Plucky Pedestrians.

Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, 4 September 1914, Page 2

Plucky Pedestrians.

A postman of FTartlepool who retired lately has not achieved a record by his forty-one years of service and estimated 160,000 miles of tramping to deliver 6,250,000 letters and parcels. A woman beat this hollow. Mary Jackson, postwoman of Bilston, must have trudged a quarter of a million miles between 1819 and 18G0, during which time she never missed a day from sickness or took any holiday. Only four Sundays oif duty in her half a century spoilt her continuous record, and these were not her fault. Delivery was experimentally suspended for those four (Jays, and Mary's own comment was that the persons responsible were a pack of fools. She left at her death a useful sum to the Wolverhampton Hos-

pital.

in 1851 an old Cornish fishwife of eighty-four, named Mary Callinack, walked from Penza nee to London to see the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. The distance is nearly 30JJ miles, and it is no wonder that the;old lady_ created a.sensation aud was noticed by Queen Victoria. She had vowed to call upon the Lord Mayor before returning and she carried out her intention', but, of course, was not permitted 'to walk back home.

A very-difficult walking feat was accomplished in 1826, when a wellknown pedestrian named Lloyd undertook for a bet to walk thirty miles backwards in nine hours. This he succeeded in doing, with fourteen minutes to spare, on the road between Bagshot and Portsmouth.

One of the most remarkable tours ever accomplished was that recently completed by a blind man named Schubert Nichols. He is an Alaskan miner, and his blindness was caused by the incessant glare of the powerful sun on the snowfields of Northern Alaska. He walked, following his clog team, from the middle fork of the Koyukuk River, north of the Yukon, to Seattle, Washington—a distance of 1,600 miles, crossing no fewer than five distinct ranges of mountains. His trip was not without its'adventures either. At one time the thermometer registered about fifty-four degrees below zero, and he lost two of his toes from frost bite. He had on two occasions a pack of

wolves to contend with. One pack succeeded in killing and devouring one of his team of dogs before he could drive them off with his long lash.—"Tit Bits."