QUEER WAGERS AND CONTESTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 13778, 17 June 1908, Page 9

QUEER WAGERS AND CONTESTS.

About four years ago a Frenchman made a bet that he would walk from Paris to Berlin and back again on stilts, the stipulation being that he should not once, while on the actual journeys, get down from his pedestal. He took his food and his- sleep leaning- up against Avails of churches and of houses, and, strange to relate,' he won his bet.. . ~",,..-.. Slock Exchange and other walks from London to Brighton were quite the rage some little time since,. but these had little of the old-fashioned flavour of oddity about them. The right old-fashioned spirit, however, " was' well in evidence when in the .spring of 1900 a, gentleman from the Thames Valley backed himself to walk, ride on horseback, swim, run, bicycle, ana row for a quarter of a 'mile by each process in less than thirty minutes altogether. The entire performance was completed in less than nineteen minutes on the riverside. This calls to mind a .somewhat similar achievement of a man who betted he would do a mile walking,' running, wheeling a- burrow, trundling; a hoop, and hopping on one leg, all, within an hour. He won. by two minutes. ' ' • Walking and running as sheer feats of endurance have always hud their exponent,*, and some of these contests have marked by very odd conditions. Here is an advertisement which appeared in a London newspaper only a year or two ago : — J.F., of Deptford (champion bottle-carrier of the world), hearing so much of the abilities of George Golding, of the Borough, is open to run Golding with a two-gallon stone bottle, neck downwards, on the head, from Chatham to Woolwich, for £10 or £20 a-side." Also on. lines quite outside the ordinary and quite after the manner of the ancient wager were some queer matches indulged in by London toilers 10 or 12 years ago. In one case a couple of Covent Garden porters were matched to walk to Hampstead Heath and back, one on stilts unburdened, and the other carrying a sack of potatoes, when the former won. Then a Chelsea fish-hawker, carrying half a hundredweight of fish on his" head, ran seven miles along the Brentford. Road, front Hyde. Park Corner, in forty-five minutes, and an orange porter won a bet of ten guineas by carrying a hundredweight of oranges twenty times between Botolph Lane and Spitalfields Market in one hour and twenty-five minutes less than the ten hours specified in the wager. If one were to dip into the past one could find enough instances of eccentric walks to fill pages of this journal, but space may be found for the mention of one such which was surely sufficiently whimsical to satisfy the most inordinate taste for uncommon performances. This eighteenth-century wager, made by Sir Anthony Leith Hay with Lord Kennedy, was a bet of £4500 that he would get from Mr. Farquharson's house, at Black Hall, in Kincardineshire, to Inverness, on foot before him. They started at nine that night in their evening dress, thin shoes, and silk stockings. Sir Andrew took the coach road by wav of Hiuntly and Elgin. Lord Kennedy (with Captain' Ross as umpire) struck straight across the Grampians in the pouring rain. They walked all night, the next day, and the followingnight, and Lord Kennedy got- to Inverness at six in the morning of the third day, winning his bet by four hours. They were gay old sports in those days, and not, it would seem, lacking in the quality of toughness.— English Illustrated Magazine.

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