t Dewhurst, just behind Arunvah, at the other end of
the South Downs. And Dewhurst had been for twenty years the centre of
that campaign to lower the colours of the English thoroughbred, which
Ikey Aaronsohnn had embarked upon in his unforgotten youth.

The little Levantine hailed from New York, Hamburg, and
London--especially the first two. A cosmopolitan banker, and genial
rascal, he had, even in England, a host of friends, and deserved them. A
man of ideals, and extremely tenacious, _objets d'art_ and steeplechase
horses had been his twin passions from his childhood. He collected both
with a judgment amounting to genius. And there were few experts in
either kind who were not prepared to acknowledge him their master.

The day when Ikey, then young, sure of himself, and enthusiastic, had
been called a "bloody little German Jew" in the Paddock at Liverpool by
a noble English sportsman, as he led his first winner home, had been
forgotten by others but not by him. And when a year later the little man
stood for White's Club, on the strength of winning the International,
and was black-balled, the die was cast.

There was no doubt that Ikey had his qualities. Whether he was your
friend or your enemy, he never forgot you; and he gave you cause to
remember him. His memory was long; his temper not to be ruffled; his
humour, in victory and defeat, invincible; his purse unfathomable. He
was never known to be angry, impetuous, or bitter. And he never deviated
from his aim. That aim, as he once told the New York Yacht Club, in
words that were trumpeted across the world, was "to lick the English
thoroughbred on his own ground, at his own game, all the time, and every
way."

What P. Forilland had done for a previous generation of Americans, when
Iroquois snatched the Blue Riband of the Turf from the English and bore
it across the Atlantic, Ikey meant to do some day at Liverpool.

"We've wopped 'em once on the flat, and we'll wop 'em yet across
country," he once said at Meadow Brook.

It was with this end in view that Chukkers, then a kid-jockey from the
West, had crossed the ocean in Ikey's train, and first carried to
victory the star-spangled jacket which for the past twenty years had
caused such heart-burnings among the English owners, trainers, and
jockeys, and such mingled enthusiasm and indignation in the
uncertain-tempered English crowd.

In that twenty years Ikey, if he had never yet achieved his end and won
the Grand