Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 22, 2025
There was the track, stretching like a band of broad green ribbon over hill and dale; there was the glorious oak wood to the west, above the smooth bit of grass which used to be the lawn, where the ladies of the reign of Victoria had their picnics and showed their dresses, and book-makers used to jostle ministers in the betting-ring.
The writers, book-makers, manufacturers, mechanics, merchants agriculturists, and all the agencies they employ, would be beggared, and one half of those not reduced to poverty would be obliged to spend all their extra means in-simply supplying necessaries to the other half.
The book-makers, ranged along in rows, stood on little platforms in front of their booths, taking the crowd's money and calling out the amount and nature of each bet to assistants within who scratched off and registered corresponding pool-tickets which were quickly returned to the struggling bettors. On a blackboard at the end of each booth were posted the names of the horses with their jockeys.
When the Gold Dust maverick, with the Ramblin' Kid swaying uncertainly on her back, had appeared on the track for the two-mile run, the tout, his eyes like those of a harried rat, sneaked out of the crowd in front of the book-makers' booths and hurried toward the Santa Fe railroad yards.
It was when their pretensions threatened the very existence of literature as an art, when the sense that the writer's work was the work of an artist, and like an artist's work must show largeness of design, and grace of form, and fitness of phrase, was either denied or forgotten, it was when every rimer was claiming to be a poet, every fault-finder a critic, every chronicler an historian, that Pope struck at the herd of book-makers and swept them from the path of letters.
"Because he dropped a couple of 'bones' not long ago at the Harlem track, he made a roar that's echoing still between this and the Rocky Mountains. The next time I saw him I gave him a 'good thing' he could have win out on, but he would n't touch it. He don't know the right way around the track. The book-makers call him 'Ready-Money' he 's so easy."
"I'm not an Irishman myself, but I've observed that the most conspicuous men in all nations are pure Irish or of Irish extraction. Look at the service. Look at the ring prize-fighters and book-makers.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking