MAD MYTTON. 325 



On one occasion Nimrod was driving with Mytton, 

 they were both going out to dinner, for which they 

 were late ; having taken a wrong turning on approach- 

 ing the house, they found themselves in a field from 

 which there was no egress, except by the gate through 

 which they had entered. " We'll manage it," said 

 Mytton; "this horse is a capital fencer, so do you 

 get over the fence and catch him." The fence was a 

 stiff hedge, with a ditch on the other side. He then 

 unbuckled the bearing-rein, gave the horse a sharp 

 cut with his whip, and over he came, gig and all, with- 

 out the slightest accident. One day, when taking 

 some friends round his stable at Halston, he said that 

 he had something still better worth seeing than his 

 horses ; and opening his coach-house doors he thus 

 addressed them : " You see that gig : last night it was 

 carried clean over my lodge gates, and, as you will 

 observe, is not a bit the worse for it, neither is the 

 horse which you saw in the stable." 



Nimrod says this was a marvellous performance, 

 as it certainly was ; but that the inhabitants of the 

 town of Wrexham, in Denbighshire, can well re- 

 member a somewhat similar circumstance occurring at 

 a villa close to that town, some twenty years back. A 

 horse, the property of the late Mr. Watkin Hayman, 

 ran away with a gig from his front-door, and carried it 

 over a high palisade gate, without injury to either him- 

 self or the gig. Nimrod says he went next day to see 

 the gate ; the only impression left upon it was the 

 fracture of one of the spikes or points of the top rail. 



Mytton naturally caused his friends some appre- 

 hension, and Nimrod says that he never entered a 

 carriage with him without first making him promise 

 not to drive or touch the whip or reins. On one occasion 

 he was driving a friend in a gig, when Mytton, without 



