has the appearance of a day’s holiday.  But the racing man knows better.  He is collecting information, coming to decisions, wandering among the bookies in the hope of getting a good price, climbing into the grand stand and descending from it, studying the points of the horses all the time with as little chance of leisure as though he were a stockbroker during a financial crisis or a sailor on a sinking ship.

Perhaps, in the train on the way home from the races, he may relax a little.  Certainly, if he has backed Cutandrun, he will.  For Cutandrun won at ten to one, and his pocket is full of five-pound notes.  He feels quite jocular now that the strain is over.  He makes puns on the names of the defeated horses.  “Lie Low lay low all right,” he announces to the compartment, indifferent to the scowls of the man in the corner who had backed it.  “Hopscotch didn’t hop quite fast enough.”  Were he tipsy, he could not jest more fluently.  His jokes are small, but be not too severe on him.  The man has had a hard day.  Wait but an hour, and care will descend on him again.  He will not have sat down to dinner in his hotel for three minutes till someone will be saying to him:  “Have you heard anything for the Cup to-morrow?” There is no six-hours day for the betting man.  He is the drudge of chance for every waking hour.  He is enviable only for one thing.  He knows what to talk about to barbers.

IV

THE HUM OF INSECTS

It makes all the difference whether you hear an insect in the bedroom or in the garden.  In the garden the voice of the insect soothes; in the bedroom it irritates.  In the garden it is the hum of spring; in the bedroom it seems to belong to the same school of music as the bizz of the dentist’s drill or the saw-mill.  It may be that it is not the right sort of insect that invades the bedroom.  Even in the garden we wave away a mosquito.  Either its note is in itself offensive or we dislike it as the voice of an unscrupulous enemy.  By an unscrupulous enemy I mean an enemy that attacks without waiting to be attacked.  The mosquito is a beast of prey; it is out for blood, whether one is as gentle as Tom Pinch or uses violence.  The bee and the wasp are in comparison noble creatures.  They will, so it is said, never injure a human being unless a human being has injured them.  The worst of it is they do not discriminate between one human being and another, and the bee that floats over the wall into our garden may turn out to have been exasperated by the behaviour of a retired policeman five miles away who struck at it with a spade and roused in it a blind passion for reprisals.  That or something like it is, probably, the explanation of the stings perfectly innocent persons receive from an insect that is said never to touch you if you leave it alone.  As a matter of fact, when a bee loses its head, it does not even wait for a human being in order to relieve its feelings, I