nd says to
the chemist 'Give us soom sal volatile or soom damned thing o' that
soort, in wather--my head's bad!' And I look at the back of his bad head
repeated in long, long lines on the race course, and in the betting
stand and outside the betting rooms in the town, and I vow to God that I
can see nothing in it but cruelty, covetousness, calculation,
insensibility, and low wickedness."

Even a half-appalling kind of luck was not absent from my friend's
experiences at the race course, when, what he called a "wonderful,
paralysing, coincidence" befell him. He bought the card; facetiously
wrote down three names for the winners of the three chief races (never
in his life having heard or thought of any of the horses, except that
the winner of the Derby, who proved to be nowhere, had been mentioned to
him); "and, if you can believe it without your hair standing on end,
those three races were won, one after another, by those three horses!!!"
That was the St. Leger-day, of which he also thought it noticeable,
that, though the losses were enormous, nobody had won, for there was
nothing but grinding of teeth and blaspheming of ill-luck. Nor had
matters mended on the Cup-day, after which celebration "a groaning
phantom" lay in the doorway of his bed-room and howled all night. The
landlord came up in the morning to apologise, "and said it was a
gentleman who had lost L1500 or L2000; and he had drunk a deal
afterwards; and then they put him to bed, and then he--took the 'orrors,
and got up, and yelled till morning."[212] Dickens might well believe,
as he declared at the end of his letter, that if a boy with any good in
him, but with a dawning propensity to sporting and betting, were but
brought to the Doncaster races soon enough, it would cure him.

FOOTNOTES:

[207] The framework for this sketch was a graphic description, also done
by Dickens, of the celebrated Charity at Rochester founded in the
sixteenth century by Richard Watts, "for six poor travellers, who, not
being Rogues or Proctors, may receive gratis for one night, lodging,
entertainment, and fourpence each." A quaint monument to Watts is the
most prominent object on the wall of the south-west transept of the
cathedral, and underneath it is now placed a brass thus inscribed:
"CHARLES DICKENS. Born at Portsmouth, seventh of February 1812. Died at
Gadshill Place by Rochester, ninth of June 1870. Buried in Westminster
Abbey. To connect his memory with the scenes in whic