The purchases made by Hutchins were so
judiciously selected, that he was able in half a
dozen years to realise a large fortune, with
which he had come home and bought an estate
in his own country. On my return to England
I went down to see him, at his earnest request,
and found him living the life of a country
gentleman, much respected in his neighbourhood,
and with an income of some two thousand five
hundred to three thousand pounds a year. His
object in advertising had been to see whether
my relation was in want of money, and if so,
to give him a thousand pounds to put himself
right, in the world. I often see Mr. Hutchins,
either at his own place or in London, and he
frequently talks of the time when he begged
his bread from us at the corner of Piccadilly.

Now for another reminiscence.

When the Derby of 1844 was about to be
run, there were two horses in the race between
which it was said to be a certainty. These were
Leander and Running Rein. Both were
suspected of being more than three years old, and
by degrees betting men became sure that
some treachery had been at work, and both
horses, although allowed to start, did so under
protest. The late Lord George Bentinck and
General (then Colonel) Peel, in common with
every judge of a horse who had seen these
animals, felt certain that they were both
four years old, and consequently had no
business to run in a three-year-old race. Just
before the race Running Rein lashed out
behind, and caught Leander on the knee, which
was smashed so completely that the brute had
to be shot there and then. Having thus rid
himself of the only really dangerous foe, Running
Rein won the race in a canter, the second horse
being Colonel Peel's Orlando. The colonel
determined to try the case in a court of law,
and towards the latter end of 1844, the
celebrated trial of Orlando versus Running
Rein was heard before the late Baron
Alderson, in Westminster Hall. Here it was
proved beyond doubt that Running Rein was
in reality a horse called Maccabeus; that he
was foaled in 1840, and that the swindle had
been concocted and carried out by a certain Mr.
Abraham Levi Goodman, who, with his
confederates, had hoped by this robbery to make a
profit of some fifty thousand pounds. This
was the trial in which Messrs. Cockburn, Lush,
Martin, and Kelly, besides the present Lord
Chelmsford, were engaged as counsel. The
second horse, Orlando, was declared to be the
winner of the stakes.

Two days after the race was run, a friend
of mine, who had laid the odds against
Running Rein, and who firmly believed he had
lost his money, was accosted in the Regent-
street Quadrant by a Jew boy, who put into
his hands a very dirty note, and then bolted
down Air-street. The epistle was folded without
being put in an envelope, and in it was
written in a very schoolboy-like hand:

HONORED SUR, You oncest did me and my
missus a good turn, and i vant to doo you the same,
runing rene is an impostur, an he vont get the
derby staks, bets must go vith staks. I noes all and
I meen peeching; by all the bets on orlando as you
kan and you will make a fortin, no more at present
from your servant,
A. SIMMONS,
formerly your helper at Crick.

At first my friend thought this a hoax,
but after a time he remembered that some
two years previously, when he made Crick
his head-quarters, in order to be near at
hand to hunt in "the shires," he had a
stable-helper called Simmons, and that on one
occasion, when an execution for rent was
put in the cottage of this man, he had at the
cost of five pounds saved him from ruin. He
had since heard that the man had taken service
in a racing stable at Northampton, and putting
these facts together, he had come to the
conclusion that there might be knowledge as well
as good intention in the advice he had received.
On going down to "The Corner" (as Tattersall's
was familiarly called, before it was moved from
Grosvenor-place to Albert Gate) that afternoon,
he heard that the doubts about Running Rein's
identity were being gradually removed, and
that it was not unlikely Orlando would, after
all, be declared the winner of the Derby.
Acting upon this information, he bought, or
caused to be bought up, all the bets in favour
of the second horse. Orlando had stood at
five to one just before the race was run, and by
an investment of some four thousand pounds,
my friend stood to win twenty thousand pounds
if Running Rein was declared to be an
impostor. He determined to go as far as he had
money to help him, and found he could buy up
the bets at a very moderate rate. In less than
a week he had laid out his money on what he
very rightly considered a certainty, and by the
time the Law Courts had come to a decision,
even allowing for a few bad debts, he had
realised rather better than eighteen thousand
pounds on the event of the Derby for 1844.

It is a curious circumstance that "the blue
ribbon of the turf" (a name given to the great
Derby prize by Mr. Disraeli, I believe, when in
1848 he tried to console Lord George Bentinck
for Surplice having won the race just after
Lord George had sold the horse) has in modern
days never fallen to the lot of any of our great
statesmen, although at least three have tried
for it, and of these three, two did so again
and again. Lord Palmerston thought he had
a very fair chance with Mainstone; Lord
Derby is said to have made winning the race
that bears his name the great object of his life
at one time, and, like Lord George Bentinck,
spared neither time, nor money, nor care to
achieve his end. But all in vain. It seems
that parliamentary, or ministerial, and turf
honours are not to be won by the same person
in these realms. Lord George Bentinck's was
a particularly hard case. As he acknowledged
himself, he had been trying all his life to win
the Derby, but had failed. And when at last,
in order to devote all his energies to his