Drawn and Etched by T. J. Rawlins Mytton swims the Severn at Uppington Ferry? "He that calls himself a Sportsman, let him follow me: Three or four of them managed to get their horses into a boat, but Mytton scorned its assistance. "Let all who call themselves sportsmen," he exclaimed, "follow me;" and, dashing into the stream, gained the opposite bank, and was one of the very few who saw the fox killed. It must again be observed, that Mytton was no swimmer, and the Severn is broad and deep, and with banks none of the best. On another occasion, he nearly lost his life in the Severn, in a run with his own hounds, near Bridgenorth. All the field but himself crossed it by a horse-ferry boat, but he gallantly plunged into it, although it was much swollen by rain at the time. His mare-a fine hunter, called Cara Sposa —was carried a long way down the stream by the current, and although she at length gained the opposite side with him, the bank would not admit of her landing herself. His whipper - in (Ned Evans), however, who had crossed by the boat, fortunately came to his assistance, and pulled him mare in the water. Jumping upon the whip's hounds, and the mare was up eventually brought ashore, without much injury. Nor Still I have reason to believe the hair-breadth escapes on wheels even exceeded those in the saddle, which perhaps may be in some measure accounted for by his early predilection for tandem drivingthe most hazardous of any, even in the best of hands, and Mytton was no coachman.1 The following feat, if true, certainly out-herod's Herod; but my readers shall have it exactly as I myself had it, accompanied with the following remark ;-Nothing, we are led to believe is impossible with God; nothing was improbable of the late John Mytton. "He was one day," says my informant, 66 engaged to dine with a friend at some distance from Halston, and came, as usual, in his tandem. After dinner, the conversation turning on the danger of that mode of harnessing horses, from the little command the driver can have over the leader, Mytton at once expressed his dissent from this doctrine; and being under the influence of the "rosy god," offered to bet a pony (25) all round, that he would, that night, drive his tandem across the country, into the turnpike road, a distance of half a mile, having in his progress to get over a sunk-fence, three yards wide; a broad deep 1 When I say he was "no coachman," I mean he knew nothing of the science or system of driving four horses. He would, however, now and then take hold of a team in the Holyhead mail, and I was told that when he did, he never attempted to lark. |