These wakes were not confined to England alone. Hone tells us also of an Easter gathering at Belfast (which is to the present time the scene of an excellent athletic meeting), where running and jumping matches were the chief features of the day, and of another meeting at Portaferry, in County Down, where these amusements were diversified with 'kissing games.' 'The men kissed the females without reserve, whether married or single.' To clear the men, however, from the charge of rudeness, it should be said that the 'kissing is taken quite as a matter of course, without any coyness.' The author sagely remarks that 'tradition is silent as to the origin of this custom.'

We have, however, said enough of these fairs and the rustic athletic gatherings which took place at them. They doubtless grew rarer and rarer during the present century, but it is equally doubtless that some of them have survived quite up to the present day, although most of them have been replaced by regular athletic meetings held under modern and organised rules. The present writer, however, in the year 1885, witnessed a wake in a small Cornish town, where, besides the roundabouts, etc, there was in the evening an athletic meeting. The events were, running, jumping, a wheelbarrow race (blindfold), a sack race, and a greasy pole, and the prizes were either hats or garments, or of an edible or potable nature. From inquiry it appeared that the annual meeting was 'older than anybody could recollect.' We have little doubt that it was as old as the foundation of the town itself, as all the wakes were originally festivals of the foundation of the churches.

We have thus far followed the history of rustic sports up to the present time, because there is no doubt that these meetings kept alive the athletic spirit throughout England, and each of them served as a nucleus for an athletic club and helped to create a centre when the modern revival of athletic sports came about. We have also been obliged, in a certain way, to anticipate matters, because through the eighteenth and earlier part of the nineteenth centuries there were two distinct streams of athleticism, the country wakes and the professional pedes-trianism which began in time to rank as a branch of legitimate sport, in the same manner as the prize ring.

We have seen that there has been a regular history of professional pedestrianism ever since the Restoration, but it must not be supposed that both under the Merry Monarch and in the eighteenth century, given up, as it was, to wagering and betting of all kinds, there were no matches between amateurs. Thackeray, who knew the period he was writing about in the 'Virginians,' and also understood something of the capacities of the human body for athletic purposes, tells of a match between Harry Warrington and Lord March and Ruglen, who jumped for a wager. The Virginian wins with 21 ft. 3 in., beating his lordship, who could only cover 18 ft. 6 in.; and Harry goes on in his letter to Virginia to state that he knew there was another in Virginia (Col. G. Washington) who could jump a foot more. Thackeray's correctness contrasts favourably with that of other writers of this century, some of whom, like Wilkie Collins in his 'Man and Wife,' undertake to write of athletic feats without taking the trouble to acquire any knowledge of them. Such faults are possibly venial with writers who simply introduce them incidentally, though these latter sometimes make strange blunders.

Scott, in his 'Lady of the Lake' (Canto V. Stanza 23), makes Douglas perform a ridiculous feat of weight-putting:

Their arms the brawny yeomen bare To hurl the massive bar in air. When each his utmost strength had shown. The Douglas rent an earth-fast stone From its deep bed, then heaved it high, And sent the fragment through the sky A rood beyond the farthest mark.

We have some suspicion that Thackeray was thinking of this when, in his 'Rebecca and Rowena,' he makes Coeur de Lion 'fling a culverin from him as though it had been a reed. It lighted three hundred yards off on the foot of Hugo de Bunyon, who was smoking a cigar at the door of his tent, and caused that redoubted warrior to limp for some days after.' There is another absurd feat, in the way of jumping, in the 'Lady of the Lake' (Canto III. Stanza 12):

And from the silver beach's side Still was the prow three fathom wide, When lightly bounded to the land The messenger of blood and brand.

Eighteen feet for a 'standing long jump' is a 'record' which is hardly likely to be beaten (10 ft. 9 3/4 in. is the best known at present at an athletic meeting). A list of such mistakes might be indefinitely multiplied, but we will only give one other here. Henry Kingsley, in 'Geoffrey Hamlin,' makes his 'muscular Christian' curate run four miles in twenty minutes, then vault over a gate, take off his hat to a lady, and draw his watch out of his pocket to time himself; after which, being apparently not in the least out of breath, he enters upon a conversation about the benefits of athletics. No wonder this curate became a dignitary of the colonial church. He deserved the honour.

The annals of the eighteenth century are full of accounts of wagers for the performance of athletic feats, both sublime as well as ridiculous. The majority of the genuine athletic performances are those of professional pedestrians, amateurs only figuring occasionally in these wagers, and often in preposterous ones. Luttrell's 'Diary' tells us of a wager made by a German of sixty-four years old to walk 300 miles in 'Hide Park' in six days, which he did 'within the time, and a mile over.' In 1780 the 'Gentleman's Magazine' tells us that a man of seventy-five years old ran four miles and a half round Queen Square in 58 minutes. Eight years later a young gentleman, with a jockey booted and spurred on his back, ran a match against an elderly fat man (of the name of Bullock) running without a rider. The more extraordinary the wager the more excitement it often caused amongst the public. A fish-hawker is reported to have for a wager run seven miles, from Hyde Park Corner to Brentford, with 56 lbs. weight of fish on his head, in 45 minutes! Another man trundled a coach-wheel eight miles in an hour round a platform erected in St. Giles's Fields.

Race between elderly fat man and man with jockey on back.

Another extraordinary match was one between a man on stilts against a man on foot, the former receiving twenty yards start in a hundred and twenty yards.

Man on stilts v. man running.

What is more astounding is that the man upon the stilts won the match.