the swiftest
horse--twenty-five thousand dollars--enough to build a meeting-house.
Doesn't it make you tremble in your shoes; but that isn't all. Everybody
was betting with everybody else, just for the fun of betting.

I saw a little shaver there, ten years old, who boasted that he had won
three pair of gloves from a little girl of eight.

The cream of that fifteen thousand skimmed itself off and consolidated
in a handsome square building that they call the Club House. We went
there, of course, and soon got seats among a crowd of upper-tenists on
the roof, which took in a view of the whole race-ground.

One or two horses, with funny little fellows on their backs, were moving
up and down before the Grand Stand, but no one seemed to care about
them. Harry Bassett and Longfellow were all they wanted in the way of
fast horses.

Sisters, don't fancy now that Longfellow is of a poetic, or even
literary, turn of mind. Nor do I want you to think that his owner named
him after our great New England poet because he was fired with
admiration of his genius. Nothing of the kind. I don't suppose that "old
Kentucky gentleman" ever read a line of Longfellow's poetry in his
life--may be, though I hate to think so, he never heard of him--at any
rate this great, long, swift, beautiful animal was named after himself,
and nobody else. His body is long and slender, very long, and that is
why the colt got his name. I wish it had been the other way, but it
wasn't, and truth is truth. In fact, I'm afraid literature isn't
appreciated on the race-course. It takes all the romance out of one to
know that this grand young horse was named after his own body, and not
after our great New Englander.

Never mind about the name now, Harry Bassett is coming down the road,
and slackens his speed in front of the Grand Stand. A beautiful,
beautiful animal, with limbs like a deer, and a coat smooth as satin,
colored like a plump ripe chestnut. Fifteen thousand people clap their
hands, stamp their feet, shout, cheer, and flutter out their
handkerchiefs as the horse goes by.

Sisters, you never saw anything like it. A camp-meeting, where every
man, woman, and child was just converted, might be a comparison, with
drawbacks.

Harry Bassett took all this cool as a cucumber. It didn't disturb a hair
on his glossy coat. The creature knew that he was being admired, and
liked it--that was all. Down he came by the Grand Stand, past the Club
House, where he got