ing good. This being the
case, people must study the science of betting just as politicians
study the ways of the electorate.

A shrewd-spoken gentleman with ruddy features and fierce white
moustachioes to whom I was introduced in the paddock, told me some of
these rules he had learned. He said "My Good Lady, I can see you have
an honest face, although you come from Western Canada where the people
are exceedingly singular. I will therefore proceed to tell you in
confidence what I know concerning the canons of betting."

"A tip, so far as I can make out"--and here he flicked a butterfly off
my shoulder--"is a secret told to the whole betting ring."

"Unless you have money to lose you should bet small till you are using
money which you have won."

He told me many other rules about gambling, with much eagerness, for he
seemed to conceive a liking for me, but it avails nothing that I tell
them to you, in that no man gives heed to another man's method of
plying the art, thinking his own a vastly greater superiority, in which
respect gamblers do closely approach to the fraternity of the pen known
as authors.

* * * * *

This Woodbine race-course is a fair tarrying place, and I enjoy its
beauty with luxurious wonder. Outside its high palings, there are
thickly peopled, fusty streets, for this is the very heart of the city.
Why any place should be called the heart of the city I cannot
conjecture, except that both the civic and human heart are places of
huge trafficking and, above all things, desperately wicked.

The near foreground is a finely brushed lawn that, here and there, has
burst into flame-red flowers. In the centre of the ring where the
hunters take the hedges, two beautiful elms hold themselves proudly
erect as if to say, "Look at us, O woman of little wit! look at us; we
are finer creations than man, or even than horses."

Off in the background, with nothing intervening save the elms, little
sailing yachts like white birds, rock and dip in the sapphire blue of
the bay. Strong-built motor-boats scud across the horizon in so
terrific a hurry one can hardly follow their wake for dust. (The
editor will kindly permit me to say "dust.") We watch them, from our
box, three women of us, with a field-glass which we use in turn for all
the world like the three hoary witches who had only one eye between
them.

I like this landscape better than our prairie. The trouble with the
prai