Bunch had just tied his Bubble to a tree at the track and was in the act of giving it a long cool drink of gasolene and some cracked oats, when Flash Harvey bore down on us and made a touch for the turn-out.

“Say, Bunch!” chirped Flash, “lend me the choo-choo for half an hour, will you?  I have my sister and a dream cousin of ours from Hartford here this aft. and I’m eager to show them how I can pound a public road with a rowdy-cart.  I’ll take good care of the machine and be back in two hours, honest, Bunch!”

Flash being an old friend of ours Bunch had to fall for the spiel and loaned him the Bubble forthwith.

Ten minutes later we were so busy listening to the sure-things falling from the eager tongues of the various friends we met that we quite forgot all about Flash and the busy barouche.

The first cinch-builder we fell over was Harry McDonough, the inventor of the stingless mosquito now in use on his Jersey farm.

Harry has the mosquito game down so fine that he’s going to take a double sextette of them into vaudeville next season.

He has trained these twelve skeets to sing “Zobia Grassa,” and Al Holbrook has promised to teach them a Venetian dances.

Harry offered us four winners in the first race and two cigars.  He told us if we lost to smoke the cigars carefully and we’d forget our troubles and our names; but if we won we could use the cigars as firecrackers.

Then we ran across Jeff D’Angelis, the composer of the new tune now played on the automobile horns.

Jeff hadn’t picked out a horse to win any race because his loyalty to sneeze-wagons is so intense that he won’t even drink a horse’s neck.

He explained that he only came to the race track to show the horses his smoke-buggy and make them shiver.

George Yates, the inventor of the machinery for removing sunburn from pickles, was there and he tried to present us with a sure winner in the third race.

A little later on we discovered that the horse Yates was doing a rave over had been dead for four years and that the card from which he was lifting his dope was the program of the meet at Sheepshead in 1896.

Some kind and thoughtful stranger had lifted fifty cent| from George’s surplus and in return had stung him with an ancient echo of the pittypats.

Our next adventure was with Joe Miron, the famous horse trainer and inventor of the only blue mare in captivity at Elmhurst.

“Say, why didn’t I see you guys before the first race; I had a plush-covered pipe!” yelled Joe.

“I had that race beat to a stage wait,” Joe went on, enthusiastically.  “Why, all you had to do was play ’The Goblin Man’ to win and ‘Murderallo’ for a place—­it was just like getting money from the patent medicine business.”

“How much did you win, Joe?” I inquired.