The flat-racing season at Newmarket—and incidentally the flat-catching season also—opens with the Craven Meeting on Easter Monday, and ends with the Houghton, or third October Meeting, towards the close of that month. Between these are the Second Spring, the two July, and the First and Second October Meetings, making in all eight annual events. But Newmarket does by no means hibernate with the end of October and merely come to life again in the spring. When the flat-racing ends, the hurdle-racing takes up the thread of sport, and allied with these winter activities are the runs of the Drag Hounds.

There are many courses on the Heath: the Old Cambridgeshire, nearest the town, where the historic Red Post, the Duke’s Stand, and some of the old saddling-stables still remain; the long four-miles’ Beacon Course, little used in its entirety, now that a two miles’ contest is thought a good race; the Rowley Mile, named after Charles II., who was known among his familiars as “Old Rowley,” either from his favourite riding-horse being so named, or else because his sacred Majesty, so grotesque of face, was thought to so greatly resemble a frog—and frogs are still, in country districts, known as “Anthony Rowleys”; the Swaffham Course, and the Bunbury Mile. There is no finer or more bracing race-ground in the kingdom than this of Newmarket Heath, nor one so open, or where every stage of every race can be so well followed. It has no parallel elsewhere, and is certainly the very antithesis of Ascot, Goodwood, and Sandown, which are ladies’ opportunities for display, as much as they are the sportsman’s occasions for betting. Here, when the Cesarewitch and the Two Thousand Guineas are being run off, it is a very serious and earnest business, and toilettes only sparingly relieve the Quaker grey of the sporting crowd.

“No Betting Allowed” is the notice that the enquiring stranger sees repeated several times on notice-boards over against the New Stand. To bet legally you must pay your sovereign, half-sovereign, or five shillings for entrance to the various enclosures in the Stand: to lay or take the odds in the open is an indictable offence. Yet there is nothing else but quiet and earnest, but unostentatious, betting going forward all the while among the crowd assembled outside the rails. The bookmakers in the various rings, sanctified and immune from molestation at the hands of the law, by reason of those entrance-fees, may be heard shouting the odds like maniacs, but here the case is indeed altered. Those notices might really, with more appearance of common sense, be spelled “No Betting Aloud,” for the very large amount of betting that actually does go on, under the very noses of the numerous foot and mounted police stationed here to prevent it, is conducted in undertones. Not whispers, by any means, but offers made by bookmakers in conversational tones, easily to be heard by the crowd at large, of so many to one on the field; with money changing hands, visibly and indubitably, for all the world to see, and the same familiar faces of the bookmakers at every race throughout the year.

Here, in fact, we see the failure of an attempt to make the people moral by Act of Parliament—a failure that in its failing creates a great deal more immorality, and of a less venial kind, than that it originally set out to suppress, for there is nothing more certain than that the police, who do not see these things with the official eye, do most surely observe them with the merely physical eyes of ordinary human beings, and not only refuse to take proper cognisance of them, but “have a bit on” of their own, and thus place themselves in the Gilbertian position of rendering themselves liable to be given into their own custody for betting for ready money in a public place.

It behoves an innocent to be careful how he has that “bit on,” for the Heath at race-time is no place for the guileless stranger with a few odd sovereigns to lose. There are those here whose sole mission in life is to plunder the unwary, and who have the keenest scent for what they elegantly term a “mug.” Their method is a simple one, as you who have the curiosity to test it may find. You hang listlessly over the rails and assume the virtuous air, even if you have it not, of being unspotted from the world. If that, on the other hand, be your usual wear—why, then so much the better. The experimentalist in this sort will not have long to wait before he gets a bite. Already, while he is taking up his position and gazing around with the air of one quite new to racing, he has been singled out from the surrounding crowds and marked down for attack by sharpers who are past-masters in the little frailties of human nature. Two men approach our innocent in being, or in seeming, and one of them, under his very nose, pays a little heap of glittering sovereigns—or counters—into the other’s palm, with the remark that if he, the payee, had only sprung a little more on that dead cert, the winnings would have been really worth winning. Poor human nature swallows that bait as eagerly as trout rise to May flies, and when those two practical philosophers accidentally, as it were, take their victim into their confidence, his gold is already as good as gone. It seems the winner owes his luck to his very good friend here who is “in the know,” and, with an inexhaustible series of good tips from the Ring, is willing—nay, eager—to give, not only his friend, but the most casual pick-up acquaintance of even less than five minutes’ standing, the full benefit of that information which, if applied in the way he presently suggests, has the power of transmuting your silver into gold, and of increasing your solitary sovereign into tens and twenties.

No sport is more enjoyable than that of fooling sharks of this description; it is its own exceeding great reward. You can play them as the fisherman does the salmon, and lead them on with ingenuous innocences and artful idiotcies until they who think they have the greatest simpleton on earth to deal with, find themselves at length fairly gaffed and landed.

The amateur simpleton receives the introduction of “my friend from Tattersall’s” with an air of eager credulity, and casually remarking that he has never before seen a race nor ever made a bet on one, raises the confederates’ hopes to the highest pitch. The “friend from Tattersall’s” has another “moral” for the next race, and recommends a sovereign placed on the selection; whereupon you consider it from this light and from that, and discuss it in all its bearings until they are half-crazed with anxiety. “Surely,” says one, “surely you can afford to back a certainty?” “Of course, if it is a certainty,” you say; and then, with the conscience-stricken qualms of the good young man, “Is it quite right to bet on a certainty?”

But the last touch of comedy comes when, having had those scruples satisfied, you insert an exploratory thumb and finger in your waistcoat pocket, and—find, regretfully, that you have come out without any money!

The effect of this is magical, and as you walk up the course to have a quiet laugh, the bitter curses of the disappointed sharps come after you, in heartfelt undertones. The horse selected for a winner comes in with the ruck, as, of course, these fellows had foreseen.