the favorite, some eight lengths behind, seemed to have forgotten that he was in the race at all.  The public had made up its mind that it had been cheated, when all at once the great horse, coming up with a rush, passed all his rivals at a bound, to resume at their head his former easy and tranquil pace.  There had not been even a contest:  Gladiateur had merely put himself on his legs, and all had been said.  These three victories brought in to Comte de Lagrange the sum of four hundred and forty-one thousand seven hundred and twenty-five francs, to say nothing of the bets.  Gladiateur afterward won the race of six thousand metres (two miles fourteen furlongs) which now bears his name, and also the Great St. Leger at Doncaster.  He was beaten but once—­in the Cambridgeshire, where he was weighted at a positively absurd figure, and when, moreover, the track was excessively heavy.  After his retirement from the turf he was sold in 1871 for breeding purposes in England for two hundred thousand francs, and died in 1876.

Like M. Fould and several other brethren of the turf, Comte de Lagrange felt the discouragements of the Franco-German war, and sold all his horses to M. Lefevre.  Fortunately, however, he had retained in his stud at Dangu a splendid lot of breeding-mares, and with these he has since been able to reconstruct a stable of the first order, though the effort has cost him a very considerable sum.  Indeed, he himself admits that to cover expenses he would have to make as much as thirty thousand pounds every year.  Four times victorious in the French Derby before 1870, he has since repeated this success for two successive years—­in 1878 with Insulaire, and in 1879 with Zut.  His colors (blue jacket with red sleeves and a red cap) are as well known in England as in his own country.  Within the last six years he has three times won the Oaks at Epsom with Regalia, Reine and Camelia, the Goodwood Cup with Flageolet, the two thousand guineas and the Middlepark and Dewhurst Plates with Chamant.  On the 12th of June, last year, at Ascot, he gained two races out of three, and in the third one of his horses came in second.

But the count is by no means always a winner, nor does he always win with the horse that, by all signs, ought to be the victor.  He has somehow acquired, whether justly or not, the reputation of being a “knowing hand” upon the turf, and all turfmen will understand what is implied in the term, whether of good or of evil.  His stable has been called a “surprise-box,” which simply means that the “horse carrying the first colors does not always carry the money;” that people who think they know the merits of his horses frequently lose a good deal by the unexpected turn of affairs upon the track; and that the count, in short, manages to take care of himself in exercising the undoubted right of an owner, as by rule established, to win if he can with any one of the horses that he may have running together for any given event.  Nothing dishonorable, according to the laws of the turf, has ever been proved, nor perhaps even been charged, against him; but as one of his countrymen, from whom I have just now quoted, remarks, “He is fond of showing to demonstration that a man does not keep two hundred horses in training just to amuse the gallery.”