The Duc de Chartres bet a considerable sum with the Comte de Genlis that the latter would not go from Paris to Fontainebleau and back before he (the Duc de Chartres) had pricked 500,000 pinholes in a piece of paper. The Comte de Genlis was the winner by several hours. The wager of the Comte d'Artois as to the building of Bagatelle is historical. He bet Marie Antoinette 100,000 livres that he would erect a palace on a certain site in the Bois de Boulogne in six weeks. Nine hundred workmen were employed night and day, whilst patrols of the Swiss Guard seized any building materials which might be of use on the roads in the vicinity--these, it must, however, be added, were paid for. At the end of the six weeks the Comte d'Artois entertained Marie Antoinette at a splendid fête in the completed house. Matches against time were common. In 1745 Mr. Cooper Thornhill rode three times between Stilton and Shoreditch--two hundred and thirteen miles--in eleven hours and thirty-four minutes on fourteen different horses. Six years later, Captain Shafto won £16,000 by winning a wager that he would cover fifty miles in two hours. He was allowed as many horses as he pleased. Not a few of these matches against time were carried out under most whimsical conditions. On 22nd August 1774, for instance, Anthony Thorpe, a journeyman baker, at the Artillery Ground, ran a mile tied up in a sack, in eleven minutes and a half. In 1773 a London to York match was run, the winner, a mare, taking forty hours and thirty-five minutes to complete the journey. A sensational match of a more sporting description was the ride of George IV., when Prince of Wales, to Brighton and back, a journey of one hundred and twelve miles, which the Royal sportsman is said to have performed on one horse in ten hours. A wonderful ride was that performed in 1786 by a featherweight jockey at Newmarket, who rode one horse twenty-three miles in two or three minutes under the hour. The Duke of Queensberry ("Old Q.") was at one time fond of sporting matches, in which he generally came off victorious, for he was a shrewd man. In 1789, during the Newmarket October Meeting, he and Sir John Lade, mounted on a brace of mules, rode from the Ditch in for £1000. This ludicrous race, which was very anxiously and obstinately contested, terminated in favour of the Duke. Mr. Thomas Dale was also the hero of a donkey match at Newmarket, where he rode one hundred miles in twenty-two hours and a half on an ass; £100 to £10 was laid against this being done within twenty-four hours. Old Q., when Earl of March, for a wager, sent a letter fifty miles within an hour by hand, which was cleverly effected by the missive in question being enclosed in a cricket ball and thrown from one to the other by twenty-four expert cricketers.