e on the
family estate, which I've had made out in blank, an I O U for fourteen
pounds which has been owing to me now for some time, and this bundle of
securities which, strictly speaking, belong to my Aunt Jane. You keep
that little lot till after the race, and we will call it in round
figures, five hundred pounds."

That single afternoon would thus bring me in five hundred thousand
pounds--provided the bookie did not blow his brains out.

Backers in Novel-land do not seem to me to know their way about. If the
hero of the popular novel swims at all, it is not like an ordinary human
being that he does it. You never meet him in a swimming-bath; he never
pays ninepence, like the rest of us, for a machine. He goes out at
uncanny hours, generally accompanied by a lady friend, with whom the
while swimming he talks poetry and cracks jokes. Some of us, when we try
to talk in the sea, fill ourselves up with salt water. This chap lies on
his back and carols, and the wild waves, seeing him, go round the other
way. At billiards he can give the average sharper forty in a hundred. He
does not really want to play; he does it to teach these bad men a lesson.
He has not handled a cue for years. He picked up the game when a young
man in Australia, and it seems to have lingered with him.

He does not have to get up early and worry dumb-bells in his nightshirt;
he just lies on a sofa in an elegant attitude and muscle comes to him. If
his horse declines to jump a hedge, he slips down off the animal's back
and throws the poor thing over; it saves argument. If he gets cross and
puts his shoulder to the massive oaken door, we know there is going to be
work next morning for the carpenter. Maybe he is a party belonging to
the Middle Ages. Then when he reluctantly challenges the crack fencer of
Europe to a duel, our instinct is to call out and warn his opponent.

"You silly fool," one feels one wants to say; "why, it is the hero of the
novel! You take a friend's advice while you are still alive, and get out
of it anyway--anyhow. Apologize--hire a horse and cart, do something.
You're not going to fight a duel, you're going to commit suicide."

If the hero is a modern young man, and has not got a father, or has only
something not worth calling a father, then he comes across a
library--anybody's library does for him. He passes Sir Walter Scott and
the "Arabian Nights," and makes a bee-line for Plato; it seems to be an
instinct w