Strange that a bookmaker, who by his trade must be accustomed to miracles, should find it difficult to believe in David and Goliath.  He was possibly a man who betted on form, and on form Goliath should undoubtedly have won.  David was an outsider.  He had no breeding.  He would have been surprised if he could have foreseen how his victory would rankle some thousands of years later in the soul of an honest English bookmaker.

It is, however, just these matters of form and breeding that raise horse-racing and betting above the intellectual level of a game of nap.  Betting men who ignore these things are as unintellectual as the average novelist.  There are some, for instance, who shut their eyes and bring down a pin or a pencil on a list of names of the horses, in the hope that in this way they may discover a winner.  No doubt they may.  It is perhaps as good a way as any other.  But there is something trivial in such methods.  This is mere gambling for the sake of excitement.  There is no more fundamental brainwork in it than in a game I saw being played in a railway carriage the other day, when a man drew a handful of coins from his pocket and bet his friend half-a-sovereign that there would be more heads than tails lying uppermost.  This is a game at which it is possible to lose five pounds in two minutes.  It is the sort of game to which a betting man will resort when in extremis, but only then.  The ruling passion is strong, however.  I have a friend who on one occasion went into retreat in a Catholic monastery.  Two well-known bookmakers had also gone into temporary retreat for the good of their souls.  My friend told me that even during the religious services the bookmakers used to bet as to which of the monks would stand up first at the conclusion of a prayer, and that in the solemn hush of the worship he would suddenly hear a hoarse whisper:  “Two to one on Brownie”—­a brother with hair of that colour—­and the answer:  “I take you, Joe.”  I have even heard of men betting as to which of two raindrops on a window-pane will reach the bottom first.  It is possible to bet on cats, rats or flies.  Calvinists do not bet, because they believe that everything that happens is a certainty.  The extreme betting man is no Calvinist, however.  He believes that most things are accidents, and the rest catastrophes.  Hence his philosophy is almost always that of Epicurus.  To him every day is a new day, at the end of which it is his aim to be able to say, like Horace, Vixi, or, as the text ought perhaps to read, Vici.

The intellectual betting man, on the other hand, has a position somewhere between the extremes of Calvinism and Epicureanism.  He worships neither certainty nor chance.  He reckons up probabilities.  When Mr Asquith picked out Spion Kop as the winner of the Derby, he did so because he went about the business of selection not with a pin or a pencil, but with one of the best brains in England.  In the course of his long conflicts with the House of