An Autobiography of an Ancient Athlete & Antiquarian

70 AUTOBIOGRAPHY attending the first meeting, but owing to the opposition of the low class clique, which by that time had obtained an ascendancy in the L.A.C., obstacles were raised and the scheme was not persevered with. Also in June, I :finished my Calendar to the Cambridge Feet of Fines, and it came out the next year, but I got no help from the authorities at Cambridge in the way of identifying the place names, and to this day I have never received any credit for my discovery as to the extraordinary difference between the early Christian or forenames there and those just over the border in Norfolk, from which I deduced the theory that the early inhabitants of Cambridge were aborigines driven out of Norfolk by the Danish invasion. The figures were 128 names in all for Cambridge, of which 28 only were found among the 322 names found in the Norfolk fines, so we had 100 names new to the very much larger and fuller list of names found in a county, the border of which absolutely marches with it for over thirty miles. It would seem to point to a radical difference in race which we should hardly expect to find at so late a date. On 6th July I met Max O'Rell and other literary cele– brities at a garden party at Holruan Hunt's, where J.B. Rye fainted from the heat and the weight of his plaster jacket. Soon after we finished our new wing at Putney. On the 8th August I read a paper as the unpublished material for the history of Norfolk before the Archceological Institute at Carrow, afterwards reprinted in its Journal, xlvii., pp. 164, &c. Just before reading it I received the painful news that Walford D. Selby, of the P.R.O., who had been a staunch friend and co-worker of mine, had shot himself after typhoid. He was one of the best, and a most cheery and able man, but the same delirium which after– wards caused the death of Archer affected him. Our autumn sail as usual was on the Broads with J.B.L. and the Ps. It was chiefly memorable for the roughest passage I ever had down the river, which had overflowed its banks below Acle, and we had to find our course by guess work and noticing the different colour of the water in the deep part. A trading wherry was not as lucky as we, for sailing over a marsh she stuck and a channel had to be dug to get her out. We came down under a bare mast and then went quite fast enough.