temporary retreat for the good of their souls. My friend told me that
even during the religious services the bookmakers used to bet as to
which of the monks would stand up first at the conclusion of a prayer,
and that in the solemn hush of the worship he would suddenly hear a
hoarse whisper: "Two to one on Brownie"--a brother with hair of that
colour--and the answer: "I take you, Joe." I have even heard of men
betting as to which of two raindrops on a window-pane will reach the
bottom first. It is possible to bet on cats, rats or flies. Calvinists
do not bet, because they believe that everything that happens is a
certainty. The extreme betting man is no Calvinist, however. He
believes that most things are accidents, and the rest catastrophes.
Hence his philosophy is almost always that of Epicurus. To him every
day is a new day, at the end of which it is his aim to be able to say,
like Horace, _Vixi_, or, as the text ought perhaps to read, _Vici_.

The intellectual betting man, on the other hand, has a position
somewhere between the extremes of Calvinism and Epicureanism. He
worships neither certainty nor chance. He reckons up probabilities.
When Mr Asquith picked out Spion Kop as the winner of the Derby, he
did so because he went about the business of selection not with a pin
or a pencil, but with one of the best brains in England. In the course
of his long conflicts with the House of Lords he had probably
interested himself somewhat profoundly in questions of heredity and
pedigree, and he was thus well equipped for an investigation into the
records of the parentage and grandparentage of the various Derby
horses. All that the ordinary casual better knows about Spion Kop is
that he is the son of Spearmint, which won the Derby in 1906. This,
however, would not alone make him an obviously better horse than
Orpheus, whose sire, Orby, won the Derby in 1907. The student of
breeding must be a feminist, who pays as much attention to the female