2 CHASING AND RACING 



King's Daughter." It was arranged that the Lord 

 Lieutenant of Middlesex and his posse of Deputy- 

 Lieutenants were to act as escort in the wedding pro- 

 cession. My excellent parent being of the cult, found 

 himself in the awful predicament of having to venture 

 outside one of the dreaded beasts, or to give up par- 

 ticipation in the historical event. So he screwed up 

 his courage and was hoisted, in all the splendour of his 

 official garb, on to the back of a particularly amiable 

 and plegmatic drum horse, borrowed from H.M.'s 

 Life Guards. With a stalwart trooper to hold his (my 

 parent's not the gee's) legs, "off" and "fore," the 

 ordeal was successfully negotiated ; but though the 

 staid old black had not ventured out of a walk from 

 first to last, the dear old " Dads " suffered pangs in 

 the lumbar region for many days that supervened. 

 When I was a nipper, there was a tradition rife among 

 my female relatives that one of my father's brothers 

 had been a devil of a rider. In fact, some went so far 

 as to declare that he had been a " gentleman jockey ; " 

 but when or where he had distinguished himself in the 

 pig-skin, I never could discover. Anyway, he passed 

 in his checks at an early age ; his demise, so I was 

 informed, being due to copious libations ; which may 

 have cheered, and undoubtedly did, intoxicate. 



So much for my Uncle Dudley. 



It was left to me to revive the tradition as far as 

 the horse-riding part of it was concerned ; albeit I was 

 not seized with any inordinate desire to distinguish 



