MOTHER HUNT 129 



This accords with a letter from P. Burges, in which he remarks 

 that E. E. Barclay was the most powerful and enduring heavy-weight 

 runner he had ever known. Hunt also, he says, " was the most 

 extraordinary runner to beagles I ever saw — he was the same at Et(m 

 — but he could not quicken. He tried the Three Miles at Fenner's, 

 but could not go fast enough." 



0. S. Curtis, as I have said, spent a good deal of time at The Pitt, 

 and told tales, among them the tale of how Weston had been imper- 

 sonated. Weston was a pedestrian.^ He w\as an American who 

 made a walking tour tlirough England and lectured at the principal 

 towns, and he was, I remember, a great topic of conversation at my 

 preparatory school. Crowds used to go out and meet him and march 

 in with him. One day he was to walk from Newmarket into Cam- 

 bridge, a route which was a geographical godsend to the practical 

 joker. On the day appointed a man came striding in through Barnwell 

 from the Newmarket Eoad, gathering, snowball like, a vast rabble of 

 followers, till suddenly he bolted into The Pitt, and— at least so I 

 should imagine — " immediately the doors were shut." Later in the 

 afternoon Mr. Weston walked into Cambridge almost alone. The 

 undergraduate who told me said that Curtis had done it. I told Mr. 

 Burges that I had met Curtis, who, so I was told, had done this 

 thing, and received the following reply : — 



" Curtis, connnonly known as 'The Colonel' — his father w^as an 

 American — was a regular Beaglist, but no great runner. If he told 

 you [he didn't, some one else did ! — F. C. K.] that he impersonated 

 Weston his memory is at fault ! He undertook to do so, and then 

 funked, luckily, as he would have been spotted for certain. B. Haig 

 of Trinity did Weston. I practically arranged the whole show, and 

 it was one of the finest frauds ever perpetrated. There have been 

 several accounts of it — notably Brookfield's in his reminiscences — in 

 which he puts me down as Weston. 



" I saw Curtis at Lord's not long ago. His wife was a sister of an 

 old friend of mine, Gandy, behind whom I rowed many successful 

 races for Third Trinity B.C." 



^ Just as "Khoda had a pagoda," but at an earlier date. 



K 



