I confessed with some shame that I did not know how to bet.     

       “That's easy,” said Henry. “I'll show you how when the time comes.”      

       Then we went round among the stables.     

       What a center of influence and power was that half-mile track and the stables about it. It was a primary school of crime, with its museum of blasphemy and its department of slang and lewdness. What a place for the tender soul of youth!     

       There were the sleek trotters passing in and out, booted for their work. In the sulkies behind them were those cursing, kinglike, contemptuous jockeys, so sublime and exalted that they were even beyond the reach of our envy. There were the great prancing, beautiful stallions, and the swipes—heroic, foul-mouthed, proud, free, and some of them dog-faced. Scarred, sniffing bulldogs were among them, spaniels with grace locks on their brows, sleek little fox terriers, and now and then a roaring mastiff. How we envied them! We became their willing slaves, we boys of the school, fetching water and sweeping floors for the sacred privilege of rubbing a horse's leg. In the end some had been kicked out of the stables, but they did not mind that. What was that if they could only play swipes and rub a horse's leg? It only heightened their respect and their will to return.     

       As my life went on I saw how these leading lights of Griggsby shone, like stars, above the paths of the young who were choosing their way.     

       We boys began to think that greatness was like a tree, with its top in the brain and its roots in the human stomach, and that the latter needed much irrigation. It seemed to us that poker, inebriety, slangy wit, and the lavish hand were as the foliage of the tree; that fame, wealth, and honor were its fruit; that the goat, the trot-ting-horse, and the millinery store were as birds of the air that sometimes lit in its branches.     

       We boys were wont to gather in an abandoned mill near the Smead house, on the river bank, after school, for practice in chewing and expectoration, and to discuss the affairs of the village.     

       One day Henry Dunbar and Ralph Buckstone had a little flask of whisky, which they had stolen from 

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