rudes itself upon
the sports or pastimes which we most affected in the days when some
of us had more time or a greater predilection to indulge in them.

We so often go back to an old stamping ground expecting to find old
friends or to meet the characters which to a great extent added to
the charm of local coloring, and nothing disappoints us more than to
find that they have all either gone the way of the earth or changed
their manner of living and habitat.

I think this is brought more forcibly to mind when we view the turf
activities of an earlier generation as compared with those more
modern, because nowadays the game is played differently all around
and doesn't look the same from the viewpoint of one who loved the
spectacular and quaint figures that so distinguished what we might
call the Victorian Era of American racing.

The sport of emperors has to a great extent become the pastime of
King Moneybags. And there is no place for ancient crusaders like Old
Man Curry, so he has taken the remnants of his stable and gone back
to the farm or merged into the humdrum and neutral tinted landscape
which always designates the conventional and ordinary.

He doesn't fit in any more. The cost of maintaining a racing stable
is almost ten times greater than it was in the days when he and his
kind went up and down the country making the great adventure. Racing
has been systematized and ticketed and labeled in such a way that it
is only very rich men who can afford to indulge in it. The tracks
west of Louisville are all closed. The skeleton hand of the gloom
distributor has put padlocks on the gates. Even if Old Man Curry was
with us to-day, his sphere of action would be limited, unless he
elected to play a game where the odds would be so immeasurably
against him that he would be beaten long before he started.

So it is that when Charlie Van Loan went away, he bequeathed to us
the records of a peculiar nomadic people which are now almost like
the argonauts and whose manner of living and happy-go-lucky ways are
but a memory. It is strange that although the turf has always formed
a prolific medium for writing people and has lent itself admirably to
fiction, very few authors seem to have taken advantage of the
opportunities offered.

As in other branches of sport, Van Loan was quick to see this and he
gave us story after story of the kind that men love to read and
chuckle over and retail to the first man they meet. And so when yo