Young infantry officers and the junior bar--they were for the most part mighty nice to look at, but very raw about racing.

How long I might have gone on in this way I cannot say; but one morning I fell in with a fat, elderly gentleman, in shorts and gaiters, mounted on a dun cob pony, that was very fidgety and hot tempered, and appeared to give the rider a great deal of uneasiness.
"'He's a spicy hack you're on, sir,' said I, 'and has a go in him, I'll be bound.' "'I rayther think he has,' said the old gentleman, half testily.
"'And can trot a bit, too.' "'Twelve Irish miles in fifty minutes, with my weight.' Here he looked down at a paunch like a sugar hosghead.
"'Maybe he's not bad across a country,' said I, rather to humour the old fellow, who, I saw, was proud of his poney.
"'I'd like to see his match, that's all.' Here he gave a rather contemptuous glance at my hack.
"Well, one word led to another, and it ended at last in our booking a match, with which one party was no less pleased than the other.

It was this: each was to ride his own horse, starting from the school in the Park, round the Fifteen Acres, outside the Monument, and back to the start--just one heat, about a mile and a half--the ground good, and only soft enough.

In consideration, however, of his greater weight, I was to give odds in the start; and as we could not well agree on how much, it was at length decided that he was to get away first, and I to follow as fast as I could, after drinking a pewter quart full of Guinness's double stout--droll odds, you'll say, but it was the old fellow's own thought, and as the match was a soft one, I let him have his way.
"The next morning the Phoenix was crowded as if for a review.

There were all the Dublin notorieties, swarming in barouches, and tilburies, and outside jaunting-cars--smart clerks in the post-office, mounted upon kicking devils from Dycer's and Lalouette's stables--attorney's wives and daughters from York-street, and a stray doctor or so on a hack that looked as if it had been lectured on for the six winter months at the College of Surgeons.