that in one year he had backed
the winner in all the principal races. But such was veritably the case.

"There's nothing in it, Marge," he said to me one evening. "There's only
one sure way to win--back every horse in the race with another man's
money. I tell a customer the tale that I was shaving a well-known
trainer that morning, and that the trainer had given me a certainty; all
I ask is that the customer will put half-a-crown on for me. I repeat the
process, changing the name of the certainty, until I have got all risks
covered. I know it's old fashioned, but I like it. It demands nothing
but patience, and it cannot possibly go wrong."

But it did go wrong. He was telling the tale of how the well-known
trainer had given him the certainty to a new customer, whom Spearmint
had never shaved before. By a disastrous coincidence it happened that
the new customer actually was that well-known trainer. He seemed to
think that Spearmint had taken a liberty with his name, and even to
resent it.

Spearmint did not lose the sight of the left eye, as was at one time
feared, but his looks have never been quite the same since his nose was
broken.

My next brother, Orby, was born in 1870. He could do the most graceful
and charming things. When his namesake won the Derby in 1907, he
immediately acquired a complimentary Irish accent, and employed it in
the narration of humorous stories. An accent acquired at the age of
thirty-seven is perhaps liable to lack conviction, and I always thought
that my brother was over-scrupulous in beginning every sentence with the
word "Bedad." Like myself, he simply did not know what fear was, and in
consequence told his Irish stories in his own Irish accent to a real
Irishman. However, now that he has got his new teeth in you would never
know that he had been hit. It was said of him by a great legal
authority--I forget in which police-court--that he had the best manners
and the least honesty of any taxi-driver on the Knightsbridge rank.

Another brother, Sunstar, acquired considerable reputation by his skill
in legerdemain. If you lent him a watch or a coin, with one turn of his
hand he would make it disappear; he could do the same thing when you
had not lent it. He could make anything disappear that was not
absolutely screwed to the floor, and at public-houses where he was known
the pewter from which he drank was always chained to the bar. He had
something of my own quixotic nature, and would pr