The daily morning journal and courier., 1900-07-24

I tJ NNiAi tctNLiliS 'N' 'tSioiibSA' Il H
 reason of this task was not given at thu
 time, but it leaked out taler on Wher
 Lord Barrymore had some friends a
 his rooms and leading up to the subjec he offered to make q bet that no ont
 present would guess within q certain
 number how many half-pennies would
 cover the floor. This was of course good enough to bet upon, and all the
 friends made their several estimates of
 the number required, estimates which
 1t is needless to say, were not quite SC
 accurate as that of the host of the
 evening.
 A haystack has played an important
 part in an irregular kind of wager
 The scene was laid in Leeds where ir
 August, 1760, Mr. Abraham Walker
 brought from Mr. William Northousa a
 stack of old hay, the produce of four acres of meadow land. The risk was estimated to contain about eight ordi- l nary carloads and the price was no
 more than forty shilings for the whole,
 upon condition that the buyer took it
 all away at once. Should he fail to do
 this the price was to be twenty pounds. | By the way, there was stipulation I | be used to move the rick. Mir. Walker | was man of resource, so he sought | out the London carrier, secured the use
 of his broad-wheeled wagon and three | horses, transferred the hay to the Wag-
 on. and successfully had it drawn over
 the two miles to his yard. The convey
 ance and its burden looked, says the
 chronlcler, Hike a moving mountain" | It was, however, a very cheap pur- | chase, while the seller and his friends who had better two to one against the accomplishment of the task lost their money, a good deal of it accompanying
 the hay to MT. Walkers premises. In 1767 there was a somewhat similar arrangement in the case of some flag gots, which a Hertfordshire farmer had for sale, which was eventually the sub-
 ject of no little betting. The price was
 eighteen shillings per hundred, exclu- sive of carriage. A little man who
 came to buy said that he would carry
 them himself, whereupon the seller,
 who thought that he saw his way to
 making a little money. made the pro-
 posal that if the buyer should carry eighteen of them to his own house every day Sunday excepted) without missing one, he might have them for his pains,
 but that if he failed before he had transferred every faggot to his own place he should pay double price. The buyer agreed to the new terms, though to all appearance everything was against him. It was computed that, taken all around, the faggots weighed half a hundredweight each, and early in the morning of the following day the little man shouldered his first faggot and walked off along the mile and half of bad road which separated his house from that of the seller. He re- turned and walked off with the second faEgot and so on to the end of the chapter bearing away eighteen per diem until the whole was removed. It miles for each faggot-a mile and a half out and, of course, the same dis tance in-so that he had to cover fifty four miles day to carry eighteen flag gots. The buyer obtained his faggots for nothing and, like the hay buyer he backed himself taking away some of the sellers money. The affair soon became noised abroad and the sellers | premises became the rendezvous for all the speculating individuals round | about, quite large number of bets be- ing made.
 At the Ascot meeting of 1765 man | sought to turn in the nimbe ninepence | by backing himself to run two miles in | twenty minutes, carrying seven pound poker in his mouth, and having | his hands tied behind him. He won by | two minutes, and then made another wager that he would run four miles in | similar conditions in forty minutes, and | again won by couple of minutes. That was on the Thursday of the meet ing, while on Saturday in the week he carried the poker in his mouth for six miles, and covered the distance in seve- ral minutes less than the hour for which he stipulated. Running a coach wheel against time was once popular form of wager and as long ago as Feb ruary. 1763 we find records of man backing himself to run a wheel eight | miles within the hour, the wager being of a considerable amount The per- formance duly came off in St Georges Fields, where a wooden platform a quarter of a mile in length and two inches from the ground had been erect ed. On this platform the wheel was run backward and forward. The saved his money by half ! minute, performing his task in fifty nine minutes and half; while three years later lad of sixteen an appren- tice to wheelWfight in the borough, undertook to run a wheel from Black man street to the third milestone at Vauxhall and back again for a bet of ten guineas. An hour was the time al- owed him, but he accomplished his tourney with great ease in tifty-seven a great deal of money chang ng hands over the match. No less a sum, however. than fourteen thousand pounds is said to have depended upon he success of failure of q lighterman % cross the Thames in one of the butchers trays with which former were familiar. At eight ,'clock in the evening in the last week ,f June the man, who had on cork acket "in case of accident" boarded lis frail craft, and using only his lands as means of progression pushed off from Somerset Stairs and cached the Surrey shore without diff ulty. Something like seventy boat pads of people accompanied the tray, md huge crowds collected on both