The cemetery at Newmarket is the traveller’s melancholy introduction to this town of gay memories. It acts the part of that oft-quoted ancient Egyptian custom of seating a skeleton at the feast; for those who go to and from the racecourse, and the budding jockeys who daily exercise the horses on the Bunbury or others of the Heath gallops, can scarce fail to see it and its serried ranks of grandiose white marble monuments. It must inevitably be dispiriting to some, for it emphasises the shortness of our course, enacts the rÔle of mentor, and seems to hint, “Why toil and moil and live laborious days, and why in that toiling stoop to petty meannesses, when at last—and at no distant date—you too must lie with the many racing celebrities of a bygone day, as forgotten as they?” In some sort the roadside cemeteries that now so dolefully are set in the gates of every town may thus be a moral force—although that is to be doubted—but certainly their suggestions of the fleeting nature of life and the essential futility of it are alien from public policy, as likely to sap the energy of the race. The time must needs come, and that soon, when cremation is made compulsory and the wayside cities of the dead abolished.

The humble gravestone is scarcely to be found in this enclosure. Nothing less than a marble cross will serve the turn of the owners, the trainers, and the jocks who are bedded down here. Captain Machell, a Turf celebrity of later years, lies nearest the gate of any: they say at Newmarket he wished to lie close to the road, near the wall on whose other side the horses go on their morning gallops throughout the year. So unfailingly does sentiment rule, even here!

A racing-man could take you through these groves of ornate monuments and thoroughly perform the part of a horsey “Who’s Who,” but the majority of the names mean nothing to the outside public. One, however, you may read that means much to our generation; it is the name of Archer. Even that section of the public uninterested in horse-racing was familiar with the name and fame of Archer in his life, and in his death he still retains a hold upon the popular imagination. Fred Archer in the early ’80’s was to the racing world what the Prime Minister is in the world of English politics, the Archbishop of Canterbury in matters ecclesiastical, and the President of the Royal Academy in the domain of Art: was, indeed, more to his world than they to theirs, for he occupied his foremost place by sheer merit, and it is not commonly the ablest statesmen, the most pious divines, or the most gifted of painters who are thus elevated above their especial spheres of activity.

It was no shame, even to the most puritanical, to know who Archer was. “Archer up!” became a synonym for success at the time when he flourished. And how he did flourish! He was but twenty-nine years of age when he died, but had long been world-famous. Born at Cheltenham in 1857, the son of a jockey turned publican, he scored his first win on Atholl Daisy, at Chester, September 28th, 1870. In 1872 he won the Cesarewitch, and in 1874 the Two Thousand Guineas, on Lord Falmouth’s Atlantic. From that time forth he was the foremost jockey, and was so successful that he became a superstition with backers. To his skilful and daring riding fell such remarkable successes as the Derby and St. Leger in 1877, and in 1885 the Derby, Oaks, Grand Prix, St. Leger, and Two Thousand Guineas. In the whole of his career he rode to victory no fewer than 2,748 winners; a record no other jockey has approached. His riding weight was 8 stone 10 lbs. In earnings and presents he is said to have made over £60,000 in those fourteen years that comprised his career. Archer’s monument is a large white marble cross, carved at the crossing with a spray of roses in high relief, and on the plinth with a rose in full bloom, represented as though having fallen from the spray. It was originally erected by him to his wife, as may be gathered from the inscription:—

Also their infant son, William, January 9th, 1884.

From the gates of this melancholy place one looks down along the whole length of Newmarket High Street. Looking backward, you see the Heath, with the long trail of the road, and the gradually diminishing line of telegraph-poles seen at so acute an angle that they give almost the impression of a close-set palisade: no place so excellent as this for the purpose of instructing the young idea into the meaning of perspective.

The Heath comes up to the very doors of the town, whose broad void street is stretched out there as though it were some Sleepy Hollow whose inhabitants were drowsing away an empty life. But no greater mistake could possibly be made: there are no more wide-awake people in the world than here. Even at Doncaster, where the St. Leger keeps the minds of the Yorkshire tykes whetted to the keenest edge, there are not sharper folks.

A race-day during the July or Houghton Meeting makes a very different picture. Special trains have by midday brought thousands of sportsmen from London and elsewhere, and the great mansions in the town, usually closed, are filled with gay parties. Every public-house does a roaring trade, and the street is thronged with an astonishing number of cabs and every variety of fly and victoria, whose drivers are all extravagantly eager to drive you to the course. Whence those vehicles come might form an interesting subject of speculation. Stalls for the sale of all manner of possible and impossible things form a continuous line along that broad thoroughfare. Even uncooked pork sausages are offered for sale, but what the class of people who flock into Newmarket for half a day are supposed to want with them it is difficult to conceive. The Newmarket sportsman is scarcely the kind of person who might be expected to carry a pound or so of pork sausages with him on to the course, or on his lap, going home.

In addition to all these stalls and booths, the sellers of “race cards” are much in evidence, and a long procession of men with that characteristic equipment of the racing-man, the field-glasses slung over the shoulders, winds slowly up the long way to the Stand. These are devotees of the great goddess Chance, who, like Justice, is blind. They do not hurry, because they have often trod the same path: they are neither joyful nor gloomy, but just stolid and businesslike, because they have come this way with such a succession of varied fortune that they take gain or loss with unchanged demeanour and equal fortitude, and when they return you shall seek in vain to guess the luck of the day from their unemotional countenances.

The racing is all done by 3.30 p.m., and in another hour the course is clear, the town empty of strangers. But the inns are filled with stable-folk and the many nondescript hangers-on of a great racing centre. As the evening wears away even the inns clear, and at ten o’clock all is quiet, except perhaps for a painful orchestra of three itinerant musicians playing injuriously outside the “Black Bear.” A drizzly rain falls and the musicians disperse, greatly to the relief of the ear that listens, not so much because it would as because it must. Newmarket’s race-day is done, and the cats make love, undisturbed, in the porticoes. Only within the mansions of the great is the excitement of the day continued, and there they play bridge until morning glints greyly through the shutters