I fear that this habit of running races late in life may be a family failing.  During my father’s second tenure of office as Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, he was still an enthusiastic cricketer, and played regularly in the Viceregal team in spite of his sixty-four years.  The Rev. Dr. Mahaffy, Professor of Ancient History at Trinity College, Dublin, also played for the Viceregal Lodge in his capacity of Chaplain to the Viceroy.  Dr. Mahaffy, though a fine bowler, was the worst runner I have ever seen.  He waddled and paddled slowly over the ground like a duck, with his feet turned outwards, exactly 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.  When told that we were merely discussing the rival merits of two schools in England, they were more than ever confirmed in their opinion that all English people were hopelessly mad.