing like so elaborate. There was only one stand, and that was opposite the old jail; there was no totalisator and no book-makers.
He reads the man accurately, he knows him better than he knows himself, and he effects a cure. "This astonishing condition is certainly a new light for those seeking to labor among men. Those who are successful gamblers, pugilists, pickpockets, saloon-keepers, book-makers, jockeys and the like are so by reason of their intelligence, their innate mental acumen and perception.
'Ardy used to yarn most about the coins he had gone through; he had lived with book-makers, and jockeys, and pugs, and actors, and all that: a precious low lot!" added this judicious person. "But it's about here my 'orse is moored, and by your leave I'll be getting ahead." "One moment," said I. "Is Mr. Sebright on board?" "No, sir, he's ashore to-day," said the sailor.
It is easy for book-makers to say "I thought so and so as I looked upon such and such a scene" when the truth is, they thought all those fine things afterwards. One's first thought is not likely to be strictly accurate, yet it is no crime to think it and none to write it down, subject to modification by later experience.
If the father's heritage, drink and women, were spared him, or at least that part of him which was really noble, a love of cleanness, clear-mindedness, and purity, died hard. But gambling was second nature to him. He could not enjoy a game unless he had something on it; and all book-makers and proprietors of gambling-houses were friends of his and called him by his first name.
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