CHAPTER I 



WHAT SHALL I WRITE? 



Once more into the Breach ! " Labby " and his Ancestry Concerning 

 a Duel with "Labby" Mr Manfield and his Boots The Pall 

 Mall Gazette and the Duel Mr Labouchere mystified till the last 



IT has been again and again pointed out to me that 

 my book, My Kingdom for a Horse, which is a plain, 

 unvarnished autobiography, might well be amplified 

 in regard to its later stages, and this is no doubt true, 

 but I am fearful of wearying my readers with anything 

 in the nature of a rehash of what I have been writing 

 for over thirty years week by week in The Sportsman. 

 One kindly American lady has written to me from 

 Lexington suggesting that all those Sportsman articles 

 should be collected, and that they would be a " most in- 

 teresting volume." Volume, indeed ! Why, the volumes 

 of all that stuff would be as numerous as those of the 

 Encyclopedia Britannical Moreover, who could write 

 twice or three times a week, and often every day in the 

 week, for thirty years without committing a lot of non- 

 sense to paper at one time or another ? 



Nevertheless, what you have written, so long as you 

 can refer to it, is useful as a refresher of memory, and 

 in this sense I propose to recall some few points of 

 interest. 



How I ran that truculent Tory paper, 52 Stephen's 

 Review, from the beginning of 1883 to the beginning 

 of 1891 has been explained in the other book, so far 

 B 17 



