Blanketed hunters are having their legs rubbed or being led up and down by grooms.  Comes a broken-winded tootle on a coach-horn and the black-and-scarlet drag of the local garrison trundles into view.  The unsophisticated gun-horses in the lead shy violently at the flapping canvas of an orange-stall and swerve to the left into a roulette-booth presided over by a vociferous ancient in a tattered overcoat and blue spectacles.  The gamblers scatter like flushed partridges and the ancient bites the turf beneath his upturned board amid a shower of silver coins.  The leaders, scared by the animated table, and the blood-curdling invocations and wildly-waving arms and legs of the fallen croupier, shy violently in the opposite direction and disappear into the refreshment-tent, whence issue the crash of crockery and the shrieks of the attendant Hebes. (Lieut.- Commander KENWORTHY should have some questions to pop about this at Westminster when next the Irish Question comes up.)

The bookmakers are perched a-top of a grassy knoll which overlooks the whole course, and around them surges the crowd.

* * * * *

Scarecrow (in somebody’s cast-off dinner-jacket and somebody else’s abandoned hunting breeches.) Kyard of the races!  Kyard of the races!

Farmer. Here y’ are.  How much?

Scarecrow. Wan shillin’-an’-sixpence, Sorr.

Farmer. There’s “Price wan shillin’” printed on ut, ye blagyard.

Scarecrow. The sixpence is for the Government’s little Intertainmints Tax, Sorr.

Farmer. Oh, go to the divil!

Scarecrow. Shure an’ I will if yer honour’ll give me a letther of inthroduction.  We’ll call ut a shillin’, thin, and I’ll sthand the loss mesilf.

[Farmer parts with the price and the Scarecrow dodges swiftly into the crowd.  The Farmer peruses the card and frowns in a puzzled way; then the date catches his eye and he curses and tears the list to pieces.

Farmer. Drat take the little scut; he’s sold me last year’s kyard!

Cattle-Dealer (shouting). Hi, sthop him there!

Farmer. Whist, let him go.  Let him trap some others first the way I’ll not be the only mug on the market this day.

Trickster (setting up his table and jerking his cards about). I’m afther losin’ a pony to thim robbers beyant, but, as Pierpont Rockafeller said to Jawn D. Morgan, “business is business, an’ if ye don’t speculate ye won’t accumulate.”  Spot the dame and my money’s yours; spot the blank and yours is mine.  “The quickness of the hand deceives the eye, or vicy-versy,” as Lord Carnegie remarked to Andrew Rothschild.  Walk up, walk up, my sporty gintlemen and thry yer luck wid the owld firm.

Farmer. There go the harses down to the post.  Who’s that leadin’ on the black?

Dealer. Young Misther Darley, no less.  ’Tis a great fella for all kinds of divarsion he is, the same.  I was beyant to Darleystown this week past and found him fightin’ a main o’cocks before the fire in his grandmother’s drawin’-room.  Herself riz up off her bed and gave the two of us the father and mother of a dhrubbin’ wid her crutch, an’ she desthroyed wid the gout an’ all.