The Life of Fred Archer "j^j 
But Fred and his mother looked as if they came of aristocratic 
people, and Charlie did too. I don't know who she was, but 
she gave you that impression. Fred had rather a long, narrow 
face. He was rather tall, and it means a fearful amount of 
wasting, and that's what indirectly caused his death. 
" He was training down to ride a horse in the Cambridge- 
shire down here, and there was a lot of money on it. For 
people staked much larger sums in those days than they do 
now, and that meant perhaps that they stood to win £80,000 
or £100,000 on the Cambridgeshire, mostly in the hands of 
one or two people, so that a great deal depended on Fred 
winning that race, and he had to get down to 8 stone 6 lb. 
for it. He caught a chill on the top of all this wasting, and 
had no strength to throw it off. It turned to typhoid fever, 
and they had two or three nurses down and a lot of people 
about. But between them all he was allowed to do it. Anyone 
else might do a thing like that in a delirious state of high fever. 
" A good many people at the time said it never ought to 
have happened ; he ought to have been watched, and they 
oughtn't to have left him, or taken their eyes off him for one 
moment. It seemed so sad for such a brilliant young life as 
that to be cut off, quite one of the things that ought not 
to have happened. I think most of the people who were 
looking after him were thrown off their guard by not knowing 
that he had a revolver, and by not even thinking of the possi- 
bility of his doing anything of the sort. 
" The wasting was hard upon Fred. We would come in 
from riding, and the rest of us had lunch and he had a nap. 
He'd perhaps had a very light breakfast, and then nothing 
else. Of course, he was a very wonderful and unusual boy, who 
shot up like a rocket into fame when he was almost a child. But 
I daresay he was lucky to get with my uncle. Of course, he 
got a very thorough training, and good horses to ride — and 
riding, to a very great extent, depends on the sort of training 
a boy gets." 
