as that uninteresting fowl
moves. My father frequently rallied Dr. Mahaffy on his defective
locomotive powers, and finally challenged him to a two hundred yards
race. My father being sixty-four years old, and Dr. Mahaffy only
thirty-six, it was agreed that the Professor should be handicapped by
wearing cricket-pads, and by carrying a cricket bat. I was present at
the race, which came off in the gardens of the Viceregal Lodge, before
quite a number of people. My father won with the utmost ease, to the
delirious joy of the two policemen on duty, who had never before seen a
Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland racing a Professor of Trinity College.

I myself must plead guilty to having entered for a "Veterans' Race" two
years ago, at the age of sixty-one, at some Sunday School sports in
Ireland. I ran against a butler, a gardener, two foremen-mechanics, and
four farmers, but only achieved second place, and that at the price of
a sprained tendon, so possibly the "feeble of foot" of the song really
is applicable to me after all. The butler, who won, started off with
the lead and kept it, though one would naturally have expected a butler
to run a "waiting" race.

I was at Harrow with the Duke of Aosta, brother of the beautiful Queen
Margherita of Italy. H. R. H. sported a full curly yellow beard at the
age of sixteen, a somewhat unusual adornment for an English schoolboy.
When I accompanied my father's special Mission to Rome in 1878, at a
luncheon at the Quirinal Palace, Queen Margherita alluded to her
brother having been at Harrow, and added, "I am told that Harrow is the
best school in England." The Harrovians present, including my father,
my brother Claud, myself, the late Lord Bradford, and my brother-in-law
the late Lord Mount Edgcumbe, welcomed this indisputable proposition
warmly--nay, enthusiastically. The Etonians who were there, Sir
Augustus Paget, then British Ambassador in Rome, the late Lord
Northampton, and others, contravened her Majesty's obviously true
statement with great heat, quite oblivious of the fact that it is
opposed to all etiquette to contradict a Crowned Head. The dispute
engendered considerable heat on either side; the walls of that hall in
the Quirinal rang with our angered protests, until the Italians present
became quite alarmed. Our discussion having taken place in English,
they had been unable to follow it, and they felt the gravest
apprehensions as to the plot the foreigners were evidently hatching.