In 1809 a very extraordinary wager was decided upon the road between Cambridge and Huntingdon. A gentleman of the former place had betted a considerable sum of money that he would go, a yard from the ground, upon stilts, the distance of twelve miles, within the space of four hours and a half: no stoppage was to be allowed, except merely the time taken up in exchanging one pair of stilts for another, and even then his feet were not to touch the ground. He started at the second milestone from Cambridge in the Huntingdon Road, to go six miles out and six miles in; the first he performed in one hour and fifty minutes, and did the distance back in two hours and three minutes, so that he went the whole in three hours and fifty-three minutes, having thirty-seven minutes to spare within the time allowed him. In the winter of 1810-1811 a bet of £500 was made by the Duke of Richmond, then Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, with Sir Edward Crofton (who afterwards committed suicide), that the latter should not produce a horse who would leap, in fair Irish sporting style (which allows just touching with the hind feet), a wall seven feet high. Sir Edward brought forward a cocktail horse, called Turnip, being got by Turnip, a thoroughbred son of old Pot8o's (a horse imported, like the celebrated Diamond, into Ireland by Colonel Hyde), out of a common Irish mare. On the day appointed, a gate was removed from its place in a very high park wall, near the Phoenix Park, and, men and stones being ready, was built up to the required and specified height, in the presence of his Grace. While this was being expeditiously accomplished by men used to building up such fences. Turnip was kept walking about, by a common groom in jacket and cap. When all was ready, and the signal given, over he went, but had so little run that the Duke, thinking the rider was going to turn him round and give him a race at it, turned his head at the moment, and did not see the leap; to reassure him, however, the horse was put over it again. He was a slow horse, and died afterwards from the effects of a severe run with the Kildare hounds in an open country, where, though the fences would in England be reckoned severe, they were nothing to the walls of Roscommon and Galway. About 1811 there appears to have been a recrudescence of the craze for eccentric wagers. A good deal of interest was excited in January of that year by the strange performance of a soldier in the Guards, who had betted two guineas that he would mark a cross on every tree in St. James's Park, that was within his reach, in an hour and ten minutes. He started at ten o'clock in the morning from the first tree in Birdcage Walk, and completed his task in three minutes less than the time allowed him. A great number of bets depended upon the result.