began to drink beer and to go to race-meetings. He rapidly rose from
the position of carpenter to that of bookmaker, and, were it not for
his infernal gift of charity, he would probably now be driving his own
car and be hall-marked with a Coalition title. Even as it was, he was
much more prosperous than any carpenter. Whenever he produced money,
it was in pocketfuls and handfuls. Strange that a bookmaker, who by
his trade must be accustomed to miracles, should find it difficult to
believe in David and Goliath. He was possibly a man who betted on
form, and on form Goliath should undoubtedly have won. David was an
outsider. He had no breeding. He would have been surprised if he could
have foreseen how his victory would rankle some thousands of years
later in the soul of an honest English bookmaker.

It is, however, just these matters of form and breeding that raise
horse-racing and betting above the intellectual level of a game of
nap. Betting men who ignore these things are as unintellectual as the
average novelist. There are some, for instance, who shut their eyes
and bring down a pin or a pencil on a list of names of the horses, in
the hope that in this way they may discover a winner. No doubt they
may. It is perhaps as good a way as any other. But there is something
trivial in such methods. This is mere gambling for the sake of
excitement. There is no more fundamental brainwork in it than in a
game I saw being played in a railway carriage the other day, when a
man drew a handful of coins from his pocket and bet his friend
half-a-sovereign that there would be more heads than tails lying
uppermost. This is a game at which it is possible to lose five pounds
in two minutes. It is the sort of game to which a betting man will
resort when _in extremis_, but only then. The ruling passion is
strong, however. I have a friend who on one occasion went into retreat
in a Catholic monastery. Two well-known bookmakers had also gone into