The sky, the green of the fields, the still, home-like, comforting trees, the mass of glorious colour, the hundreds of horses that weren't running and the scores that were to run, sleek and long, and made like shining silk and steel, it all was like heaven on earth to me--a horse-race heaven on earth.

There you have the state of my mind in those days, the kind of man I was." Sitting up, he gazed straight in front of him as though he saw Epsom Downs before his eyes; as though he was watching the fateful race that bore him down.

He was terribly, exhaustingly alive.

Something possessed him, and he possessed his hearers.
"It was just as I said and knew--my horse, Flamingo, stretched away from the rest at Tattenham Corner and came sailing away home two lengths ahead.

It was a sight to last a lifetime, and that was what I meant it to be for me.