Excerpt from My Life as Soldier and Sportsman When a mere layman writes a book it is customary for him to inscribe a preface or, as Izaak Walton would say, an "epistle" to the readers. My original idea was to write and have printed a few personal reminiscences of the days and weeks I have spent in various sports, for the young folks who may come after me; in fact, I contemplated writing a sort of boys' book. However, it came to pass that I met, and discussed the subject with, Mr Arthur F. Meyrick who, like myself, is getting on in years. He is a most enthusiastic student of racing and other sports, and in addition to suggesting that I should write a larger volume, on more general subjects, he volunteered to contribute to my book by supplying details of the Grand National from Lottery to Troytown. Gradually, as the copy grew, so did the number of new ideas. Thus it came about that causeries on other sports suggested themselves to me. When a young man, Mr Meyrick followed in the footsteps of his father in the journalistic world, and knew most of the celebrities of his time. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.