nd Military or the Grand National. There were keen
excitement and heavy stakes on the present event; the betting had never
stood still a second in Town or the Shires; and even the "knowing ones,"
the worshipers of the "flat" alone, the professionals who ran down
gentlemen races and the hypercritics who affirmed that there is not such
a thing as a steeple-chaser to be found on earth (since, to be a
fencer, a water-jumper, and a racer were to attain an equine perfection
impossible on earth, whatever it may be in "happy hunting ground" of
immortality)--even these, one and all of them, came eager to see the
running for the Gilt Vase.

For it was known very well that the Guards had backed their horse
tremendously, and the county laid most of its money on him, and
the bookmakers were shy of laying off much against one of the first
cross-country riders of the Service, who had landed his mount at the
Grand National Handicap, the Billesdon Coplow, the Ealing, the Curragh,
the Prix du Donjon, the Rastatt, and almost every other for which he had
entered. Yet, despite this, the "Fancy" took most to Bay Regent; they
thought he would cut the work out; his sire had won the Champion Stakes
at Doncaster, and the Drawing-room at "glorious Goodwood," and that
racing strain through the White Lily blood, coupled with a magnificent
reputation which he brought from Leicestershire as a fencer, found him
chief favor among the fraternity.

His jockey, Jimmy Delmar, too, with his bronzed, muscular, sinewy frame,
his low stature, his light weight, his sunburnt, acute face, and a way
of carrying his hands as he rode that was precisely like Aldcroft's,
looked a hundred times more professional than the brilliance of
"Beauty," and the reckless dash of his well-known way of "sending the
horse along with all he had in him," which was undeniably much more like
a fast kill over the Melton country, than like a weight-for-age race
anywhere. "You see the Service in his stirrups," said an old nobbler who
had watched many a trial spin, lying hidden in a ditch or a drain; and
indisputably you did: Bertie's riding was superb, but it was still the
riding of a cavalryman, not of a jockey. The mere turn of the foot in
the stirrups told it, as the old man had the shrewdness to know.

So the King went down at one time two points in the morning betting.

"Know them flash cracks of the Household," said Tim Varnet, as sharp a
little Leg as ever "got on" a dark thing,