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Hawke's Bay Times, Issue 1605, 25 August 1874, Page 333

We take the following from the Leisuro Hour: The veteran patron of horse racing, Admiral Rous, in a recent letter to the Times, says—" There is a hlack cloud on the horizon threatening destruction to the Turf." The very same figure of speech has hcen used by the gallant Admiral on more than one occasion before. What his present foreboding is does not clearly appear in his rambling letter, which refers to a variety of questions connected with racing. But the following passage in the third volume of the " Life of Charles Dickens," by John Forster, may explain something of the blackness that disgraces the Turf, and eventually will make horse-racing as discreditable a sport as cock-fighting, bull-baiting, or other " amusements" of olden times in England. In 1857, returning from a tour in Cumberland with Mr Wilkie Collins, they came upon Doncaster, and " this was Dickens's first experience of the St. Leger and its Saturnalia." " The impressions received from the race-week were not favorable. It was a noise and turmoil all day long, and a gathering of vagabonds from all parts of the racing earth. Every bad face that had ever caught wickedness from an innocent horse had its representative in the streets; and as, Dickens, like Gulliver, looking down upon fellow men after coining from the horse eountry, looked down into Doncaster High-street from his inn-window, ho seemed to see everywhere a then notorious personage who had just poisoned his betting companion. ' Everywhere I see the Into MiPalmer with his betting-book in his hand. Mr Palmer sits next me at the theatre; Mr Palmer goes before me down the street; Mr Palmer follows me into the chemist's shop, where I go to buy rosewater after breakfast, and says to the chemist, " Give us some sal volatile, or soom thing o' that soort, in wather—my head's bad !" And I look at the back of his head, repeated in long, long lines on the race-course, and in the betting stand, and outside the betting rooms in the town, and I vow that I can see nothing in it but cruelty, covetousness, calculations, insensibility and low wickedness,'"