Grit, Sand and the Turf.

Roa's racecourse was a nine-mile beach, and every mile was as smooth as the sales talk of a Grecian oil merchant. Everything transportable attended the races, including ten barrels of necessary enthusiasm, wives and sweethearts. The Shepherd's Plate was about to be run. Skinny was mounted. He patted Gentle Annie in a last attempt to heal the breach. She tried to bite his leg. The gun went off. One horse fell over and the remaining nine took off for the south. They bunched for a furlong, and then Gentle Annie drew ahead. Skinny's impression was that he was being hurled through a sand storm on a three-legged camel with delirium trimmings. He was too busy trying to keep abreast of events to see the scenery passing in leaps and bounds, or to hear the shouts emanating from the sandhills. Not his to reason why, but his to do or die—or both. After several years of sustained effort the galloping ball of sand and horse-flesh reached the judge, with Gentle Annie leading by a length. Unfortunately the judge had armed himself with a large red flag with which to signal when the race was run and won. As Gentle Annie pounded past she glimpsed the emblem of revolt from the corner of her wild white eye, and emitting a scream like an engine whistle with laryngitis, she turned her back on the sea and made for the beyond, beyond the beyond. Skinny's knees were so stiff from cramp that he could not have fallen off even had he so desired.

Skinny, like John Gilpin gallopin', threatened and cajoled, but Gentle Annie was as immune from the contagion of speech as a deaf mute at an auction sale. A lone cow-herd threw a bucket at them as they zoomed through his yard. Dogs chased them. Men cursed them; but no one stopped them. They missed disaster by a whisker a hundred times. Water hazards, bunkers, broken ground; they were as nothing to Gentle Annie; but she holed out at the hundredth-and-ninth. Skinny remembers little of the final fracture of their long association. He had a fair recollection of going up, and was sure that Gentle Annie wasn't with him at the moment. He remained poised like a “blimp” quiescent in a field of azure, for sufficiently long to admire the wonders of Nature; the descent was swifter, and terminated in a night attack accompanied by Verey lights, a barrage of gasometers, and a mine explosion. Then a very old gentleman, wearing white whiskers and a bunch of keys, demanded his gateticket. While he was searching for it, three other gentlemen with black whiskers, telling each other to handle him easy, lifted him into a cart.

This terminated Skinny's connection with the turf and the sport of kings.

But it's impossible to cure Skinny. His latest ambition is to get a job on the Railways as a shunter, his contention being that the iron horse is the only sort of horse on which you can ride in front and look where you're going, while you go where you're looking.