als, and so forth, and when he
begins to show signs of aptitude he is put up to ride for his master in
public. If he is a born horseman, like Archer or Robinson, he may make
his mark long before his indentures are returned to him, and he is at
once surrounded by a horde of flatterers who do their best to spoil him.
There is no cult so distinguished by slavishness, by gush, by
lavishness, as jockey-worship, and a boy needs to have a strong head and
sound, careful advisers, if he is to escape becoming positively
insufferable. When the lad Robinson won the St. Leger, after his horse
had been left at the post, he was made recipient of the most frantic and
silly toadyism that the mind can conceive; the clever trainer to whom he
was apprenticed received L1,500 for transferring the little fellow's
services, and he is now a celebrity who probably earns a great deal more
than Professor Owen or Mr. Walter Besant. The tiny boy who won the
Cesarevitch on Don Juan received L1,000 after the race, and it must be
remembered that this child had not left school. Mr. Herbert Spencer has
not earned L1,000 by the works that have altered the course of modern
thought; the child Martin picked up the amount in a lump, after he had
scurried for less than five minutes on the back of a feather-weighted
thoroughbred. As the jockey grows older and is freed from his
apprenticeship he becomes a more and more important personage; if his
weight keeps well within limits he can ride four or five races every day
during the season; he draws five guineas for a win, and three for the
mount, and he picks up an infinite number of unconsidered trifles in the
way of presents, since the turfite, bad or good, is invariably a
cheerful giver. The popular jockey soon has his carriages, his horses,
his valet, and his sumptuous house; noblemen, millionaires, great dames,
and men and women of all degrees conspire to pamper him: for
jockey-worship, when it is once started, increases in intensity by a
sort of geometrical progression. A shrewd man of the world may smile
grimly when he hears that a popular rider was actually received with
royal honours and installed in the royal box when he went to the theatre
during his honeymoon, but there are the facts. It was so, and the best
people of the fine town in which this deplorable piece of toadyism was
perpetrated were tolerably angry at the time. If the sporting
journalists perform their work of puffery with skill and care, the