carriage wheel on top of this daïs while he himself ran on the ground beside it, the wheelwright was no longer handicapped, and won the race easily.
The winner, by the way, must have been something of an acrobat as well as a sprinter to have balanced the wheel on a narrow platform while travelling at full speed.
All true golfers must have read with pain an account of the dastardly attempt which was made two years ago to tamper with the sacred game. In a most reprehensible spirit of levity two golfers in July, 1898, arranged a match of which the conditions were that one of them should go round the links with the ordinary ball and clubs, while the other should go round with a bow and arrow. The superior driving powers of the bow and arrow won the day. As a putter the bow proved a contemptibly ineffective implement, but it
GOLF: CLUBS v. BOW AND ARROW.
amply compensated for this inferiority by the certainty with which it sent the arrow soaring over bunkers.
As lawn tennis players are not nearly such a serious minded race as golfers, it is only to be expected that lawn tennis should suffer where even golf cannot escape. The writer remembers seeing some ten years ago a weird contest between a most distinguished Irish lawn tennis player and an opponent to whom under ordinary circumstances he could give enormous odds. On this occasion, in lieu of the usual odds he undertook to play him with a soda water bottle instead of a racket. The match proved infinitely more exciting to look at than it appears on paper. The accuracy of the wielder of the soda water bottle was something extraordinary, and in the end he won fairly easily. The experiment was also interesting as showing the impossibility of handicapping a player of the highest class and a fifth rate performer.
But though this match had something torecommend it, the same cannot be said of a ridiculous contest which took place in the early days of lawn tennis at Brighton. In this match one of the players rode a pony which was shod with leather shoes for the occasion, and is said to have appeared to take a personal interest in the affair, while his opponent, a lifeguardsman, was arrayed in the full panoply of the uniform of that corps in heavy marching order. They played the best of five sets, and the mounted player won by three sets to two, his opponent at the end being absolutely exhausted.
A match which excited a considerable amount of interest at the time was played forty years ago between John Roberts, father of the present billiard champion, and an amateur who was a very fair player. Roberts played with an old umbrella instead of a cue, his opponent being equipped in the normal fashion. To appreciate fully the difficulty of Roberts’s task let anyone try the experiment for himself. He will be lucky if he can make the ball travel even approximately in the direction which he intends. Old Roberts, who, by the way, lost the Umbrella v. Cue match, had a great fancy for similar experiments. It is on record that when he met a very inferior player he
