All the way down I kept praying, "Lead not Janey into temptation," knowing right well I would slay any one who kept me out. I take off my hat to myself.
"Dear me!" says John. "One would think you cut your teeth on a bit instead of a pen." Some people like the idea of betting: some don't.
At this Woodbine race-course in Toronto, they no longer have turf accountants. Their days were numbered when careless people started to call them bookies. They have been succeeded by steel slot affairs called pari-mutuel machines. The words pari and mutuel would seem to be almost synonymous, one meaning equal, the other reciprocal. The reciprocal arrangements are like this; the party of the first part gets the money; the party of the second part, the experience. "And the machine?" you ask. (I asked that too.) The machine, which is only an impersonal way of saying the Jockey Club, gets as its commission five per centum of all wagers, and I am told it makes as high as eight thousand dollars the day. There are as many ways of fixing the races as there are of making bannocks on the Mackenzie River, but you can't fix the machine. It never gets tired of being 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."