at do you mean when you say you never gave in?" asked Conway,
half sternly.

"What do I mean?" said Beecher, repeating the words, half stunned by the
boldness of the question,--"what do I mean? Why, I mean that they never
saw me 'down,'--that no man can say Annesley Beecher ever said 'die.'
Have n't I had my soup piping hot,--spiced and peppered too! Was n't I
in for a pot on Blue Nose, when Mope ran a dead heat with Belshazzar for
the Cloudeslie,--fifteen to three in fifties twice over, and my horse
running in bandages, and an ounce of corrosive sublimate in his stomach!
Well, you 'd not believe it,--I don't ask any one to believe it that
did n't see it,--but I was as cool as I am here, and I walked up to
Lady Tinkerton's drag and ate a sandwich; and when she said, 'Oh!
Mr. Beecher, do come and tell me what to bet on,' I said to her,
'Quicksilver's the fastest of metals, but don't back it just now.' They
had it all over the course in half an hour: 'Quicksilver's the fastest
of metals--'"

"I'm afraid I don't quite catch your meaning."

"It was alluding to the bucketing, you know. They 'd just given Blue
Nose corrosive sublimate, which is a kind of quicksilver."

"Oh, I perceive," said Conway.

"Good,--wasn't it?" said Beecher, chuckling. "Let A. B. alone to 'sarve
them out,'--that's what all the legs said!" And then he heaved a little
sigh, as though to say that, after all, even wit and smartness were only
a vanity and a vexation of spirit, and that a "good book" was better
than them all.

"I detest the whole concern," said Conway. "So long as gentlemen bred
and trained to run their horses in honorable rivalry, it was a noble
sport, and well became the first squirearchy of the world; but when it
degenerated into a field for every crafty knave and trickster,--when
the low cunning of the gambler succeeded to the bold daring of the true
lover of racing,--then the turf became no better than the _rouge et
noir_ table, without even the poor consolation of thinking that chance
was any element in the result."

"Why, what would you have? It's a game where the best player wins,
that's all," broke in Beecher.

"If you mean it is always a contest where the best horse carries away
the prize, I enter my denial to the assertion. If it were so, the legs
would have no existence, and all that classic vocabulary of 'nobbling,'
'squaring,' and so on, have no dictionary."

"It's all the same the whole world over," broke in Beech