s,--more than his share. He had been in at some of
the "very best-robberies" ever done at Newmarket. The horses he had
"nobbled," the jockeys "squared," the owners "hocussed," were legion.
All the matches he had "made safe," all the fights he had sold, would
have filled five columns of "Bell's Life." In whatever called itself
"sport" he had dabbled and cheated for years; and yet, there he was,
with all his successes and all his experiences, something more than
fifteen thousand pounds worse than ruined.

Worthy reader, have you stood by while some enthusiastic admirer of
Turner's later works has, in all the fervor of his zeal, encomiumized
one of those strange, incomprehensible creations, where cloud and sea,
atmosphere, shadow and smoke, seem madly commingled with tall masts
piercing the lurid vapor, and storm-clouds drifting across ruined
towers? If at first you gladly welcomed any guidance through the
wondrous labyrinth, and you accepted gratefully the aid of one who could
reconcile seeming incongruities, and explain apparent difficulties, what
was your disappointment, at last, to discover that from some defect of
organization, some absent power of judgment, you could not follow the
elucidation; that you saw no power in this, no poetry in that; that no
light gleamed into _your_ soul out of all that darkness, nor any hope
into _your_ heart, from the mad confusion of that chaos? Pretty much
the same mystification had it been to you to have listened to Annes-ley
Beecher's account of his friend Grog Davis. It was evident that _he_
saw the reason for everything,--he could account for all; but, alas! the
explanatory gift was denied him. The very utmost you could attain to was
a glimmering perception that there were several young men of rank and
station who had only half trusted the distinguished Davis, and in their
sparing confidence had rescued themselves from his knavery; that very
artful combinations occasionally require confederates, and confederates
are not always loyal; that Grog occasionally did things with too high a
hand,--in plain words, reserved for himself more than his share of the
booty; and, in fact, that, with the best intentions and the most decided
determination to put others "into the hole," he fell in himself, and so
completely, too, that he had never been able to show his head out of it
ever since.

If, therefore, as we have said, Annesley Beecher's explanation of these
tangled skeins was none of the c