Chapter 3

Dotted at intervals throughout society are the people endowed with the faculty for “getting up things”. They are dauntless people, filled with the power of driving lesser and deeper reluctant spirits before them; remorseless to the timid, carneying to the stubborn.

Of such was Mrs. Carteret, with powers matured in hill-stations in India, mellowed by much voyaging in P. and O. steamers. Not even an environment as unpromising as that of Enniscar in its winter torpor had power to dismay her. A public whose artistic tastes had hitherto been nourished upon travelling circuses, Nationalist meetings, and missionary magic lanterns in the Wesleyan schoolhouse, was, she argued, practically virgin soil, and would ecstatically respond to any form of cultivation.

“I know there’s not much talent to be had,” she said combatively to her husband, “but we’ll just black our faces, and call ourselves the Green Coons or something, and it will be all right!”

“Dashed if I’ll black my face again,” said Captain Carteret; “I call it rot trying to get up anything here. There’s no one to do anything.”

“Well, there’s ourselves and little Taylour” (“little Taylour,” it may be explained, was Captain Carteret’s subaltern), “that’s two banjoes and a bones anyhow; and Freddy Alexander, and there’s your dear friend Fanny Fitz--she’ll be home in a few days, and these two big Hamilton girls--”

“Oh, Lord!” ejaculated Captain Carteret.

“Oh, yes!” continued Mrs. Carteret, unheedingly, “and there’s Mr. Gunning; he’ll come if Fanny Fitz does.”

“He’ll not be much advantage when he does come,” said Captain Carteret spitefully.

“Oh, he sings,” said Mrs. Carteret, arranging her neat small fringe at the glass--“rather a good voice. You needn’t be afraid, my dear, I’ll arrange that the fascinating Fanny shall sit next you!”

Upon this somewhat unstable basis the formation of the troupe of Green Coons was undertaken. Mrs. Carteret took off her coat to the work, or rather, to be accurate, she put on a fur-lined one, and attended a Nationalist meeting in the Town Hall to judge for herself how the voices carried. She returned rejoicing--she had sat at the back of the hall, and had not lost a syllable of the oratory, even during sundry heated episodes, discreetly summarised by the local paper as “interruption”. The Town Hall was chartered, superficially cleansed, and in the space of a week the posters had gone forth.

By what means it was accomplished that Rupert Gunning should attend the first rehearsal he did not exactly understand; he found himself enmeshed in a promise to meet every one else at the Town Hall with tea at the Carterets’ afterwards. Up to this point the fact that he was to appear before the public with a blackened face had been diplomatically withheld from him, and an equal diplomacy was shown on his arrival in the deputing of Miss Fitzroy to break the news to him.

“Mrs. Carteret says it’s really awfully becoming,” said Fanny, breathless and brilliant from assiduous practice of a hornpipe under Captain Carteret’s tuition, “and as for trouble! We might as well make a virtue of necessity in this incredibly dirty place; my hands are black already, and I’ve only swept the stage!”

She was standing at the edge of the platform that was to serve as the stage, looking down at him, and it may be taken as a sufficient guide to his mental condition that his abhorrence of the prospect for himself was swallowed up by fury at the thought of it for her.

“Are you--do you mean to tell me you are going to dance _with a black face_?” he demanded in bitter and incongruous wrath.

“No, I’m going to dance with Captain Carteret!” replied Fanny frivolously, “and so can you if you like!”

She was maddeningly pretty as she smiled down at him, with her bright hair roughened, and the afterglow of the dance alight in her eyes and cheeks. Nevertheless, for one whirling moment, the old Adam, an Adam blissfully unaware of the existence of Eve, asserted himself in Rupert. He picked up his cap and stick without a word, and turned towards the door. There, however, he was confronted by Mrs. Carteret, tugging at a line of chairs attached to a plank, like a very small bird with a very large twig. To refuse the aid that she immediately demanded was impossible, and even before the future back row of the sixpennies had been towed to its moorings, he realised that hateful as it would be to stay and join in these distasteful revels, it would be better than going home and thinking about them.

From this the intelligent observer may gather that absence had had its traditional, but by no means invariable, effect upon the heart of Mr. Gunning, and, had any further stimulant been needed, it had been supplied in the last few minutes by the aggressive and possessive manner of Captain Carteret.

The rehearsal progressed after the manner of amateur rehearsals. The troupe, with the exception of Mr. Gunning, who remained wrapped in silence, talked irrepressibly, and quite inappropriately to their rôle as Green Coons. Freddy Alexander and Mr. Taylour bear-fought untiringly for possession of the bones and the position of Corner Man; Mrs. Carteret alone had a copy of the music that was to be practised, and in consequence, the company hung heavily over her at the piano in a deafening and discordant swarm. The two tall Hamiltons, hitherto speechless by nature and by practice, became suddenly exhilarated at finding themselves in the inner circle of the soldiery, and bubbled with impotent suggestions and reverential laughter at the witticisms of Mr. Taylour. Fanny Fitz and Captain Carteret finally removed themselves to a grimy corner behind the proscenium, and there practised, _sotto voce_, the song with banjo accompaniment that was to culminate in the hornpipe. Freddy Alexander had gone forth to purchase a pack of cards, in the futile hope that he could prevail upon Mrs. Carteret to allow him to inflict conjuring tricks upon the audience.

“As if there were anything on earth that bored people as much as card tricks!” said that experienced lady to Rupert Gunning. “Look here, _would_ you mind reading over these riddles, to see which you’d like to have to answer. Now, here’s a local one. I’ll ask it--‘Why am dis room like de Enniscar Demesne?’--and then _you’ll_ say, ‘Because dere am so many pretty little deers in it’!”

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly do that!” said Rupert hastily, alarmed as well as indignant; “I’m afraid I really must go now--”

He had to pass by Fanny Fitz on his way out of the hall. There was something vexed and forlorn about him, and, being sympathetic, she perceived it, though not its cause.

“You’re deserting us!” she said, looking up at him.

“I have an appointment,” he said stiffly, his glance evading hers, and resting on Captain Carteret’s well-clipped little black head.

Some of Fanny’s worst scrapes had been brought about by her incapacity to allow any one to part from her on bad terms, and, moreover, she liked Rupert Gunning. She cast about in her mind for something conciliatory to say to him.

“When are you going to show me the cob that you bought at the Horse Show?”

The olive branch thus confidently tendered had a somewhat withering reception.

“The cob I bought at the Horse Show?” Mr. Gunning repeated with an increase of rigidity, “Oh, yes--I got rid of it.”

He paused; the twanging of Captain Carteret’s banjo bridged the interval imperturbably.

“Why had you to get rid of it?” asked Fanny, still sympathetic.

“She was a failure!” said Rupert vindictively; “I made a fool of myself in buying her!”

Fanny looked at him sideways from under her lashes.

“And I had counted on your giving me a mount on her now and then!”

Rupert forgot his wrath, forgot even the twanging banjo.

“I’ve just got another cob,” he said quickly; “she jumps very well, and if you’d like to hunt her next Tuesday--”

“Oh, thanks awfully, but Captain Carteret has promised me a mount for next Tuesday!” said the perfidious Fanny.

Mrs. Carteret, on her knees by a refractory footlight, watched with anxiety Mr. Gunning’s abrupt departure from the room.

“Fanny!” she said severely, “what have you been doing to that man?”

“Oh, nothing!” said Fanny.

“If you’ve put him off singing I’ll never forgive you!” continued Mrs. Carteret, advancing on her knees to the next footlight.

“I tell you I’ve done nothing to him,” said Fanny Fitz guiltily.

“Give me the hammer!” said Mrs. Carteret. “Have I eyes, or have I not?”

“He’s awfully keen about her!” Mrs. Carteret said that evening to her husband. “Bad temper is one of the worst signs. Men in love are always cross.”

“Oh, he’s a rotter!” said Captain Carteret conclusively.

In the meantime the object of this condemnation was driving his ten Irish miles home, by the light of a frosty full moon. Between the shafts of his cart a trim-looking mare of about fifteen hands trotted lazily, forging, shying, and generally comporting herself in a way only possible to a grass-fed animal who has been in the hands of such as Mr. William Fennessy. The thick and dingy mane that had hung impartially on each side of her neck, now, together with the major portion of her voluminous tail, adorned the manure heap in the rear of the Fennessy public-house. The pallid fleece in which she had been muffled had given place to a polished coat of iron-grey, that looked black in the moonlight. A week of over-abundant oats had made her opinionated, but had not, so far, restored to her the fine lady nervousness that had landed her in the window of the hat shop.

Rupert laid the whip along her fat sides with bitter disfavour. She was a brute in harness, he said to himself, her blemished fetlock was uglier than he had at first thought, and even though she had yesterday schooled over two miles of country like an old stager, she was too small to carry him, and she was not, apparently, wanted to carry any one else. Here the purchase received a very disagreeable cut on the neck that interrupted her speculations as to the nature of the shadows of telegraph-posts. To have bought two useless horses in four months was pretty average bad luck. It was also pretty bad luck to have been born a fool. Reflection here became merged in the shapeless and futile fumings of a man badly in love and preposterously jealous.

Known only to the elect among entertainment promoters are the methods employed by Mrs. Carteret to float the company of The Green Coons. The fact remains that on the appointed night the chosen troupe, approximately word-perfect, and with spirits something chastened by stage fright, were assembled in the clerk’s room of the Enniscar Town Hall, round a large basin filled horribly with a compound of burnt cork and water.

“It’s not as bad as it looks!” said Mrs. Carteret, plunging in her hands and heroically smearing her face with a mass of black oozy matter believed to be a sponge. “It’s quite becoming if you do it thoroughly. Mind, all of you, get it well into your ears and the roots of your hair!”

The Hamiltons, giggling wildly, submitted themselves to the ministrations of Freddy Alexander, and Mrs. Carteret, appallingly transformed into a little West Indian coolie woman, applied the sponge to the shrinking Fanny Fitz.

“Will you do Mr. Gunning, Fanny?” she whispered into one of the ears that she had conscientiously blackened. “I think he’d bear it better from you!”

“I shall do nothing of the kind!” replied Fanny, with a dignity somewhat impaired by her ebon countenance and monstrous green turban.

“Why not?”

Mrs. Carteret’s small neat features seemed unnaturally sharpened, and her eyes and teeth glittered in her excitement.

“For goodness’ sake, take your awful little black face away, Mabel!” exclaimed Fanny hysterically. “It quite frightens me! I’m _very_ angry with Mr. Gunning! I’ll tell you why some other time.”

“Well, don’t forget you’ve got to say ‘Buck up, Sambo!’ to him after he’s sung his song, and you may fight with him as much as you like afterwards,” said Mrs. Carteret, hurrying off to paint glaring vermilion mouths upon the loudly protesting Hamiltons.

During these vicissitudes, Rupert Gunning, arrayed in a green swallow-tailed calico coat, short white cotton trousers, and a skimpy nigger wig, presented a pitiful example of the humiliations which the allied forces of love and jealousy can bring upon the just. Fanny Fitz has since admitted that, in spite of the wrath that burned within her, the sight of Mr. Gunning morosely dabbing his long nose with the repulsive sponge that was shared by the troupe, almost moved her to compassion.

A pleasing impatience was already betraying itself in cat-calls and stampings from the sixpenny places, and Mrs. Carteret, flitting like a sheep dog round her flock, arranged them in couples and drove them before her on to the stage, singing in chorus, with a fair assumption of hilarity, “As we go marching through Georgia”.

For Fanny Fitz the subsequent proceedings became merged in a nightmare of blinding heat and glare, made actual only by poignant anxiety as to the length of her green skirt. The hope that she might be unrecognisable was shattered by the yell of “More power, Miss Fanny!” that crested the thunderous encore evoked by her hornpipe with Captain Carteret, and the question of the skirt was decided by the fact that her aunts, in the front row, firmly perused their programmes from the beginning of her dance to its conclusion.

The entertainment went with varying success after the manner of its kind. The local hits and personal allusions, toilfully compiled and ardently believed in, were received in damping silence, while Rupert Gunning’s song, of the truculent order dedicated to basses, and sung by him with a face that would have done credit to Othello, received an ovation that confirmed Captain Carteret in his contempt for country audiences. The performance raged to its close in a “Cake Walk,” to the inspiring strains of “Razors a-flying through the air,” and the curtain fell on what the Enniscar _Independent_ described cryptically as “a _tout ensemble à la conversazione_ that was refreshingly unique”.

“Five minutes more and I should have had heat apoplexy!” said Mrs. Carteret, hurling her turban across the clerk’s room, “but it all went splendidly! Empty that basin out of the window, somebody, and give me the vaseline. The last time I blacked my face it was covered with red spots for a week afterwards because I used soap instead of vaseline!”

Rupert Gunning approached Fanny with an open note in his hand.

“I’ve had this from your aunt,” he said, handing it to her; it was decorated with sooty thumb marks, to which Fanny’s black claw contributed a fresh batch as she took it, but she read it without a smile.

It was to the effect that the heat of the room had been too much for the elder Misses Fitzroy, and they had therefore gone home, but as Mr. Gunning had to pass their gate perhaps he would be kind enough to drive their niece home.

“Oh--” said Fanny, in tones from which dismay was by no means eliminated. “How stupid of Aunt Rachel!”

“I’m afraid there seems no way out of it for you,” said Rupert offendedly.

A glimpse of their two wrathful black faces in the glass abruptly checked Fanny’s desire to say something crushing. At this juncture she would rather have died than laughed.

Burnt cork is not lightly to be removed at the first essay, and when, half an hour later, Fanny Fitz, with a pale and dirty face, stood under the dismal light of the lamp outside the Town Hall, waiting for Mr. Gunning’s trap, she had the pleasure of hearing a woman among the loiterers say compassionately:--

“God help her, the crayture! She looks like a servant that’d be bate out with work!”

Mr. Gunning’s new cob stood hearkening with flickering ears to the various commotions of the street--she understood them all perfectly well, but her soul being unlifted by reason of oats, she chose to resent them as impertinences. Having tolerated with difficulty the instalment of Miss Fitzroy in the trap, she started with a flourish, and pulled hard until clear of the town and its flaring public-houses. On the open road, with nothing more enlivening than the dark hills, half-seen in the light of the rising moon, she settled down. Rupert turned to his silent companion. He had become aware during the evening that something was wrong, and his own sense of injury was frightened into the background.

“What do you think of my new buy?” he said pacifically, “she’s a good goer, isn’t she?”

“Very,” replied Fanny.

Silence again reigned. One or two further attempts at conversation met with equal discouragement. The miles passed by. At length, as the mare slackened to walk up a long hill, Rupert said with a voice that had the shake of pent-up injury:--

“I’ve been wondering what I’ve done to be put into Coventry like this!”

“I thought you probably wouldn’t care to speak to me!” was Fanny’s astonishing reply, delivered in tones of ice.

“I!” he stammered, “not care to speak to _you_! You ought to know--”

“Yes, indeed, I do know!” broke in Fanny, passing from the frigid to the torrid zone with characteristic speed, “I know what a _failure_ your horse-dealing at the Dublin Show was! I’ve heard how you bought my mare, and had her shot the same night, because you wouldn’t take the trouble even to go and look at her after the poor little thing was hurt! Oh! I can’t bear even to _think_ of it!”

Rupert Gunning remained abjectly and dumfoundedly silent.

“And then,” continued Fanny, whirling on to the final point of her indictment, “you pretended to Captain Carteret and me that the horse you had bought was ‘a common brute,’ _a cob for carting_, and you said the other night that you had made a fool of yourself over it! I didn’t know then all about it, but I do now. Captain Carteret heard about it from the dealer in Dublin. Even the dealer said it was a pity you hadn’t given the mare a chance!”

“It’s all perfectly true,” said Rupert, in a low voice.

A soft answer, so far from turning away wrath, frequently inflames it.

“Then I think there’s no more to be said!” said Fanny hotly.

There was silence. They had reached the top of the hill, and the grey mare began to trot.

“Well, there’s just one thing I should like to say,” said Rupert awkwardly, his breath coming very short, “I couldn’t help everything going wrong about the mare. It was just my bad luck. I only bought her to please you. They told me she couldn’t get right after the accident. What was the good of my going to look at her? I wanted to cross in the boat with you. Whatever I did I did for you. I would do anything in the world for you--”

It was at this crucial moment that there arose suddenly from the dim grey road in front of them a slightly greyer shadow, a shadow that limped amid the clanking of chains. The Connemara mare, now masquerading as a County Cork cob, asked for nothing better. If it were a ghost, she was legitimately entitled to flee from it; if, as was indeed the case, it was a donkey, she made a point of shying at donkeys. She realised that, by a singular stroke of good fortune, the reins were lying in loops on her back.

A snort, a sideways bound, a couple of gleeful kicks on the dashboard, and she was away at full gallop, with one rein under her tail, and a pleasant open road before her.

“It’s all right!” said Rupert, recovering his balance by a hair-breadth, and feeling in his heart that it was all wrong, “the Craffroe Hill will stop her. Hold on to the rail.”

Fanny said nothing. It was, indeed, all that she could do to keep her seat in the trap, with which the rushing road was playing cup and ball; she was, besides, not one of the people who are conversational in emergencies. When an animal, as active and artful as the Connemara mare, is going at some twenty miles an hour, with one of the reins under its tail, endeavours to detach the rein are not much avail, and when the tail is still tender from recent docking, they are a good deal worse than useless. Having twice nearly fallen on his head, Rupert abandoned the attempt and prayed for the long stiff ascent of the Craffroe Hill.

It came swiftly out of the grey moonlight. At its foot another road forked to the right; instead of facing the hill that led to home and stable, the mare swung into the side road, with one wheel up on the grass, and the cushions slipping from the seat, and Rupert, just saving the situation with the left rein that remained to him, said to himself that they were in for a bad business.

For a mile they swung and clattered along it, with the wind striking and splitting against their faces like a cold and tearing stream of water; a light wavered and disappeared across the pallid fields to the left, a group of starveling trees on a hill slid up into the skyline behind them, and at last it seemed as if some touch of self-control, some suggestion of having had enough of the joke, was shortening the mare’s grasping stride. The trap pitched more than ever as she came up into the shafts and back into her harness; she twisted suddenly to the left into a narrow lane, cleared the corner by an impossible fluke, and Fanny Fitz was hurled ignominiously on to Rupert Gunning’s lap. Long briars and twigs struck them from either side, the trap bumped in craggy ruts and slashed through wide puddles, then reeled irretrievably over a heap of stones and tilted against the low bank to the right.

Without any exact knowledge of how she got there, Fanny found herself on her hands and knees in a clump of bracken on top of the bank; Rupert was already picking himself out of rugs and other jetsam in the field below her, and the mare was proceeding up the lane at a disorderly trot, having jerked the trap on to its legs again from its reclining position.

Fanny was lifted down into the lane; she told him that she was not hurt, but her knees shook, her hands trembled, and the arm that was round her tightened its clasp in silence. When a man is strongly moved by tenderness and anxiety and relief, he can say little to make it known; he need not--it is known beyond all telling by the one other person whom it concerns. She felt suddenly that she was safe, that his heart was torn for her sake, and that the tension of the last ten minutes had been great. It went through her with a pang, and her head swayed against his arm. In a moment she felt his lips on her hair, on her temple, and the oldest, the most familiar of all words of endearment was spoken at her ear. She recovered herself, but in a new world. She tried to walk on up the lane, but stumbled in the deep ruts and found the supporting arm again ready at need. She did not resist it.

A shrill neigh arose in front of them. The mare had pulled up at a closed gate, and was apparently apostrophising some low farm buildings beyond it. A dog barked hysterically, the door of a cowshed burst open, and a man came out with a lantern.

“Oh, I know now where we are!” cried Fanny wildly, “it’s Johnny Connolly’s! Oh, Johnny, Johnny Connolly, we’ve been run away with!”

“For God’s sake!” responded Johnny Connolly, standing stock still in his amazement, “is that Miss Fanny?”

“Get hold of the mare,” shouted Rupert, “or she’ll jump the gate!”

Johnny Connolly advanced, still calling upon his God, and the mare uttered a low but vehement neigh.

“Ye’re deshtroyed, Miss Fanny! And Mr. Gunning, the Lord save us! Ye’re killed the two o’ ye! What happened ye at all? Woa, gerr’l, woa, gerrlie! Ye’d say she knew me, the crayture.”

The mare was rubbing her dripping face and neck against the farmer’s shoulder, with hoarse whispering snorts of recognition and pleasure. He held his lantern high to look at her.

“Musha, why wouldn’t she know me!” he roared, “sure it’s yer own mare, Miss Fanny! ’Tis the Connemara mare I thrained for ye! And may the divil sweep and roast thim that has it told through all the counthry that she was killed!”

A GRAND FILLY

I am an Englishman. I say this without either truculence or vainglorying, rather with humility--a mere Englishman, who submits his Plain Tale from the Western Hills with the conviction that the Kelt who may read it will think him more mere than ever.

I was in Yorkshire last season when what is trivially called “the cold snap” came upon us. I had five horses eating themselves silly all the time, and I am not going to speak of it. I don’t consider it a subject to be treated lightly. It was in about the thickest of it that I heard from a man I know in Ireland. He is a little old horse-coping sportsman with a red face and iron-grey whiskers, who has kept hounds all his life; or, rather, he has always had hounds about, on much the same conditions that other men have rats. The rats are indubitably there, and feed themselves variously, and so do old Robert Trinder’s “Rioters,” which is their _nom de guerre_ in the County Corkerry (the few who know anything of the map of Ireland may possibly identify the two counties buried in this cryptogram).

I meet old Robert most years at the Dublin Horse Show, and every now and then he has sold me a pretty good horse, so when he wrote and renewed a standing invitation, assuring me that there was open weather, and that he had a grand four-year-old filly to sell, I took him at his word, and started at once. The journey lasted for twenty-eight hours, going hard all the time, and during the last three of them there were no foot-warmers and the cushions became like stones enveloped in mustard plasters. Old Trinder had not sent to the station for me, and it was pelting rain, so I had to drive seven miles in a thing that only exists south of the Limerick Junction, and is called a “jingle”. A jingle is a square box of painted canvas with no back to it, because, as was luminously explained to me, you must have some way to get into it, and I had to sit sideways in it, with my portmanteau bucking like a three-year-old on the seat opposite to me. It fell out on the road twice going uphill. After the second fall my hair tonic slowly oozed forth from the seams, and added a fresh ingredient to the smells of the grimy cushions and the damp hay that furnished the machine. My hair tonic costs eight-and-sixpence a bottle.

There is probably not in the United Kingdom a worse-planned entrance gate than Robert Trinder’s. You come at it obliquely on the side of a crooked hill, squeeze between its low pillars with an inch to spare each side, and immediately drop down a yet steeper hill, which lasts for the best part of a quarter of a mile. The jingle went swooping and jerking down into the unknown, till, through the portholes on either side of the driver’s legs, I saw Lisangle House. It had looked decidedly better in large red letters at the top of old Robert’s notepaper than it did at the top of his lawn, being no more than a square yellow box of a house, that had been made a fool of by being promiscuously trimmed with battlements. Just as my jingle tilted me in backwards against the flight of steps, I heard through the open door a loud and piercing yell; following on it came the thunder of many feet, and the next instant a hound bolted down the steps with a large plucked turkey in its mouth. Close in its wake fled a brace of puppies, and behind them, variously armed, pursued what appeared to be the staff of Lisangle House. They went past me in full cry, leaving a general impression of dirty aprons, flying hair, and onions, and I feel sure that there were bare feet somewhere in it. My carman leaped from his perch and joined in the chase, and the whole party swept from my astonished gaze round or into a clump of bushes. At this juncture I was not sorry to hear Robert Trinder’s voice greeting me as if nothing unusual were occurring.

“Upon me honour, it’s the Captain! You’re welcome, sir, you’re welcome! Come in, come in, don’t mind the horse at all; he’ll eat the grass there as he’s done many a time before! When the gerr’ls have old Amazon cot they’ll bring in your things.”

(Perhaps I ought to mention at once that Mr. Trinder belongs to the class who are known in Ireland as “Half-sirs”. You couldn’t say he was a gentleman, and he himself wouldn’t have tried to say so. But, as a matter of fact, I have seen worse imitations.)

Robert was delighted to see me, and I had had a whisky-and-soda and been shown two or three more hound puppies before it occurred to him to introduce me to his aunt. I had not expected an aunt, as Robert is well on the heavenward side of sixty; but there she was: she made me think of a badly preserved Egyptian mummy with a brogue. I am always a little afraid of my hostess, but there was something about Robert’s aunt that made me know I was a worm. She came down to dinner in a bonnet and black kid gloves--a circumstance that alone was awe-inspiring. She sat entrenched at the head of the table behind an enormous dish of thickly jacketed potatoes, and, though she scorned to speak to Robert or me, she kept up a sort of whispered wrangle with the parlour-maid all the time. The latter’s red hair hung down over her shoulders--and at intervals over mine also--in horrible luxuriance, and recalled the leading figure in the pursuit of Amazon; there was, moreover, something about the heavy boots in which she tramped round the table that suggested that Amazon had sought sanctuary in the cow-house. I have done some roughing it in my time, and I am not over-particular, but I admit that it was rather a shock to meet the turkey itself again, more especially as it was the sole item of the _menu_. There was no doubt of its identity, as it was short of a leg, and half the breast had been shaved away. The aunt must have read my thoughts in my face. She fixed her small implacable eyes on mine for one quelling instant, then she looked at Robert. Her nephew was obviously afraid to meet her eye; he coughed uneasily, and handed a surreptitious potato to the puppy who was sitting under his chair.

“This place is rotten with dogs,” said the aunt; with which announcement she retired from the conversation, and fell again to the slaughter of the parlour-maid. I timidly ate my portion of turkey and tried not to think about the cow-house.

It rained all night. I could hear the water hammering into something that rang like a gong; and each time I rolled over in the musty trough of my feather-bed I fractiously asked myself why the mischief they had left the tap running all night. Next morning the matter was explained when, on demanding a bath, I was told that “there wasn’t but one in the house, and ’twas undher the rain-down. But sure ye can have it,” with which it was dragged in full of dirty water and flakes of whitewash, and when I got out of it I felt as if I had been through the Bankruptcy Court.

The day was windy and misty--a combination of weather possible only in Ireland--but there was no snow, and Robert Trinder, seated at breakfast in a purple-red hunting coat, dingy drab breeches, and woollen socks, assured me that it was turning out a grand morning.

I distinctly liked the looks of my mount when Jerry the Whip pulled her out of the stable for me. She was big and brown, with hindquarters that looked like jumping; she was also very dirty and obviously underfed. None the less she was lively enough, and justified Jerry’s prediction that “she’d be apt to shake a couple or three bucks out of herself when she’d see the hounds”. Old Robert was on an ugly brute of a yellow horse, rather like a big mule, who began the day by bucking out of the yard gate as if he had been trained by Buffalo Bill. It was at this juncture that I first really respected Robert Trinder; his retention of his seat was so unstudied, and his command of appropriate epithets so complete.

Jerry and the hounds awaited us on the road, the latter as mixed a party as I have ever come across. There were about fourteen couple in all, and they ranged in style from a short-legged black-and-tan harrier, who had undoubtedly had an uncle who was a dachshund, to a thing with a head like a greyhound, a snow-white body, and a feathered stern that would have been a credit to a setter. In between these extremes came several broken-haired Welshmen, some dilapidated 24-inch foxhounds, and a lot of pale-coloured hounds, whose general effect was that of the tablecloth on which we had eaten our breakfast that morning, being dirty white, covered with stains that looked like either tea or egg, or both.

“Them’s the old Irish breed,” said Robert, as the yellow horse voluntarily stopped short to avoid stepping on one of them; “there’s no better. That Gaylass there would take a line up Patrick Street on a fair day, and you’d live and die seeing her kill rats.”

I am bound to say I thought it more likely that I should live to see her and some of her relations killing sheep, judging by their manners along the road; but we got to Letter cross-roads at last with no more than an old hen and a wandering cur dog on our collective consciences. The road and its adjacent fences were thronged with foot people, mostly strapping young men and boys, in the white flannel coats and slouched felt hats that strike a stranger with their unusualness and picturesqueness.

“Do you ever have a row with Land Leaguers?” I asked, noting their sticks, while the warnings of a sentimental Radical friend as to the danger of encountering an infuriated Irish peasantry suddenly assumed plausibility.

“Land League? The dear help ye! Who’d be bothered with the Land League here?” said Robert, shoving the yellow horse into the crowd; “let the hounds through, boys, can’t ye? No, Captain, but ’tis Saint November’s Day, as they call it, a great holiday, and there isn’t a ruffian in the country but has come out with his blagyard dog to head the fox!”

A grin of guilt passed over the faces of the audience.

“There’s plinty foxes in the hill, Mr. Thrinder,” shouted one of them; “Dan Murphy says there isn’t a morning but he’d see six or eight o’ them hoppin’ there.”

“Faith, ’tis thrue for you,” corroborated Dan Murphy. “If ye had thim gethered in a quarther of ground and dhropped a pin from th’ elements, ‘twould reach one o’ thim!”

(As a matter of fact, I haven’t a notion what Mr. Murphy meant, but that is what he said, so I faithfully record it.)

The riders were farmers and men of Robert’s own undetermined class, and there was hardly a horse out who was more than four years old, saving two or three who were nineteen. Robert pushed through them and turned up a bohireen--_i.e._, a narrow and incredibly badly made lane--and I presently heard him cheering the hounds into covert. As to that covert, imagine a hill that in any civilised country would be called a mountain: its nearer side a cliff, with just enough slope to give root-hold to giant furze bushes, its summit a series of rocky and boggy terraces, trending down at one end into a ravine, and at the other becoming merged in the depths of an aboriginal wood of low scrubby oak trees. It seemed as feasible to ride a horse over it as over the roof of York Minster. I hadn’t the vaguest idea what to do or where to go, and I clave to Jerry the Whip.

The hounds were scrambling like monkeys along the side of the hill; so were the country boys with their curs; old Trinder moved parallel with them along its base. Jerry galloped away to the ravine, and there dismounting, struggled up by zig-zag cattle paths to the comparative levels of the summit. I did the same, and was pretty well blown by the time I got to the top, as the filly scorned the zigzags, and hauled me up as straight as she could go over the rocks and furze bushes. A few other fellows had followed us, and we all pursued on along the top of the hill.

Suddenly Jerry stopped short and held up his hand. A hound spoke below us, then another, and then came a halloa from Jerry that made the filly quiver all over. The fox had come up over the low fence that edged the cliff, and was running along the terrace in front of us. Old Robert below us--I could almost have chucked a stone on to him--gave an answering screech, and one by one the hounds fought their way up over the fence and went away on the line, throwing their tongues in a style that did one good to hear. Our only way ahead lay along a species of trench between the hill, on whose steep side we were standing, and the cliff fence. Jerry kicked the spurs into his good ugly little horse, and making him jump down into the trench, squeezed along it after the hounds. But the delay of waiting for them had got the filly’s temper up. When I faced her at the trench she reared, and whirled round, and pranced backwards in, considering the circumstances, a highly discomposing way. The rest of the field crowded through the furze past me and down into the trench, and twice I thought the mare would land herself and me on top of one of them. I don’t wonder she was frightened. I know I was. There was nothing between us and a hundred-foot drop but this narrow trench and a low, rotten fence, and the fool behaved as though she wanted to jump it all. I hope no one will ever erect an equestrian statue in my honour; now that I have experienced the sensation of ramping over nothing, I find I dislike it. I believe I might have been there now, but just then a couple of hounds came up, and before I knew what she was at, the filly had jumped down after them into the trench as if she had been doing it all her life. I was not long about picking the others up; the filly could gallop anyhow, and we thundered on over ground where, had I been on foot, I should have liked a guide and an alpenstock. At intervals we jumped things made of sharp stones, and slates, and mud; I don’t know whether they were banks or walls. Sometimes the horses changed feet on them, sometimes they flew the whole affair, according to their individual judgment. Sometimes we were splashing over sedgy patches that looked and felt like buttered toast, sometimes floundering through stuff resembling an ill-made chocolate soufflé, whether intended for a ploughed field or a partially drained bog-hole I could not determine, and all was fenced as carefully as cricket-pitches. Presently the hounds took a swing to the left and over the edge of the hill again, and our leader Jerry turned sharp off after them, down a track that seemed to have been dug out of the face of the hill. I should have liked to get off and lead, but they did not give me time, and we suddenly found ourselves joined to Robert Trinder and his company of infantry, all going hard for the oak wood that I mentioned before.

It was pretty to see the yellow horse jump. Nothing came amiss to him, and he didn’t seem able to make a mistake. There was a stone stile out of a bohireen that stopped every one, and he changed feet on the flag on top and went down by the steps on the other side. No one need believe this unless they like, but I saw him do it. The country boys were most exhilarating. How they got there I don’t know, but they seemed to spring up before us wherever we went. They cheered every jump, they pulled away the astounding obstacles that served as gates (such as the end of an iron bedstead, a broken harrow, or a couple of cartwheels), and their power of seeing the fox through a stone wall or a hill could only be equalled by the Röntgen rays. We fought our way through the oak wood, and out over a boggy bounds ditch into open country at last. The Rioters had come out of the wood on a screaming scent, and big and little were running together in a compact body, followed, like the tail of a kite, by a string of yapping country curs. The country was all grass, enchantingly green and springy; the jumps were big, yet not too big, and there were no two alike; the filly pulled hard, but not too hard, and she was jumping like a deer; I felt that all I had heard of Irish hunting had not been overstated.

We had been running for half an hour when we checked at a farmhouse; the yellow horse had been leading the hunt all the time, making a noise like a steam-engine, but perfectly undefeated, and our numbers were reduced to five. An old woman and a girl rushed out of the yard to meet us, screaming like sea-gulls.

“He’s gone south this five minutes! I was out spreadin’ clothes, and I seen him circling round the Kerry cow, and he as big as a man!” screamed the girl.

“He was, the thief!” yelled the old woman. “I seen him firsht on the hill, cringeing behind a rock, and he hardly able to thrail the tail afther him!”

“Run now, like a good girl, and show me where did he cross the fence,” said old Robert, puffing and blowing, as with a purple face he hurried into the yard to collect the hounds, who, like practised foragers, had already overrun the farmhouse, as was evidenced by an indignant and shrieking flight of fowls through the open door.

The girl ran, snatching off her red plaid shawl as she went.

“Here’s the shpot now!” she called out, flinging the shawl down on the fence; “here’s the very way just that he wint! Go south to the gap; I’ll pull the pole out for ye--this is a cross place.”

The hunt gratefully accepted her good offices. She tore the monstrous shaft of a cart out of a place that with it was impossible, and without it was a boggy scramble, and as we began to gallop again, I began to think there was a good deal to be said in favour of the New Woman.

I suppose we had had another quarter of an hour, when the mist, that had been hanging about all day, came down on us, and it was difficult to see more than a field ahead. We had got down on to lower ground, and we were in a sort of marshy hollow when we were confronted by the most serious obstacle of the day: a tall and obviously rotten bank clothed in briars, with sharp stones along its top, a wide ditch in front of it, and a disgustingly squashy take-off. Robert Trinder and the yellow horse held their course undaunted: the rest of the field turned as one man, and went for another way round--I, in my arrogance, followed the Master. The yellow horse rose out of the soft ground with quiet, indescribable ease, got a foothold on the side of the bank for his hind legs, and was away into the next field without pause or mistake.

“Go round, Captain!” shouted Trinder; “it’s a bad place!”

I hardly heard him; I was already putting the filly at it for the second time. It took about three minutes for her to convince me that she and Robert were right, and I was wrong, and by that time everybody was out of sight, swallowed up in the mist. I tried round after the others, and found their footmarks up a lane and across a field; a loose stone wall confronted me, and I rode at it confidently; but the filly, soured by our recent encounter, reared and would have none of it. I tried yet another way round, and put her at a moderate and seemingly innocuous bank, at which, with the contrariety of her sex, she rushed at a thousand miles an hour. It looked somehow as if there might be a bit of a drop, but the filly had got her beastly blood up, and I have been in a better temper myself.

She rose to the jump when she was a good six feet from it. I knew she would not put an iron on it, and I sat down for the drop. It came with a vengeance. I had a glimpse of a thatched roof below me, and the next instant we were on it or in it--I don’t know which. It gave way with a crash of rafters, the mare’s forelegs went in, and I was shot over her head, rolled over the edge of the roof, and fell on my face into a manure heap. A yell and a pig burst simultaneously from the door, a calf followed, and while I struggled up out of my oozy resting-place, I was aware of the filly’s wild face staring from the door of the shed in which she so unexpectedly found herself. The broken reins trailed round her legs, she was panting and shivering, and blood was trickling down the white blaze on her nose. I got her out through the low doorway with a little coaxing, and for a moment hardly dared to examine as to the amount of damage done. She was covered with cobwebs and dirt out of the roof, and, as I led her forward, she went lame on one foreleg; but beyond this, and a good many scratches, there was nothing wrong. My own appearance need not here be dilated upon. I was cleaning off what they call in Ireland “the biggest of the filth” with a bunch of heather, when from a cottage a little bit down the lane in which I was standing a small barelegged child emerged. It saw me, uttered one desperate howl, and fled back into the house. I abandoned my toilet and led the mare to the cottage door.

“Is any one in?” I said to the house at large.

A fresh outburst of yells was the sole response; there was a pattering of bare feet, and somewhere in the smoky gloom a door slammed. It was clearly a case of “Not at Home” in its conventional sense. I scribbled Robert Trinder’s name on one of my visiting cards, laid it and half a sovereign on a table by the door, and started to make my way home.

The south of Ireland is singularly full of people. I do not believe you can go a quarter of a mile on any given road without meeting some one, and that some one is sure to be conversationally disposed and glad of the chance of answering questions. By dint of asking a good many, I eventually found myself on the high road, with five miles between me and Lisangle. The mare’s lameness had nearly worn off, and she walked beside me like a dog. After all, I thought, I had had the best of the day, had come safely out of what might have been a nasty business, and was supplied with a story on which to dine out for the rest of my life. My only anxiety was as to whether I could hope for a bath when I got in--a luxury that had been hideously converted by the _locale_ of my fall into a necessity. I led the filly in the twilight down the dark Lisangle drive, feeling all the complacency of a man who knows he has gone well in a strange country, and was just at the turn to the yard when I came upon an extraordinary group. All the women of the household were there, gathered in a tight circle round some absorbing central fact; all were shrieking at the tops of their voices, and the turkey cock in the yard gobbled in response to each shriek.

“Ma’am, ma’am!” I heard, “ye’ll pull the tail off him!”

“Twisht the tink-an now, Bridgie! Twisht it!”

“Holy Biddy! the masther’ll kill us!”

What the deuce were they at? and what was a “tink-an”? I dragged the filly nearer, and discovered that a hound puppy was the central point of the tumult, and was being contended for, like the body of Moses, by Miss Trinder and Bridgie the parlour-maid. Both were seated on the ground pulling at the puppy for all they were worth; Miss Trinder had him by the back of his neck and his tail, while Bridgie was dragging--what _was_ she dragging at? Then I saw that the puppy’s head was jammed in a narrow-necked tin milk-can, and that, as things were going, he would wear it, like the Man in the Iron Mask, for the rest of his life.

The small, grim face of Robert’s aunt was scarlet with exertion; her black bonnet had slipped off her head, and the thin grey hair that was ordinarily wound round her little skull as tightly as cotton on a reel, was hanging in scanty wisps from its central knot; nevertheless, she was, metaphorically speaking, pulling Bridgie across the line every time. I gave the filly to one of the audience, and took Bridgie’s place at the “tink-an”. Miss Trinder and I put our backs into it, and suddenly I found myself flat on mine, with the “tink-an” grasped in both hands above my head.

A composite whoop of triumph rose from the spectators, and the filly rose with it. She went straight up on her hind legs, and the next instant she was away across the drive and into the adjoining field, and, considering all things, I don’t blame her. We all ran after her. I led, and the various female retainers strung out after me like a flight of wild-duck, uttering cries of various encouragement and consternation. Miss Trinder followed, silent and indomitable, at the heel of the hunt, and the released puppy, who had also harked in, could be heard throwing his tongue in the dusky shrubbery ahead of us. It was all exasperatingly absurd, as things seem to have a habit of being in Ireland. I never felt more like a fool in my life, and the bitterest part of it was that it was all I could do to keep ahead of Bridgie. As for the filly, she waited till we got near her, and then she jumped a five-foot coped wall into the road, fell, picked herself up, and clattered away into darkness. At this point I heard Robert’s horn, and sundry confused shouts and sounds informed me that the filly had run into the hounds.

She was found next day on the farm where she was bred, fifteen miles away. The farmer brought her back to Lisangle. She had injured three hounds, upset two old women and a donkey-cart, broken a gate, and finally, on arriving at the place of her birth, had, according to the farmer, “fired the divil’s pelt of a kick into her own mother’s stomach”. Moreover, she “hadn’t as much sound skin on her as would bait a rat-trap”--I here quote Mr. Trinder--and she had fever in all her feet.

Of course I bought her. I could hardly do less. I told Robert he might give her to the hounds, but he sent her over to me in a couple of months as good as new, and I won the regimental steeplechase cup with her last April.

A NINETEENTH-CENTURY MIRACLE

Captain “Pat” Naylor, of the --th Dragoons, had the influenza. For three days he had lain prostrate, a sodden and aching victim to the universal leveller, and an intolerable nuisance to his wife. This last is perhaps an over-statement; Mrs. Naylor was in the habit of bearing other people’s burdens with excellent fortitude, but she felt justly annoyed that Captain Pat should knock up before they had fairly settled down in their new quarters, and while yet three of the horses were out of sorts after the crossing from England.

Pilot, however, was quite fit, a very tranquillising fact, and one that Mrs. Pat felt was due to her own good sense in summering him on her father’s broad pastures in Meath, instead of “lugging him to Aldershot with the rest of the string, as Pat wanted to do,” as she explained to Major Booth. Major Booth shed a friendly grin upon his fallen comrade, who lay, a deplorable object, on the horrid velvet-covered sofa peculiar to indifferent lodgings, and said vaguely that one of his brutes was right anyhow, and he was going to ride him at Carnfother the next day.

“You’d better come too, Mrs. Pat,” he added; “and if you’ll drive me I’ll send my chap on with the horses. It’s too far to ride. It’s fourteen Irish miles off; and fourteen Irish miles is just about the longest distance I know.”

Carnfother is a village in a remote part of the Co. Cork; it possesses a small hotel--in Ireland no hostelry, however abject, would demean itself by accepting the title of inn--a police barrack, a few minor public-houses, a good many dirty cottages, and an unrivalled collection of loafers. The stretch of salmon river that gleamed away to the distant heathery hills afforded the _raison d’être_ of both hotel and loafers, but the fishing season had not begun, and the attention of both was therefore undividedly bestowed on Mrs. Naylor and Major Booth. The former’s cigarette and the somewhat Paradisaic dimensions of her apron skirt would indeed at any time have rivalled in interest the landing of a 20-lb. fish, and as she strode into the hotel the bystanders’ ejaculatory piety would have done credit to a revival meeting.

“Well, well, I’ll say nothing for her but that she’s quare!” said the old landlady, hurrying in from her hens to attend to these rarer birds whom fortune had sent to her net.

Mrs. Pat’s roan cob had attacked and defeated the fourteen Irish miles with superfluous zeal, and there were still several minutes before the hounds could be reasonably expected on the scene. The soda was bad, the whisky was worse. The sound of a riddle came in with the sunshine through the open door, and our friends strolled out into the street to see what was going on. In the centre of a ring of onlookers an old man was playing, and was, moreover, dancing to his own music, and dancing with serious, incongruous elegance. Round and round the circle he footed it, his long thin legs twinkling in absolute accord with the complicated jig that his long thin fingers were ripping out of the cracked and raucous fiddle. A very plain, stout young woman, with a heavy red face and discordantly golden hair, shuffled round after him in a clumsy pretence of dancing, and as the couple faced Mrs. Pat she saw that the old man was blind. Steam was rising from his domed bald head, and his long black hair danced on his shoulders. His face was pale and strange and entirely self-absorbed. Had Mrs. Pat been in the habit of instituting romantic parallels between the past and the present she might have thought of the priests of Baal who danced in probably just such measures round the cromlechs in the hills above Carnfother; as she wasn’t, she remarked merely that this was all very well, but that the old maniac would have to clear out of that before they brought Pilot round, or there’d be trouble.

There was trouble, but it did not arise from Pilot, but from the yellow-haired woman’s pertinacious demands for money from Mrs. Naylor. She had the offensive fluency that comes of long practice in alternate wheedling and bullying, and although Major Booth had given her a shilling she continued to pester Mrs. Pat for a further largesse. But, as it happened, Mrs. Pat’s purse was in her covert coat in the dog-cart, and Mrs. Pat’s temper was ever within easy reach, and on being too closely pressed for the one she exhibited the other with a decision that contracted the ring of bystanders to hear the fun, and loosened the yellow-haired woman’s language, till unfortunate Major Booth felt that if he could get her off the field of battle for a sovereign it would be cheap at the price. The old man continued to walk round and round, fingering a dumb tune on his fiddle that he did not bow, while the sunlight glistened hot and bright in his unwinking eyes; there was a faint smile on his lips, he heard as little as he saw; it was evident that he was away where “beyond these voices there is peace,” in the fairy country that his forefathers called the Tir na’n Oge.

At this juncture the note of the horn sounded very sweetly from across the shining ford of the river. Hounds and riders came splashing up into the village street, the old man and his daughter were hustled to one side, and Mrs. Pat’s affability returned as she settled her extremely smart little person on Pilot’s curveting back, and was instantly aware that there was nothing present that could touch either of them in looks or quality. Carnfother was at the extreme verge of the D---- Hounds’ country; there were not more than about thirty riders out, and Mrs. Pat was not far wrong when she observed to Major Booth that there was not much class about them. Of the four or five women who were of the field, but one wore a habit with any pretensions to conformity with the sacred laws of fashion, and its colour was a blue that, taken in connection with a red, brass-buttoned waistcoat, reminded the severe critic from Royal Meath of the head porter at the Shelburne Hotel. So she informed Major Booth in one of the rare intervals permitted to her by Pilot for conversation.

“All right,” responded that gentleman, “you wait until you and that ramping brute of yours get up among the stone walls, and you’ll be jolly glad if she’ll call a cab for you and see you taken safe home. I tell you what--you won’t be able to see the way she goes.”

“Rubbish!” said Mrs. Pat, and, whether from sympathy or from a petulant touch of her heel, Pilot at this moment involved himself in so intricate a series of plunges and bucks as to preclude further discussion.

The first covert--a small wood on the flank of a hill--was blank, and the hounds moved on across country to the next draw. It was a land of pasture, and in every fence was a deep muddy passage, through which the field splashed in single file with the grave stolidity of the cows by whom the gaps had been made. Mrs. Pat was feeling horribly bored. Her escort had joined himself to two of the ladies of the hunt, and though it was gratifying to observe that one wore a paste brooch in her tie and the other had an imitation cavalry bit and bridle, with a leather tassel hanging from her pony’s throat, these things lost their savour when she had no one with whom to make merry over them. She had left her sandwiches in the dog-cart, her servant had mistaken whisky for sherry when he was filling her flask; the day had clouded over, and already one brief but furious shower had scourged the curl out of her dark fringe and made the reins slippery.

At last, however, a nice-looking gorse covert was reached, and the hounds threw themselves into it with promising alacrity. Pilot steadied himself, and stood with pricked ears, giving an occasional snatch at his bit, and looking, as no one knew better than his rider, the very picture of a hunter, while he listened for the first note that should tell of a find. He had not long to wait. There came a thin little squeal from the middle of the covert, and a hound flung up out of the thicker gorse and began to run along a ridge of rock, with head down, and feathering stern.

“They’ve got him, my lady,” said a young farmer on a rough three-year-old to Mrs. Pat, as he stuffed his pipe in his pocket. “That’s Patience; we’ll have a hunt out o’ this.”

Then came another and longer squeal as Patience plunged out of sight again, and then, as the glowing chorus rose from the half-seen pack, a whip, posted on a hillside beyond the covert, raised his cap high in the air, and a wild screech that set Pilot dancing from leg to leg broke from a country boy who was driving a harrow in the next field: “Ga--aane awa--ay!”

Mrs. Pat forgot her annoyances. Her time had come. She would show that idiot Booth that Pilot was not to be insulted with impunity, and--But here retrospect and intention became alike merged in the present, and in the single resolve to get ahead and stay there. Half a dozen of Pilot’s great reaching strides, and she was in the next field and over the low bank without putting an iron on it. The horse with the harrow, deserted by his driver, was following the hunt with the best of them, and, combining business with pleasure, was, as he went, harrowing the field with absurd energy. The Paste Brooch and the Shelburne Porter--so Mrs. Pat mentally distinguished them--were sailing along with a good start, and Major Booth was close at their heels. The light soil of the tilled field flew in every direction as thirty or more horses raced across it, and the usual retinue of foot runners raised an ecstatic yell as Mrs. Pat forged ahead and sent her big horse over the fence at the end of the field in a style that happily combined swagger with knowledge.

The hounds were streaking along over a succession of pasture fields, and the cattle gaps which were to be found in every fence vexed the proud soul of Mrs. Pat. She was too good a sportswoman to school her horse over needless jumps when hounds were running, but it infuriated her to have to hustle with these outsiders for her place at a gap. So she complained to Major Booth, with a vehemence of adjective that, though it may be forgiven to her, need not be set down here.

“Is _all_ the wretched country like this?” she inquired indignantly, as the Shelburne Porter’s pony splashed ahead of her through a muddy ford, just beyond which the hounds had momentarily checked; “you told me to bring out a big-jumped horse, and I might have gone the whole hunt on a bicycle!”

Major Booth’s reply was to point to the hounds. They had cast back to the line that they had flashed over, and had begun to run again at right angles from the grassy valley down which they had come, up towards the heather-clad hills that lay back of Carnfother.

“Say your prayers, Mrs. Pat!” he said, in what Mrs. Pat felt to be a gratuitously offensive manner, “and I’ll ask the lady in the pretty blue habit to have an eye to you. This is a hill fox and he’s going to make you and Pilot sit up!”

Mrs. Pat was not in a mood to be trifled with, and I again think it better to omit her response to this inconvenient jesting. What she did was to give Pilot his head, and she presently found herself as near the hounds as was necessary, galloping in a line with the huntsman straight for a three-foot wall, lightly built of round stones. That her horse could refuse to jump it was a possibility that did not so much as enter her head; but that he did so was a fact whose stern logic could not be gainsaid. She had too firm a seat to be discomposed by the swinging plunge with which he turned from it, but her mental balance sustained a serious shake. That Pilot, at the head of the hunt should refuse, was a thing that struck at the root of her dearest beliefs. She stopped him and turned him at the wall again; again he refused, and at the same instant Major Booth and the blue habit jumped it side by side.

“What did I tell you!” the former called back, with a laugh that grated on Mrs. Pat’s ear with a truly fiendish rasp; “do you want a lead?”

The incensed Mrs. Pat once more replied in forcible phraseology, as she drove her horse again at the wall. The average Meath horse likes stones just about as much as the average Co. Cork horse enjoys water, and the train of running men and boys were given the exquisite gratification of a contest between Pilot and his rider.

“Howld on, miss, till I knock a few shtones for ye!” volunteered one, trying to interpose between Pilot and the wall.

“Get out of the way!” was Mrs. Pat’s response to this civility, as she crammed her steed at the jump again. The volunteer, amid roars of laughter from his friends, saved his life only by dint of undignified agility, as the big horse whirled round, rearing and plunging.

“Isn’t he the divil painted?” exclaimed another in highest admiration; “wait till I give him a couple of slaps of my bawneen, miss!” He dragged off his white flannel coat and attacked Pilot in the rear with it, while another of the party flung clods of mud vaguely into the battle, and another persistently implored the maddened Mrs. Pat to get off and let him lead the horse over “before she’d lose her life:” a suggestion that has perhaps a more thoroughly exasperating effect than any other on occasions such as this.

By the time that Pilot had pawed down half the wall and been induced to buck over, or into, what remained of it, Mrs. Pat’s temper was irretrievably gone, and she was at the heel instead of the head of the hunt. Thanks to this position there was bestowed on her the abhorred, but not to be declined, advantage of availing herself of the gaps made in the next couple of jumps by the other riders; but the stones they had kicked down were almost as agitating to Pilot’s ruffled nerves as those that still remained in position. She found it the last straw that she should have to wait for the obsequious runners to tear these out of her way, while the galloping backs in front of her grew smaller and smaller, and the adulatory condolences of her assistants became more and more hard to endure. She literally hurled the shilling at them as she set off once more to try to recover her lost ground, and by sheer force of passion hustled Pilot over the next broken-down wall without a refusal. For she had now got into that stony country whereof Major Booth had spoken. Rough heathery fields, ribbed with rocks and sown with grey boulders, were all round. The broad salmon river swept sleekly through the valley below, among the bland green fields which were as far away for all practical purposes as the plains of Paradise. No one who has not ridden a stern chase over rough ground on a well-bred horse with his temper a bit out of hand will be able at all fitly to sympathise with the trials of Mrs. Naylor. The hunt and all that appertained to it had sunk out of sight over a rugged hillside, and she had nothing by which to steer her course save the hoof-marks in the occasional black and boggy intervals between the heathery knolls. No one had ever accused her of being short of pluck, and she pressed on her difficult way with the utmost gallantry; but short of temper she certainly was, and at each succeeding obstacle there ensued a more bitter battle between her and her horse. Every here and there a band of crisp upland meadow would give the latter a chance, but each such advantage would be squandered in the war dance that he indulged in at every wall.

At last the summit of the interminable series of hills was gained, and Mrs. Pat scanned the solitudes that surrounded her with wrathful eyes. The hounds were lost, as completely swallowed up as ever were Korah, Dathan and Abiram. Not the most despised of the habits or the feeblest of the three-year-olds had been left behind to give a hint of their course; but the hoof-marks showed black on a marshy down-grade of grass, and with an angry clout of her crop on Pilot’s unaccustomed ribs, she set off again. A narrow road cut across the hills at the end of the field. The latter was divided from it by a low, thin wall of sharp slaty stones, and on the further side there was a wide and boggy drain. It was not a nice place, and Pilot thundered down towards it at a pace that suited his rider’s temper better than her judgment. It was evident, at all events, that he did not mean to refuse. Nor did he; he rose out of the heavy ground at the wall like a rocketing pheasant, and cleared it by more than twice its height; but though he jumped high he did not jump wide, and he landed half in and out of the drain, with his forefeet clawing at its greasy edge, and his hind legs deep in the black mud.

Mrs. Pat scrambled out of the saddle with the speed of light, and after a few momentous seconds, during which it seemed horribly likely that the horse would relapse bodily into the drain, his and Mrs. Pat’s efforts prevailed, and he was standing, trembling, and dripping, on the narrow road. She led him on for a few steps; he went sound, and for one delusive instant she thought he had escaped damage; then, through the black slime on one of his hind legs the red blood began to flow. It came from high up inside the off hind leg, above the hock, and it welled ever faster and faster, a plaited crimson stream that made his owner’s heart sink. She dipped her handkerchief in the ditch and cleaned the cut. It was deep in the fleshy part of the leg, a gaping wound, inflicted by one of those razor slates that hide like sentient enemies in such boggy places. It was large enough for her to put her hand in; she held the edges together, and the bleeding ceased for an instant; then, as she released them, it began again worse than ever. Her handkerchief was as inadequate for any practical purpose as ladies’ handkerchiefs generally are, but an inspiration came to her. She tore off her gloves, and in a few seconds the long linen hunting-scarf that had been pinned and tied with such skilled labour in the morning was being used as a bandage for the wound. But though Mrs. Pat could tie a tie with any man in the regiment, she failed badly as a bandager of a less ornamental character. The hateful stream continued to pump forth from the cut, incarnadining the muddy road, and in despair she took Pilot by the head and began to lead him down the hill towards the valley.

Another gusty shower flung itself at her. It struck her bare white neck with whips of ice, and though she turned up the collar of her coat, the rain ran down under the neckband of her shirt and chilled her through and through. It was evident that an artery had been cut in Pilot’s leg; the flow from the wound never ceased; the hunting-scarf drenched with blood, had slipped down to the hock. It seemed to Mrs. Pat that her horse must bleed to death, and, tough and unemotional though she was, Pilot was very near her heart; tears gathered in her eyes as she led him slowly on through the rain and the loneliness, in the forlorn hope of finding help. She progressed in this lamentable manner for perhaps half a mile; the rain ceased, and she stopped to try once more to readjust the scarf, when, in the stillness that had followed the cessation of the rain, she heard a faint and distant sound of music. It drew nearer, a thin, shrill twittering, and as Mrs. Pat turned quickly from her task to see what this could portend, she heard a woman’s voice say harshly:--

“Ah, have done with that thrash of music; sure, it’ll be dark night itself before we’re in to Lismore.”

There was something familiar in the coarse tones. The weirdness fell from the wail of the music as Mrs. Pat remembered the woman who had bothered her for money that morning in Carnfother. She and the blind old man were tramping slowly up the road, seemingly as useless a couple to any one in Mrs. Pat’s plight as could well be imagined.

“How far am I from Carnfother?” she asked, as they drew near to her. “Is there any house near here?”

“There is not,” said the yellow-haired woman; “and ye’re four miles from Carnfother yet.”

“I’ll pay you well if you will take a message there for me--” began Mrs. Pat.

“Are ye sure have ye yer purse in yer pocket?” interrupted the yellow-haired woman with a laugh that succeeded in being as nasty as she wished; “or will I go dancin’ down to Carnfother--”

“Have done, Joanna!” said the old man suddenly; “what trouble is on the lady? What lamed the horse?”

He turned his bright blind eyes full on Mrs. Pat. They were of the curious green blue that is sometimes seen in the eyes of a grey collie, and with all Mrs. Pat’s dislike and suspicion of the couple, she knew that he was blind.

“He was cut in a ditch,” she said shortly.

The old man had placed his fiddle in his daughter’s hands; his own hands were twitching and trembling.

“I feel the blood flowing,” he said in a very low voice, and he walked up to Pilot.

His hands went unguided to the wound, from which the steady flow of blood had never ceased. With one he closed the lips of the cut, while with the other he crossed himself three times. His daughter watched him stolidly; Mrs. Pat, with a certain alarm, having, after the manner of her kind, explained to herself the incomprehensible with the all-embracing formula of madness. Yes, she thought, he was undoubtedly mad, and as soon as the paroxysm was past she would have another try at bribing the woman.

The old man was muttering to himself, still holding the wound in one hand. Mrs. Pat could distinguish no words, but it seemed to her that he repeated three times what he was saying. Then he straightened himself and stroked Pilot’s quarter with a light, pitying hand. Mrs. Pat stared. The bleeding had ceased. The hunting-scarf lay on the road at the horse’s empurpled hoof. There was nothing to explain the mystery, but the fact remained.

“He’ll do now,” said the blind man. “Take him on to Carnfother; but ye’ll want to get five stitches in that to make a good job of it.”

“But--I don’t understand--” stammered Mrs. Pat, shaken for once out of her self-possession by this sudden extension of her spiritual horizon. “What have you done? Won’t it begin again?” She turned to the woman in her bewilderment: “Is--is he mad?”

“For as mad as he is, it’s him you may thank for yer horse,” answered the yellow-haired woman. “Why, Holy Mother! did ye never hear of Kane the Blood-Healer?”

The road round them was suddenly thronged with hounds, snuffing at Pilot, and pushing between Mrs. Pat and the fence. The cheerful familiar sound of the huntsman’s voice rating them made her feel her feet on solid ground again. In a moment Major Booth was there, the Master had dismounted, the habits, loud with sympathy and excitement, had gathered round; a Whip was examining the cut, while he spoke to the yellow-haired woman.

Mrs. Pat tie-less, her face splashed with mud, her bare hands stained with blood, told her story. It is, I think, a point in her favour that for a moment she forgot what her appearance must be.

“The horse would have bled to death before the lady got to Carnfother, sir,” said the Whip to the Master; “it isn’t the first time I seen life saved by that one. Sure, didn’t I see him heal a man that got his leg in a mowing machine, and he half-dead, with the blood spouting out of him like two rainbows!”

This is not a fairy story. Neither need it be set lightly down as a curious coincidence. I know the charm that the old man said. I cannot give it here. It will only work successfully if taught by man to woman or by woman to man; nor do I pretend to say that it will work for every one. I believe it to be a personal and wholly incomprehensible gift, but that such a gift has been bestowed, and in more parts of Ireland than one, is a bewildering and indisputable fact.

HIGH TEA AT McKEOWN’S

“Papa!” said the youngest Miss Purcell, aged eleven, entering the drawing-room at Mount Purcell in a high state of indignation and a flannel dressing-gown that had descended to her in unbroken line of succession from her eldest sister, “isn’t it my turn for the foxy mare to-morrow? Nora had her at Kilmacabee, and it’s a rotten shame--”

The youngest Miss Purcell here showed signs of the imminence of tears, and rooted in the torn pocket of the dressing-gown for the hereditary pocket-handkerchief that went with it.

Sir Thomas paused in the act of cutting the end off a long cigar, and said briefly:--

“Neither of you’ll get her. She’s going ploughing the Craughmore.”

The youngest Miss Purcell knew as well as her sister Nora that the latter had already commandeered the foxy mare, and, with the connivance of the cowboy, had concealed her in the cow-house; but her sense of tribal honour, stimulated by her sister’s threatening eye, withheld her from opening this branch of the subject.

“Well, but Johnny Mulcahy won’t plough to-morrow because he’s going to the Donovan child’s funeral. Tommy Brien’s just told me so, and he’ll be drunk when he comes back, and to-morrow’ll be the first day that Carnage and Trumpeter are going out--”

The youngest Miss Purcell paused, and uttered a loud sob.

“My darling baby,” remonstrated Lady Purcell from behind a reading-lamp, “you really ought not to run about the stable-yard at this hour of the night, or, indeed, at any other time!”

“Baby’s always bothering to come out hunting,” remarked an elder sister, “and you know yourself, mamma, that the last time she came was when she stole the postman’s pony, and he had to run all the way to Drinagh, and you said yourself she was to be kept in the next day for a punishment.”

“How ready you are with your punishments! What is it to you if she goes out or no?” demanded Sir Thomas, whose temper was always within easy reach.

“She can have the cob, Tom,” interposed stout and sympathetic Lady Purcell, on whom the tears of her youngest born were having their wonted effect, “I’ll take the donkey chaise if I go out.”

“The cob is it?” responded Sir Thomas, in the stalwart brogue in which he usually expressed himself. “The cob has a leg on him as big as your own since the last day one of them had him out!” The master of the house looked round with exceeding disfavour on his eight good-looking daughters. “However, I suppose it’s as good to be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, and if you don’t want him--”

The youngest Miss Purcell swiftly returned her handkerchief to her pocket, and left the room before any change of opinion was possible.

Mount Purcell was one of those households that deserve to be subsidised by any country neighbourhood in consideration of their unfailing supply of topics of conversation. Sir Thomas was a man of old family, of good income and of sufficient education, who, while reserving the power of comporting himself like a gentleman, preferred as a rule to assimilate his demeanour to that of one of his own tenants (with whom, it may be mentioned, he was extremely popular). Many young men habitually dined out on Sir Thomas’s brogue and his unwearying efforts to dispose of his eight daughters.

His wife was a handsome, amiable, and by no means unintelligent lady upon whose back the eight daughters had ploughed and had left long furrows. She was not infrequently spoken of as “that un_for_tunate Lady Purcell!” with a greater or less broadening of the accent on the second syllable according to the social standard of the speaker. Her tastes were comprehended and sympathised with by her gardener, and by the clerk at Mudie’s who refilled her box. The view taken of her by her husband and family was mainly a negative one, and was tinged throughout by the facts that she was afraid to drive anything more ambitious than the donkey, and had been known to mistake the kennel terrier for a hound puppy. She had succeeded in transmitting to her daughters her very successful complexion and blue eyes, but her responsibility for them had apparently gone no further. The Misses Purcell faced the world and its somewhat excessive interest in them with the intrepid _esprit de corps_ of a square of British infantry, but among themselves they fought, as the coachman was wont to say--and no one knew better than the coachman--“both bitther an regular, like man and wife!” They ranged in age from about five and twenty downwards, sportswomen, warriors, and buccaneers, all of them, and it would be difficult to determine whether resentment or a certain secret pride bulked the larger in their male parent’s mind in connection with them.

“Are you going to draw Clashnacrona to-morrow?” asked Muriel, the second of the gang (Lady Purcell, it should have been mentioned, had also been responsible for her daughters’ names), rising from her chair and pouring what was left of her after dinner coffee into her saucer, a proceeding which caused four pairs of lambent eyes to discover themselves in the coiled mat of red setters that occupied the drawing-room hearthrug.

“No, I am not,” said Sir Thomas, “and, what’s more, I’m coming in early. I’m a fool to go hunting at all at this time o’ year, with half the potatoes not out of the ground.” He rose, and using the toe of his boot as the coulter of a plough, made a way for himself among the dogs to the centre of the hearthrug. “Be hanged to these dogs! I declare I don’t know am I more plagued with dogs or daughters! Lucy!”

Lady Purcell dutifully disinterred her attention from a catalogue of Dutch bulbs.

“When I get in to-morrow I’ll go call on that Local Government Board Inspector who’s staying in Drinagh. They tell me he’s a very nice fellow and he’s rolling in money. I daresay I’ll ask him to dinner. He was in the army one time, I believe. They often give these jobs to soldiers. If any of you girls come across him,” he continued, bending his fierce eyebrows upon his family, “I’ll trouble you to be civil to him and show him none of your infernal airs because he happens to be an Englishman! I hear he’s bicycling all over the country and he might come out to see the hounds.”

Rosamund, the eldest, delivered herself of an almost imperceptible wink in the direction of Violet, the third of the party. Sir Thomas’s diplomacies were thoroughly appreciated by his offspring. “It’s time some of you were cleared out from under my feet!” he told them. Nevertheless when, some four or five years before, a subaltern of Engineers engaged on the Government survey of Ireland had laid his career, plus fifty pounds per annum and some impalpable expectations, at the feet of Muriel, the clearance effected by Sir Thomas had been that of Lieutenant Aubrey Hamilton. “Is it marry one of my daughters to that penniless pup!” he had said to Lady Purcell, whose sympathies had, as usual, been on the side of the detrimental. “Upon my honour, Lucy, you’re a bigger fool than I thought you--and that’s saying a good deal!”

It was near the beginning of September, and but a sleepy half dozen or so of riders had turned out to meet the hounds the following morning, at Liss Cranny Wood. There had been rain during the night and, though it had ceased, a wild wet wind was blowing hard from the north-west. The yellowing beech trees twisted and swung their grey arms in the gale. Hats flew down the wind like driven grouse; Sir Thomas’s voice, in the middle of the covert, came to the riders assembled at the cross roads on the outskirts of the wood in gusts, fitful indeed, but not so fitful that Nora, on the distrained foxy mare, was not able to gauge to a nicety the state of his temper. From the fact of her unostentatious position in the rear it might safely be concluded that it, like the wind, was still rising. The riders huddled together in the lee of the trees, their various elements fused in the crucible of Sir Thomas’s wrath into a compact and anxious mass. There had been an unusually large entry of puppies that season, and Sir Thomas’s temper, never at its best on a morning of cubbing, was making exhaustive demands on his stock of expletives. Rabbits were flying about in every direction, each with a shrieking puppy or two in its wake. Jerry, the Whip, was galloping _ventre à terre_ along the road in the vain endeavour to overtake a couple in headlong flight to the farm where they had spent their happier earlier days. At the other side of the wood the Master was blowing himself into apoplexy in the attempt to recall half a dozen who were away in full cry after a cur-dog, and a zealous member of the hunt looked as if he were playing polo with another puppy that doubled and dodged to evade the lash and the duty of getting to covert. Hither and thither among the beech trees went that selection from the Master’s family circle, exclusive of the furtive Nora, that had on this occasion taken the field. It was a tradition in the country that there were never fewer than four Miss Purcells out, and that no individual Miss Purcell had more than three days’ hunting in the season. Whatever may have been the truth of this, the companion legend that each Miss Purcell slept with two hound puppies in her bed was plausibly upheld by the devotion with which the latter clung to the heels of their nurses.

In the midst of these scenes of disorder an old fox rightly judging that this was no place for him, slid out of the covert, and crossed the road just in front of where Nora, in a blue serge skirt and a red Tam-o’-Shanter cap, lurked on the foxy mare. Close after him came four or five couple of old hounds, and, prominent among her elders, yelped the puppy that had been Nora’s special charge. This was not cubbing, and no one knew it better than Nora; but the sight of Carnage among the prophets--Carnage, whose noblest quarry hitherto had been the Mount Purcell turkey-cock--overthrew her scruples. The foxy mare, a ponderous creature, with a mane like a Nubian lion and a mouth like steel, required nearly as much room to turn in as a man-of-war, and while Nora, by vigorous use of her heel and a reliable ash plant, was getting her head round, her sister Muriel, on a raw-boned well-bred colt--Sir Thomas, as he said, made the best of a bad job, and utilised his daughters as roughriders--shot past her down the leafy road, closely followed by a stranger on a weedy bay horse, which Nora instantly recognised as the solitary hireling of the neighbourhood.

Through the belt of wood and out into the open country went the five couple, and after them went Muriel, Nora and the strange man. There had been an instant when the colt had thought that it seemed a pity to leave the road, but, none the less, he had the next instant found himself in the air, a considerable distance above a low stone wall, with a tingling streak across his ribs, and a bewildering sensation of having been hustled. The field in which he alighted was a sloping one and he ramped down it very enjoyably to himself, with all the weight of his sixteen hands and a half concentrated in his head, when suddenly a tall grassy bank confronted him, with, as he perceived with horror, a ditch in front of it. He tried to swerve, but there seemed something irrevocable about the way in which the bank faced him, and if his method of “changing feet” was not strictly conventional, he achieved the main point and found all four safely under him when he landed, which was as much--if not more than as much--as either he or Muriel expected. The Miss Purcells were a practical people, and were thankful for minor mercies.

It was at about this point that the stranger on the hireling drew level; he had not been at the meet, and Muriel turned her head to see who it was that was kicking old McConnell’s screw along so well. He lifted his cap, but he was certainly a stranger. She saw a discreetly clipped and pointed brown beard, with a rather long and curling moustache.

“Fed on furze!” thought Muriel, with a remembrance of the foxy mare’s upper lip when she came in “off the hill”.

Then she met the strange man’s eyes--was he quite a stranger? What was it about the greeny-grey gleam of them that made her heart give a curious lift, and then sent the colour running from it to her face and back again to her heart?

“I thought you were going to cut me--Muriel!” said the strange man.

In the meantime the five couple and Carnage were screaming down the heathery side of Liss Cranny Hill, on a scent that was a real comfort to them after nearly five miserable months of kennels and road-work, and a glorious wind under their sterns. Jerry, the Whip, was riding like a madman to stop them; they knew that well, and went the faster for it. Sir Thomas was blowing his horn inside out. But Jerry was four fields behind, and Sir Thomas was on the wrong side of the wood, and Miss Muriel and the strange gentleman were coming on for all they were worth, and were as obviously bent on having a good time as they were. Carnage flung up her handsome head and squealed with pure joy, as she pitched herself over the big bounds fence at the foot of the hill, and flopped across the squashy ditch on the far side. There was grass under her now, beautiful firm dairy grass, and that entrancing perfume was lying on it as thick as butter--Oh! it was well to be hunting! thought Carnage, with another most childish shriek, legging it after her father and mother and several other blood relations in a way that did Muriel’s heart good to see.

The fox, as good luck would have it, had chosen the very pick of Sir Thomas’s country, and Muriel and the stranger had it all to themselves. She looked over her shoulder. Away back in a half-dug potato field Nora and a knot of labourers were engaged in bitter conflict with the foxy mare on the subject of a bank with a rivulet in front of it. To refuse to jump running water had been from girlhood the resolve of the foxy mare; it was plain that neither Nora’s ash plant, nor the stalks of rag-wort, torn from the potato ridges, with which the countrymen flagellated her from behind, were likely to make her change her mind. Farther back still were a few specks, motionless apparently, but representing, as Muriel was well aware, the speeding indignant forms of those Miss Purcells who had got left. As for Sir Thomas--well, it was no good going to meet the devil half-way! was the filial reflection of Sir Thomas’s second daughter, as, with a clatter of stones, she and the colt dropped into a road, and charged on over the bank on the other side, the colt leaving a hind leg behind him in it, and sending thereby a clod of earth flying into the stranger’s face. The stranger only laughed, and catching hold of the much enduring hireling he drove him level with the colt, and lifted him over the ensuing bank and gripe in a way subsequently described by Jerry as having “covered acres”.

But the old fox’s hitherto straight neck was getting a twist in it. Possibly he had summered himself rather too well, and found himself a little short of training for the point that he had first fixed on. At all events, he swung steadily round, and headed for the lower end of the long belt of Liss Cranny Wood; and, as he and his pursuers so headed, Retributive Justice, mounted on a large brown horse, very red in the face, and followed by a string of hounds and daughters, galloped steadily toward the returning sinners.

It is probably superfluous to reproduce for sporting readers the exact terms in which an infuriated master of hounds reproves an erring flock. Sir Thomas, even under ordinary circumstances, had a stirring gift of invective. It was currently reported that after each day’s hunting Lady Purcell made a house-to-house visitation of conciliation to all subscribers of five pounds and upwards. On this occasion the Master, having ordered his two daughters home without an instant’s delay, proceeded to a satiric appreciation of the situation at large and in detail, with general reflections as to the advantage to tailors of sticking to their own trade, and direct references of so pointed a character to the mental abilities of the third delinquent, that that gentleman’s self-control became unequal to further strain, and he also retired abruptly from the scene.

Nora and Muriel meanwhile pursued their humbled, but unrepentant, way home. It was blowing as hard as ever. Muriel’s hair had only been saved from complete overthrow by two hair-pins yielded, with pelican-like devotion, by a sister. Nora had lost the Tam-o’-Shanter, and had torn her blue serge skirt. The foxy mare had cast a shoe, and the colt was unaffectedly done.

“He’s mad for a drink!” said Muriel, as he strained towards the side of the bog road, against which the waters of a small lake, swollen by the recent rains, were washing in little waves under the lash of the wind--“I think I’ll let him just wet his mouth.”

She slackened the reins, and the thirsty colt eagerly thrust his muzzle into the water. As he did so he took another forward step, and instantly, with a terrific splash, he and his rider were floundering in brown water up to his withers in the ditch below the submerged edge of the road. To Muriel’s credit, it must be said that she bore this unlooked-for immersion with the nerve of a Baptist convert. In a second she had pulled the colt round parallel with the bank, and in another she had hurled herself from the saddle and was dragging herself, like a wounded otter, up on to the level of the road.

“Well you’ve done it now, Muriel!” said Nora dispassionately. “How pleased Sir Thomas will be when the colt begins to cough to-morrow morning! He’s bound to catch cold out of this. Look out! Here’s that man that went the run with us. I’d try and wipe some of the mud off my face if I were you!”

A younger sister of fifteen is not apt to err on the side of over sympathy, but the deficiencies of Nora were more than made up for by the solicitude of the stranger with the pointed beard. He hauled the colt from his watery nest, he dried him down with handfuls of rushes, he wiped the saddle with his own beautiful silk pocket-handkerchief. For a stranger he displayed--so it struck Nora--a surprising knowledge of the locality. He pointed out that Mount Purcell was seven miles away, and that the village of Drinagh, where he was putting up--(“Oho! so he’s the inspector Sir Thomas was going to be so civil to!” thought the younger Miss Purcell with an inward grin)--was only two or three miles away.

“You know, Nora,” said Muriel with an unusually conciliatory manner, “it isn’t at all out of our way, and the colt _ought_ to get a proper rub down and a hot drink.”

“I should have thought he’d had about as much to drink as he wanted, hot or cold!” said Nora.

But Nora had not been a younger sister for fifteen years for nothing, and it was for Drinagh that the party steered their course.

Their arrival stirred McKeown’s Hotel (so-called) to its depths. Destiny had decreed that Mrs. McKeown, being, as she expressed it, “an epicure about boots,” should choose this day of all others to go to “town” to buy herself a pair, leaving the direction of the hotel in the hands of her husband, a person of minor importance, and of Mary Ann Whooly, a grey-haired kitchen-maid, who milked the cows and made the beds, and at a distance in the back-yard was scarcely distinguishable from the surrounding heaps of manure.

The Inspector’s hospitality knew no limits, and failed to recognise that those of McKeown’s Hotel were somewhat circumscribed. He ordered hot whisky and water, mutton chops, dry clothes for Miss Purcell, fires, tea, buttered toast, poached eggs and other delicacies simultaneously and immediately, and the voice of Mary Ann Whooly imploring Heaven’s help for herself and its vengeance upon her inadequate assistants was heard far in the streets of Drinagh.

“Sure herself” (herself was Mrs. McKeown) “has her box locked agin me, and I’ve no clothes but what’s on me!” she protested, producing after a long interval a large brown shawl and a sallow-complexioned blanket, “but the Captain’s after sending these. Faith, they’ll do ye grand! Arrah, why not, asthore! Sure he’ll never look at ye!”

These consisted of a long covert coat, a still longer pair of yellow knitted stockings, and a pair of pumps.

“Sure they’re the only best we have,” continued Mary Ann Whooly, pooling, as it were, her wardrobe with that of the lodger. “God’s will must be, Miss Muriel, my darlin’ gerr’l!”

It says a good deal for the skill of Nora as a tire-woman that her sister’s appearance ten minutes afterwards was open to no reproach, save possibly that of eccentricity, and the Inspector’s gaze--which struck the tire-woman as being of a singularly enamoured character for so brief an acquaintance--was so firmly fixed upon her sister’s countenance that nothing else seemed to signify. It was by this time past two o’clock, and the repast, which arrived in successive relays, had, at all events, the merit of combining the leading features of breakfast, lunch and afternoon tea in one remarkable procession, Julia Connolly, having inaugurated the entertainment with tumblers of dark brown steaming whisky and water, was impelled from strength to strength by her growing sense of the greatness of the occasion, and it would be hard to say whether the younger Miss Purcell was more gratified by the mound of feather-light pancakes which followed on the tea and buttered toast, or by the almost cringing politeness of her elder sister.

“How civil she is!” thought Nora scornfully; “for all she’s so civil she’ll have to lend me her saddle next week, or I’ll tell them the whole story!” (Them meant the sisterhood.) “I bet he was holding her hand just before the pancakes came in!”

At about this time Lady Purcell, pursuing her peaceful way home in her donkey chaise, was startled by the sound of neighing and by the rattle of galloping hoofs behind her, and her consternation may be imagined when the foxy mare and the colt, saddled but riderless, suddenly ranged up one on either side of her chaise. Having stopped themselves with one or two prodigious bounds that sent the mud flying in every direction, they proceeded to lively demonstrations of friendship towards the donkey, which that respectable animal received with every symptom of annoyance. Lady Purcell had never in her life succeeded in knowing one horse from another, and what horses these were she had not the faintest idea; but the side saddles were suggestive of her Amazon brood; she perceived that one of the horses had been under water, and by the time she had arrived at her own hall door, with the couple still in close attendance upon her, anxiety as to the fate of her daughters and exhaustion from much scourging of the donkey, upon whom the heavy coquetries of the foxy mare had had a most souring effect, rendered the poor lady but just capable of asking if Sir Thomas had returned.

“He is, my Lady, but he’s just after going down to the farm, and he’s going on to call on the English gentleman that’s at Mrs. McKeown’s.”

“And the young ladies?” gasped Lady Purcell.

The answer suited with her fears. Lady Purcell was not wont to take the initiative, still less one of her husband’s horses, without his approval; but the thought of the saturated side-saddle lent her decision, and as soon as a horse and trap could be got ready she set forth for Drinagh.

It need not for a moment be feared that such experienced campaigners as the Misses Muriel and Nora Purcell had forgotten that their father had settled to call upon their temporary host, what time the business of the morning should be ended, or that they had not arranged a sound scheme of retirement, but when the news was brought to them that during the absence of the stable-boy--“to borrow a half score of eggs and a lemon for pancakes,” it was explained--their horses had broken forth from the cowshed and disappeared, it may be admitted that even their stout hearts quailed.

“Oh, it will be all right!” the Inspector assured them, with the easy optimism of the looker-on in domestic tragedy; “your father will see there was nothing else for you to do.”

“That’s all jolly fine,” returned Nora, “but _I’m_ going out to borrow Casey’s car” (Casey was the butcher), “and I’ll just tell old Mary Ann to keep a sharp look out for Sir Thomas, and give us warning in time.”

It is superfluous to this simple tale to narrate the conversation that befel on the departure of Nora. It was chiefly of a retrospective character, with disquisitions on such abstractions as the consolations that sometimes follow on the loss of a wealthy great-aunt, the difficulties of shaving with a “tennis elbow,” the unchanging quality of certain emotions. This later topic was still under discussion when Nora burst into the room.

“Here’s Sir Thomas!” she panted. “Muriel, fly! There’s no time to get downstairs, but Mary Ann Whooly said we could go into the room off this sitting-room till he’s gone.”

Flight is hardly the term to be applied to the second Miss Purcell’s retreat, and it says a good deal for the Inspector’s mental collapse that he saw nothing ludicrous in her retreating back, clad as it was in his own covert coat, with a blanket like the garment of an Indian brave trailing beneath it. Nora tore open a door near the fireplace, and revealed a tiny room containing a table, a broken chair, and a heap of feathers near an old feather bed on the floor.

“Get in, Muriel!” she cried.

They got in, and as the door closed on them Sir Thomas entered the room.

During the morning the identity of the stranger on whom he had poured the vials of his wrath, with the Local Government Board Inspector whom he was prepared to be delighted to honour, had been brought home to Sir Thomas, and nothing could have been more handsome and complete than the apology that he now tendered. He generously admitted the temptation endured in seeing hounds get away with a good fox on a day devoted to cubbing, and even went so far as to suggest that possibly Captain Clarke--

“Hamilton-Clarke,” said the Inspector.

“Had ridden so hard in order to stop them.”

“Er--quite so,” said the Inspector.

Something caused the dressing-room door to rattle, and Captain Hamilton-Clarke grew rather red.

“My wife and I hope,” continued Sir Thomas, urbanely, “that you will come over to dine with us to-morrow evening, or possibly to-night.”

He stopped. A trap drove rapidly up to the door, and Lady Purcell’s voice was heard agitatedly inquiring “if Miss Muriel and Miss Nora were there? Casey had just told her--”

The rest of the sentence was lost.

“Why, that _is_ my wife!” said Sir Thomas. “What the deuce does she want here?”

A strange sound came from behind the door of the dressing-room: something between a stifled cry and a laugh. The Inspector’s ears became as red as blood. Then from within there was heard a sort of rush, and something fell against the door. There followed a wholly uncontrolled yell and a crash, and the door was burst open.

It has, I think, been mentioned that in the corner of the dressing-room in which the Misses Purcell had taken refuge there was on the floor the remains of a feather bed. The feathers had come out through a ragged hole in one corner of it; Nora, in the shock of hearing of Lady Purcell’s arrival, trod on the corner of the bed and squeezed more of the feathers out of it. A gush of fluff was the result, followed by a curious and unaccountable movement in the bed, and then from the hole there came forth a corpulent and very mangy old rat. Its face was grey and scaly, and horrid pink patches adorned its fat person. It gave one beady glance at Nora, and proceeded with hideous composure to lope heavily across the floor towards the hole in the wall by which it had at some bygone time entered the room. But the hole had been nailed up, and as the rat turned to seek another way of escape the chair upon which Muriel had incontinently sprung broke down, depositing her and her voluminous draperies on top of the rat.

I cannot feel that Miss Purcell is to be blamed that at this moment all power of self-control, of reason almost, forsook her. Regardless of every other consideration, she snatched the blankets and the covert-coat skirts into one massive handful, and with, as has been indicated, a yell of housemaid stridency, flung herself against the door and dashed into the sitting-room, closely followed by Nora, and rather less closely by the rat. The latter alone retained its presence of mind, and without an instant’s delay hurried across the room and retired by the half-open door. Immediately from the narrow staircase there arose a series of those acclaims that usually attend the progress of royalty, and, in even an intenser degree, of rats. There came a masculine shout, a shrill and ladylike scream, a howl from Mary Ann Whooly, accompanied by the clang and rattle of a falling coal box, and then Lady Purcell, pale and breathless, appeared at the doorway of the sitting-room.

“Sure the young ladies isn’t in the house at all, your ladyship!” cried the pursuing voice of Mary Ann Whooly, faithful, even at this supreme crisis, to a lost cause.

Lady Purcell heard her not. She was aware only of her daughter Muriel, attired like a scarecrow in a cold climate, and of the attendant fact that the arm of the Local Government Board Inspector was encircling Muriel’s waist, as far as circumstances and a brown woollen shawl would permit. Nora, leaning half-way out of the window, was calling at the top of her voice for Sir Thomas’s terrier; Sir Thomas was very loudly saying nothing in particular, much as an angry elderly dog barks into the night. Lady Purcell wildly concluded that the party was rehearsing a charade--the last scene of a very vulgar charade.

“Muriel!” she exclaimed, “_what_ have you got on you? And who--” She paused and stared at the Inspector. “Good gracious!” she cried, “why, it’s Aubrey Hamilton!”

THE BAGMAN’S PONY

When the regiment was at Delhi, a T.G. was sent to us from the 105th Lancers, a bagman, as they call that sort of globe-trotting fellow that knocks about from one place to another, and takes all the fun he can out of it at other people’s expense. Scott in the 105th gave this bagman a letter of introduction to me, told me that he was bringing down a horse to run at the Delhi races; so, as a matter of course, I asked him to stop with me for the week. It was a regular understood thing in India then, this passing on the T.G. from one place to another; sometimes he was all right, and sometimes he was a good deal the reverse--in any case, you were bound to be hospitable, and afterwards you could, if you liked, tell the man that sent him that you didn’t want any more from him.

The bagman arrived in due course, with a rum-looking roan horse, called the “Doctor”; a very good horse, too, but not quite so good as the bagman gave out that he was. He brought along his own grass-cutter with him, as one generally does in India, and the grass-cutter’s pony, a sort of animal people get because he can carry two or three more of these beastly clods of grass they dig up for horses than a man can, and without much regard to other qualities. The bagman seemed a decentish sort of chap in his way, but, my word! he did put his foot in it the first night at mess; by George, he did! There was somehow an idea that he belonged to a wine merchant business in England, and the Colonel thought we’d better open our best cellar for the occasion, and so we did; even got out the old Madeira, and told the usual story about the number of times it had been round the Cape. The bagman took everything that came his way, and held his tongue about it, which was rather damping. At last, when it came to dessert and the Madeira, Carew, one of our fellows, couldn’t stand it any longer--after all, it _is_ aggravating if a man won’t praise your best wine, no matter how little you care about his opinion, and the bagman was supposed to be a _connoisseur_.

“Not a bad glass of wine that,” says Carew to him; “what do you think of it?”

“Not bad,” says the bagman, sipping it, “Think I’ll show you something better in this line if you’ll come and dine with me in London when you’re home next.”

“Thanks,” says Carew, getting as red as his own jacket, and beginning to splutter--he always did when he got angry--“this is good enough for me, and for most people here--”

“Oh, but nobody up here has got a palate left,” says the bagman, laughing in a very superior sort of way.

“What do you mean, sir?” shouted Carew, jumping up. “I’ll not have any d----d bagmen coming here to insult me!”

By George, if you’ll believe me, Carew had a false palate, with a little bit of sponge in the middle, and we all knew it, _except the bagman_. There was a frightful shindy, Carew wanting to have his blood, and all the rest of us trying to prevent a row. We succeeded somehow in the end, I don’t quite know how we managed it, as the bagman was very warlike too; but, anyhow, when I was going to bed that night I saw them both in the billiard room, very tight, leaning up against opposite ends of the billiard table, and making shoves at the balls--with the wrong ends of their cues, fortunately.

“He called me a d----d bagman,” says one, nearly tumbling down with laughing.

“Told me I’d no palate,” says the other, putting his head down on the table and giggling away there “best thing I ever heard in my life.”

Every one was as good friends as possible next day at the races, and for the whole week as well. Unfortunately for the bagman his horse didn’t pull off things in the way he expected, in fact he hadn’t a look in--we just killed him from first to last. As things went on the bagman began to look queer and by the end of the week he stood to lose a pretty considerable lot of money, nearly all of it to me. The way we arranged these matters then was a general settling-up day after the races were over; every one squared up his books and planked ready money down on the nail, or if he hadn’t got it he went and borrowed from some one else to do it with. The bagman paid up what he owed the others, and I began to feel a bit sorry for the fellow when he came to me that night to finish up. He hummed and hawed a bit, and then asked if I should mind taking an I.O.U. from him, as he was run out of the ready.

Of course I said, “All right, old man, certainly, just the same to me,” though it’s usual in such cases to put down the hard cash, but still--fellow staying in my house, you know--sent on by this pal of mine in the 11th--absolutely nothing else to be done.

Next morning I was up and out on parade as usual, and in the natural course of events began to look about for my bagman. By George, not a sign of him in his room, not a sign of him anywhere. I thought to myself, this is peculiar, and I went over to the stable to try whether there was anything to be heard of him.

The first thing I saw was that the “Doctor’s” stall was empty.

“How’s this?” I said to the groom; “where’s Mr. Leggett’s horse?”

“The sahib has taken him away this morning.”

I began to have some notion then of what my I.O.U. was worth.

“The sahib has left his grass-cutter and his pony,” said the _sais_, who probably had as good a notion of what was up as I had.

“All right, send for the grass-cutter,” I said.

The fellow came up, in a blue funk evidently, and I couldn’t make anything of him. Sahib this, and sahib that, and salaaming and general idiotcy--or shamming--I couldn’t tell which. I didn’t know a nigger then as well as I do now.

“This is a very fishy business,” I thought to myself, “and I think it’s well on the cards the grass-cutter will be out of this to-night on his pony. No, by Jove, I’ll see what the pony’s good for before he does that. Is the grass-cutter’s pony there?” I said to the _sais_.

“He is there, sahib, but he is only a _kattiawa tattoo_,” which is the name for a common kind of mountain pony.

I had him out, and he certainly was a wretched-looking little brute, dun with a black stripe down his back, like all that breed, and all bony and ragged and starved.

“Indeed, he is a _gareeb kuch kam ki nahin_,” said the _sais_, meaning thereby a miserable beast, in the most intensified form, “and not fit to stand in the sahib’s stable.”

All the same, just for the fun of the thing, I put the grass-cutter up on him, and told him to trot him up and down. By George! the pony went like a flash of lightning! I had him galloped next; same thing--fellow could hardly hold him. I opened my eyes, I can tell you, but no matter what way I looked at him I couldn’t see where on earth he got his pace from. It was there anyhow, there wasn’t a doubt about that. “That’ll do,” I said, “put him up. And you just stay here,” I said to the grass-cutter; “till I hear from Mr. Leggett where you’re to go to. Don’t leave Delhi till you get orders from me.”

It got about during the day that the bagman had disappeared, and had had a soft thing of it as far as I was concerned. The 112th were dining with us that night, and they all set to work to draw me after dinner about the business--thought themselves vastly witty over it.

“Hullo Paddy, so you’re the girl he left behind him!” “Hear he went off with two suits of your clothes, one over the other.” “Cheer up, old man; he’s left you the grass-cutter and the pony, and what _he_ leaves must be worth having, I’ll bet!” and so on.

I suppose I’d had a good deal more than my share of the champagne, but all of a sudden I began to feel pretty warm.

“You’re all d----d funny,” I said, “but I daresay you’ll find he’s left me something that _is_ worth having.”

“Oh, yes!” “Go on!” “Paddy’s a great man when he’s drunk,” and a lot more of the same sort.

“I tell you what it is,” said I, “I’ll back the pony he’s left here to trot his twelve miles an hour on the road.”

“Bosh!” says Barclay of the 112th. “I’ve seen him, and I’ll lay you a thousand rupees even he doesn’t.”

“Done!” said I, whacking my hand down on the table.

“And I’ll lay another thousand,” says another fellow.

“Done with you too,” said I.

Every one began to stare a bit then.

“Go to bed, Paddy,” says the Colonel, “you’re making an exhibition of yourself.”

“Thank you, sir; I know pretty well what I’m talking about,” said I; but, by George, I began privately to think I’d better pull myself together a bit, and I got out my book and began to hedge--laid three to one on the pony to do eleven miles in the hour, and four to one on him to do ten--all the fellows delighted to get their money on. I was to choose my own ground, and to have a fortnight to train the pony, and by the time I went to bed I stood to lose about £1,000.

Somehow in the morning I didn’t feel quite so cheery about things--one doesn’t after a big night--one gets nasty qualms, both mental and the other kind. I went out to look after the pony, and the first thing I saw by way of an appetiser was Biddy, with a face as long as my arm. Biddy, I should explain, was a chap called Biddulph, in the Artillery; they called him Biddy for short, and partly, too, because he kept a racing stable with me in those days, I being called Paddy by every one, because I was Irish--English idea of wit--Paddy and Biddy, you see.

“Well,” said he, “I hear you’ve about gone and done it this time. The 112th are going about with trumpets and shawms, and looking round for ways to spend that thousand when they get it. There are to be new polo ponies, a big luncheon, and a piece of plate bought for the mess, in memory of that benefactor of the regiment, the departed bagman. Well, now, let’s see the pony. That’s what I’ve come down for.”

I’m hanged if the brute didn’t look more vulgar and wretched than ever when he was brought out, and I began to feel that perhaps I was more parts of a fool than I thought I was. Biddy stood looking at him there with his under-lip stuck out.

“I think you’ve lost your money,” he said. That was all, but the way he said it made me feel conscious of the shortcomings of every hair in the brute’s ugly hide.

“Wait a bit,” I said, “you haven’t seen him going yet. I think he has the heels of any pony in the place.”

I got a boy on to him without any more ado, thinking to myself I was going to astonish Biddy. “You just get out of his way, that’s all,” says I, standing back to let him start.

If you’ll believe it, he wouldn’t budge a foot!--not an inch--no amount of licking had any effect on him. He just humped his back, and tossed his head and grunted--he must have had a skin as thick as three donkeys! I got on to him myself and put the spurs in, and he went up on his hind legs and nearly came back with me--that was all the good I got of that.

“Where’s the grass-cutter,” I shouted, jumping off him in about as great a fury as I ever was in. “I suppose _he_ knows how to make this devil go!”

“Grass-cutter went away last night, sahib. Me see him try to open stable door and go away. Me see him no more.”

I used pretty well all the bad language I knew in one blast. Biddy began to walk away, laughing till I felt as if I could kick him.

“I’m going to have a front seat for this trotting match,” he said, stopping to get his wind. “Spectators along the route requested to provide themselves with pitchforks and fireworks, I suppose, in case the champion pony should show any of his engaging little temper. Never mind, old man, I’ll see you through this, there’s no use in getting into a wax about it. I’m going shares with you, the way we always do.”

I can’t say I responded graciously, I rather think I cursed him and everything else in heaps. When he was gone I began to think of what could be done.

“Get out the dog-cart,” I said, as a last chance. “Perhaps he’ll go in harness.”

We wheeled the cart up to him, got him harnessed to it, and in two minutes that pony was walking, trotting, anything I wanted--can’t explain why--one of the mysteries of horseflesh. I drove him out through the Cashmere Gate, passing Biddy on the way, and feeling a good deal the better for it, and as soon as I got on to the flat stretch of road outside the gate I tried what the pony could do. He went even better than I thought he could, very rough and uneven, of course, but still promising. I brought him home, and had him put into training at once, as carefully as if he was going for the Derby. I chose the course, took the six-mile stretch of road from the Cashmere gate to Sufter Jung’s tomb, and drove him over it every day. It was a splendid course--level as a table, and dead straight for the most part--and after a few days he could do it in about forty minutes out and thirty-five back. People began to talk then, especially as the pony’s look and shape were improving each day, and after a little time every one was planking his money on one way or another--Biddy putting on a thousand on his own account--still, I’m bound to say the odds were against the pony. The whole of Delhi got into a state of excitement about it, natives and all, and every day I got letters warning me to take care, as there might be foul play. The stable the pony was in was a big one, and I had a wall built across it, and put a man with a gun in the outer compartment. I bought all his corn myself, in feeds at a time, going here, there, and everywhere for it, never to the same place for two days together--I thought it was better to be sure than sorry, and there’s no trusting a nigger.

The day of the match every soul in the place turned out, such crowds that I could scarcely get the dog-cart through when I drove to the Cashmere gate. I got down there, and was looking over the cart to see that everything was right, when a little half-caste _keranie_, a sort of low-class clerk, came up behind me and began talking to me in a mysterious kind of way, in that vile _chi-chi_ accent one gets to hate so awfully.

“Look here, Sar,” he said, “you take my car, Sar; it built for racing. I do much trot-racing myself”--mentioning his name--“and you go much faster my car, Sar.”

I trusted nobody in those days, and thought a good deal of myself accordingly. I hadn’t found out that it takes a much smarter man to know how to trust a few.

“Thank you,” I said, “I think I’ll keep my own, the pony’s accustomed to it.”

I think he understood quite well what I felt, but he didn’t show any resentment.

“Well, Sar, you no trust my car, you let me see your wheels?”

“Certainly,” I said “you may look at them,” determined in my own mind I should keep my eye on him while he did.

He got out a machine for propping the axle, and lifted the wheel off the ground.

“Make the wheel go round,” he said.

I didn’t like it much, but I gave the wheel a turn. He looked at it till it stopped.

“You lose match if you take that car,” he said, “you take my car, Sar.”

“What do you mean?” said I, pretty sharply.

“Look here,” he said, setting the wheel going again. “You see here, Sar, it die, all in a minute, it jerk, doesn’t die smooth. You see _my_ wheel, Sar.”

He put the lift under his own, and started the wheel revolving. It took about three times as long to die as mine, going steady and silent and stopping imperceptibly, not so much as a tremor in it.

“Now, Sar!” he said, “you see I speak true, Sar. I back you two hundred rupee, if I lose I’m ruin, and I beg you, Sar, take my car! can no win with yours, mine match car.”

“All right!” said I with a sort of impulse, “I’ll take it.” And so I did.

I had to start just under the arch of the Cashmere gate, by a pistol shot, fired from overhead. I didn’t quite care for the look of the pony’s ears while I was waiting for it--the crowd had frightened him a bit I think. By Jove, when the bang came he reared straight up, dropped down again and stuck his forelegs out, reared again when I gave him the whip, every second of course telling against me.

“Here, let me help you,” shouted Biddy, jumping into the trap. His weight settled the business, down came the pony, and we went away like blazes.

The three umpires rode with us, one each side and one behind, at least that was the way at first, but I found the clattering of their hoofs made it next to impossible to hold the pony. I got them to keep back, and after that he went fairly steadily, but it was anxious work. The noise and excitement had told on him a lot, he had a tendency to break during all that six miles out, and he was in a lather before we got to Sufter Jung’s tomb. There were a lot of people waiting for me out there, some ladies on horseback, too, and there was a coffee-shop going, with drinks of all kinds. As I got near they began to call out, “You’re done, Paddy, thirty-four minutes gone already, you haven’t the ghost of a chance. Come and have a drink and look pleasant over it.”

I turned the pony, and Biddy and I jumped out. I went up to the table, snatched up a glass of brandy and filled my mouth with it, then went back to the pony, took him by the head, and sent a squirt of brandy up each nostril; I squirted the rest down his throat, went back to the table, swallowed half a tumbler of curaçoa or something, and was into the trap and off again, the whole thing not taking more than twenty seconds.

The business began to be pretty exciting after that. You can see four miles straight ahead of you on that road; and that day the police had special orders to keep it clear, so that it was a perfectly blank, white stretch as far as I could see. You know how one never seems to get any nearer to things on a road like that, and there was the clock hanging opposite to me on the splash board; I couldn’t look at it, but I could hear its beastly click-click through the trotting of the pony, and that was nearly as bad as seeing the minute hand going from pip to pip. But, by George, I pretty soon heard a worse kind of noise than that. It was a case of preserve me from my friends. The people who had gone out to Sufter Jung’s tomb on horseback to meet me, thought it would be a capital plan to come along after me and see the fun, and encourage me a bit--so they told me afterwards. The way they encouraged me was by galloping till they picked me up, and then hammering along behind me like a troop of cavalry till it was all I could do to keep the pony from breaking.

“You’ve got to win, Paddy,” calls out Mrs. Harry Le Bretton, galloping up alongside, “you promised you would!”

Mrs. Harry and I were great friends in those days--very sporting little woman, nearly as keen about the match as I was--but at that moment I couldn’t pick my words.

“Keep back!” I shouted to her; “keep back, for pity’s sake!”

It was too late--the next instant the pony was galloping. The penalty is that you have to pull up, and make the wheels turn in the opposite direction, and I just threw the pony on his haunches. He nearly came back into the cart, but the tremendous jerk gave the backward turn to the wheels and I was off again. Not even that kept the people back. Mrs. Le Bretton came alongside again to say something else to me, and I suddenly felt half mad from the clatter and the frightful strain of the pony on my arms.

“D----n it all! Le Bretton!” I yelled, as the pony broke for the second time, “can’t you keep your wife away!”

They did let me alone after that--turned off the road and took a scoop across the plain, so as to come up with me at the finish--and I pulled myself together to do the last couple of miles. I could see that Cashmere gate and the Delhi walls ahead of me; ‘pon my soul I felt as if they were defying me and despising me, just standing waiting there under the blazing sky, and they never seemed to get any nearer. It was like the first night of a fever, the whizzing of the wheels, the ding-dong of the pony’s hoofs, the silence all round, the feeling of stress and insane hurrying on, the throbbing of my head, and the scorching heat. I’ll swear no fever I’ve ever had was worse than that last two miles.

As I reached the Delhi walls I took one look at the clock. There was barely a minute left.

“By Jove!” I gasped, “I’m done!”

I shouted and yelled to the pony like a madman, to keep up what heart was left in the wretched little brute, holding on to him for bare life, with my arms and legs straight out in front of me. The gray wall and the blinding road rushed by me like a river--I scarcely knew what happened--I couldn’t think of anything but the ticking of the clock that I was somehow trying to count, till there came the bang of a pistol over my head.

It was the Cashmere gate, and I had thirteen seconds in hand.

* * * * *

There was never anything more heard of the bagman. He can, if he likes, soothe his conscience with the reflection that he was worth a thousand pounds to me.

But Mrs. Le Bretton never quite forgave me.

AN IRISH PROBLEM

Conversation raged on the long flanks of the mail-car.

An elderly priest, with a warm complexion and a controversial under-lip, was expounding his native country to a fellow-traveller, with slight but irrepressible pulpit gestures of the hand. The fellow traveller, albeit lavender-hued from an autumn east wind, was obediently observing the anæmic patches of oats and barley, pale and thin, like the hair of a starving baby, and the huge slants of brown heather and turf bog, and was interjecting “Just so!” at decent intervals. Now and then, as the two tall brown mares slackened for a bout of collar-work at a hill, or squeezed slowly past a cart stacked high with sods of turf, we, sitting in silence, Irish wolves in the clothing of English tourists, could hear across the intervening pile of luggage and bicycles such a storm of conversation as bursts forth at a dinner-party after the champagne has twice gone round.

The brunt of the talk was borne by the old lady in the centre. Her broad back, chequered with red plaid, remained monumental in height and stillness, but there was that in the tremor of the steel spray in her bonnet that told of a high pressure of narrative. The bearded Dublin tourist on her left was but little behind her in the ardour of giving information. His wife, a beautifully dressed lady with cotton-wool in her ears, remained abstracted, whether from toothache, or exclusiveness, or mere wifely boredom, we cannot say. Among the swift shuttles of Irish speech the ponderous questions and pronouncements of an English fisherman drove their way. The talk was, we gathered, of sport and game laws and their administration.

“Is it hares?” cried the Dublin tourist, perorating after a flight or two into the subject of poachers; “what d’ye think would happen a hare in Donegal?”

His handsome brown eye swept his audience, even, through the spokes of a bicycle, gathering in our sympathies. It left no doubts as to the tragedy that awaited the hare.

The east wind hunted us along the shore of the wide, bleak bay, rimmed with yellow sea-weed, and black and ruffled like the innumerable lakelets that lay along our route. The tall mountain over it was hooded in cloud. It seemed as threatening and mysterious as Sinai; ready to utter some awful voice of law to the brown solitudes and windy silences.

Far ahead of us a few houses rose suddenly above the low coast line, an ugly family party of squat gables and whitewashed walls, with nothing nearer them to westward than the homesteads of America.

Far and near there was not a tree visible, nor a touch of colour to tell of the saving grace of flowers. The brown mares swung the car along with something resembling enthusiasm; Letterbeg was the end of their stage; it was the end of ours also. Numb with long sitting we dropped cumbrously to earth from the high footboard, and found ourselves face to face with the problem of how to spend the next three hours. It was eleven o’clock in the morning, too early for lunch, though, apparently, quite the fashionable hour in Letterbeg for bottled porter, judging by the squeak of the corkscrew and the clash of glasses that issued from the dark interior of the house in front of which we had been shed by the mail-car. This was a long cottage with a prosperous slate roof, and a board over its narrow door announcing that one Jas. Heraty was licensed for the retail of spirits and porter.

The mail-car rolled away; as it crawled over the top of a hill and sank out of sight a last wave of the priestly hand seemed to include us. Doubtless we were being expounded as English tourists, and our great economic value to the country was being expatiated upon. The _rôle_ is an important one, and has its privileges; yet, to the wolf, there is something stifling in sheep’s clothing; certainly, on the occasions when it was discarded by us, a sympathy and understanding with the hotels was quickly established. Possibly they also are wolves. Undoubtedly the English tourist, with his circular ticket and his coupons, does not invariably get the best of everything. We write surrounded by him and his sufferings. An earlier visit than usual to the hotel sitting-room has revealed him, lying miserably on the sofa, shrouded in a filthy _duvet_, having been flung there at some two in the morning on his arrival, wet through, from heaven knows what tremendous walk. Subsequently we hear him being haled from his lair by the chambermaid, who treats him as the dirt under her feet (or, indeed, if we may judge by our bedroom carpet, with far less consideration).

“Here!” she says, “go in there and wash yerself!”

We hear her slamming him into a room from which two others of his kind have been recently bolted like rabbits, by the boots, to catch the 6 A.M. train. We can just faintly realise its atmosphere.

This, however, is a digression, but remotely connected with Letterbeg and Mr. Heraty’s window, to which in our forlorn state we turned for distraction.

It was very small, about two feet square, but it made its appeal to all the needs of humanity from the cradle to the grave. A feeding-bottle, a rosary, a photograph of Mr. Kruger, a peg-top, a case of salmon flies, an artistic letter-weight, consisting of a pigeon’s egg carved in Connemara marble, two seductively small bottles of castor-oil--these, mounted on an embankment of packets of corn-flour and rat poison, crowded the four little panes. Inside the shop the assortment ranged from bundles of reaping-hooks on the earthen floor to bottles of champagne in the murk of the top shelf. A few men leaned against the tin-covered counter, gravely drinking porter. As we stood dubiously at the door there was a padding of bare feet in the roadway, and a very small boy with a red head, dressed in a long flannel frock of a rich madder shade fluttered past us into the shop.

“Me dada says let yees be hurrying!” he gasped, between spasms of what was obviously whooping-cough. “Sweeny’s case is comin’ on!”

Had the message been delivered by the Sergeant-at-Arms it could not have been received with more respectful attention or been more immediately obeyed. The porter was gulped down, one unfinished glass being bestowed upon the Sergeant-at-Arms, possibly as a palliative for the whooping-cough, and the party trooped up the road towards a thatched and whitewashed cottage that stood askew at the top of a lane leading to the seashore. Two tall constables of the R.I.C. stood at the door of the cottage. It came to us, with a lifting of the heart, that we had chanced upon Petty Sessions day in Letterbeg, and this was the court-house.

It was uncommonly hot in what is called in newspapers “the body of the court”. Something of the nature of a rood-screen, boarded solidly up to a height of about four feet, divided the long single room of the cottage; we, with the rest of the public, were penned in the division nearest the door. The cobwebbed boards of the loft overhead almost rested on our hats; the public, not being provided with seats by the Government, shuffled on the earthen floor and unaffectedly rested on us and each other. Within the rood-screen two magistrates sat at a table, with their suite, consisting of a clerk, an interpreter, and a district inspector of police, disposed round them.

“The young fella with the foxy mustash is Docthor Lyden,” whispered an informant in response to a question, “and the owld lad that’s lookin’ at ye now is Heraty, that owns the shop above--”

At this juncture an emissary from the Bench very kindly offered us seats within the rood-screen. We took them, on a high wooden settle, beside the magisterial table, and the business of the court proceeded.

Close to us stood the defendant, Sweeny, a tall elderly man, with a long, composed, shaven face, and an all-observant grey eye: Irish in type, Irish in expression, intensely Irish in the self-possession in which he stood, playing to perfection the part of calm rectitude and unassailable integrity.

Facing him, the plaintiff lounged against the partition; a man strangely improbable in appearance, with close-cropped grey hair, a young, fresh-coloured face, a bristling orange moustache, and a big, blunt nose. One could have believed him a soldier, a German, anything but what he was, a peasant from the furthest shores of Western Ireland, cut off from what we call civilisation by his ignorance of any language save his own ancient speech, wherein the ideas of to-day stand out in English words like telegraph posts in a Connemara moorland.

Between the two stood the interpreter--small, old, froglike in profile, full of the dignity of the Government official.

“Well, we should be getting on now,” remarked the Chairman, Heraty, J.P., after some explanatory politeness to his unexpected visitors. “William, swear the plaintiff!”

The oath was administered in Irish, and the orange moustache brushed the greasy Testament. The space above the dado of the partition became suddenly a tapestry of attentive faces, clear-eyed, all-comprehending.

“This case,” announced Mr. Heraty judicially yet not without a glance at the visitors, “is a demand for compensation in the matter of a sheep that was drowned. William”--this to the interpreter--“ask Darcy what he has to say for himself?”

Darcy hitched himself round, still with a shoulder propped against the partition, and uttered, without any enthusiasm, a few nasal and guttural sentences.

“He says, yer worship,” said William, with unctuous propriety, “that Sweeny’s gorsoons were ever and always hunting his sheep, and settin’ on their dog to hunt her, and that last week they dhrove her into the lake and dhrownded her altogether.”

“Now,” said Mr. Heraty, in a conversational tone, “William, when ye employ the word ‘gorsoon,’ do ye mean children of the male or female sex?”

“Well, yer worship,” replied William, who, it may incidentally be mentioned, was himself in need of either an interpreter or of a new and complete set of teeth, “I should considher he meant ayther the one or the other.”

“They’re usually one or the other,” said Doctor Lyden solemnly, and in a stupendous brogue. It was the first time he had spoken; he leaned back, with his hands in his pockets, and surveyed with quiet but very bright eyes the instant grin that illumined the faces of the tapestry.

“Sure William himself is no bad judge of gorsoons,” said Mr. Heraty. “Hadn’t he a christening in his own house three weeks ago?”

At this excursion into the family affairs of the interpreter the grin broke into a roar.

“See now, we’ll ask Mr. Byrne, the schoolmaster,” went on Mr. Heraty with owl-like gravity. “Isn’t that Mr. Byrne that I see back there in the coort? Come forward, Mr. Byrne!”

Thus adjured, a tall, spectacled man emerged from the crowd, and, beaming with a pleasing elderly bashfulness through his spectacles, gave it as his opinion that though gorsoon was a term usually applied to the male child, it was equally applicable to the female. “But, indeed,” he concluded, “the Bench has as good Irish as I have myself, and better.”

“The law requires that the thransactions of this coort shall take place in English,” the Chairman responded, “and we have also the public to consider.”

As it was pretty certain that we were the only persons in the court who did not understand Irish, it was borne in upon us that we were the public, and we appreciated the consideration.

“We may assume, then, that the children that set on the dog wor’ of both sexes,” proceeded Mr. Heraty. “Well, now, as to the dog-- William, ask Darcy what sort of dog was it.”

The monotonous and quiet Irish sentences followed one another again.

“That’ll do. Now, William--”

“He says, yer worship, that he was a big lump of a yalla dog, an’ very cross, by reason of he r’arin’ a pup.”

“And ’twas to make mutton-broth for the pup she dhrove Darcy’s sheep in the lake, I suppose?”

A contemptuous smile passed over Darcy’s face as the Chairman’s sally was duly translated to him, and he made a rapid reply.

“He says there isn’t one of the neighbours but got great annoyance by the same dog, yer worship, and that when the dog’d be out by night hunting, there wouldn’t be a yard o’ wather in the lakes but he’d have it barked over.”

“It appears,” observed Dr. Lyden serenely, “that the dog, like the gorsoons, was of both sexes.”

“Well, well, no matther now; we’ll hear what the defendant has to say. Swear Sweeny!” said Mr. Heraty, smoothing his long grey beard, with suddenly remembered judicial severity and looking menacingly over his spectacles at Sweeny. “Here, now! you don’t want an interpreter! You that has a sisther married to a stationmaster and a brother in the Connaught Rangers!”

“I have as good English as anny man in this coort,” said Sweeny morosely.

“Well, show it off man! What defence have ye?”

“I say that the sheep wasn’t Darcy’s at all,” said Sweeny firmly, standing as straight as a ramrod, with his hands behind his back, a picture of surly, wronged integrity. “And there’s no man livin’ can prove she was. Ask him now what way did he know her?”

The question evidently touched Darcy on a tender point. He squared his big shoulders in his white flannel jacket, and turning his face for the first time towards the magistrates delivered a flood of Irish, in which we heard a word that sounded like _ullán_ often repeated.

“He says, yer worships,” translated William, “why wouldn’t he know her! Hadn’t she the _ullán_ on her! He says a poor man like him would know one of the few sheep he has as well as yer worship’d know one o’ yer own gowns if it had sthrayed from ye.”

It is probable that we looked some of the stupefaction that we felt at this remarkable reference to Mr. Heraty’s wardrobe.

“For the benefit of the general public,” said Dr. Lyden, in his languid, subtle brogue, with a side-glance at that body, “it may be no harm to mention that the plaintiff is alluding to the Chairman’s yearling calves and not to his costume.”

“Order now!” said Mr. Heraty severely.

“An’ he says,” continued William, warily purging his frog-countenance of any hint of appreciation, “that Sweeny knew the _ullán_ that was on her as well as himself did.”

“_Ullán!_ What sort of English is that for an interpreter to be using! Do ye suppose the general public knows what is an _ullán_?” interrupted Mr. Heraty with lightning rapidity. “Explain that now!”

“Why, yer worship, sure anny one in the world’d know what the _ullán_ on a sheep’s back is!” said William, staggered by this sudden onslaught, “though there’s some might call it the _rebugh_.”

“God help the Government that’s payin’ you wages!” said Mr. Heraty with sudden and bitter ferocity (but did we intercept a wink at his colleague?). “If it wasn’t for the young family you’re r’arin’ in yer old age, I’d commit ye for contempt of coort!”

A frank shout of laughter, from every one in court but the victim, greeted this sally, the chorus being, as it were, barbed by a shrill crow of whooping-cough.

“Mr. Byrne!” continued Mr. Heraty without a smile, “we must call upon you again!”

Mr. Byrne’s meek scholastic face once more appeared at the rood-screen.

“Well, I should say,” he ventured decorously, “that the expression is locally applied to what I may call a plume or a feather that is worn on various parts of the sheep’s back, for a mark, as I might say, of distinction.”

“Thank you, Mr. Byrne, thank you,” said Mr. Heraty, to whose imagination a vision of a plumed or feathered sheep seemed to offer nothing unusual, “remember that now, William!”

Dr. Lyden looked at his watch.

“Don’t you think Sweeny might go on with his defence?” he remarked. “About the children, Sweeny--how many have ye?”

“I have four.”

“And how old are they?”

“There’s one o’ thim is six years an another o’ thim is seven--”

“Yes, and the other two eight and nine, I suppose?” commented Dr. Lyden.

The defendant remained silent.

“Do ye see now how well he began with the youngest--the way we’d think ’twas the eldest!” resumed Dr. Lyden. “I think we may assume that a gorsoon--male or female--of eight or nine years is capable of setting a dog on the sheep.”

Here Darcy spoke again.

“He says,” interpreted William, “there isn’t pig nor ass, sheep nor duck, belongin’ to him that isn’t heart-scalded with the same childhren an’ their dog.”

“Well, I say now, an’ I swear it,” said Sweeny, his eye kindling like a coal, and his voice rising as the core of what was probably an old neighbourly grudge was neared, “my land is bare from his bastes threspassing on it, and my childhren are in dread to pass his house itself with the kicks an’ the sthrokes himself an’ his mother dhraws on them! The Lord Almighty knows--”

“Stop now!” said Mr. Heraty, holding up his hand. “Stop! The Lord’s not intherferin’ in this case at all! It’s me an’ Doctor Lyden has it to settle.”

No one seemed to find anything surprising in this pronouncement; it was accepted as seriously as any similar statement of the Prophet Samuel to the Children of Israel, and was evidently meant to imply that abstract justice might be expected.

“We may assume, then,” said Dr. Lyden amiably, “that the sheep walked out into Sweeny’s end of the lake and drowned herself there on account of the spite there was between the two families.”

The court tittered. A dingy red showed itself among the grizzled hairs and wrinkles on Sweeny’s cheek. In Ireland a point can often be better carried by sarcasm than by logic.

“She was blind enough to dhrown herself, or two like her!” he said angrily; “she was that owld and blind it was ayqual to her where she’d go!”

“How d’ye know she was blind?” said Mr. Heraty quickly.

“I thought the defence opened with the statement that it wasn’t Darcy’s sheep at all,” put in Dr. Lyden, leaning back in his chair with his eyes fixed on the rafters.

Sweeny firmly regarded Mr. Heraty.

“How would I know she was blind?” he repeated. “Many’s the time when she’d be takin’ a sthroll in on my land I’d see her fallin’ down in the rocks, she was that blind! An’ didn’t I see Darcy’s mother one time, an’ she puttin’ something on her eyes.”

“Was it glasses she was putting on the sheep’s eyes?” suggested the Chairman, with a glance that admitted the court to the joke.

“No, but an ointment,” said Sweeny stubbornly. “I seen her rubbing it to the eyes, an’ she no more than thirty yards from me.”

“Will ye swear that?” thundered Mr. Heraty; “will you swear that at a distance of thirty yards you could tell what was between Darcy’s mother’s fingers and the sheep’s eyes? No you will not! Nor no man could! William, is Darcy’s mother in the coort? We’ll have to take evidence from her as to the condition of the sheep’s eyes!”

“Darcy says, yer worship, that his mother would lose her life if she was to be brought into coort,” explained William, after an interlude in Irish, to which both magistrates listened with evident interest; “that ere last night a frog jumped into the bed to her in the night, and she got out of the bed to light the Blessed Candle, and when she got back to the bed again she was in it always between herself and the wall, an’ she got a wakeness out of it, and great cold--”

“Are ye sure it wasn’t the frog got the wakeness?” asked Dr. Lyden.

A gale of laughter swept round the court.

“Come, come!” said Mr. Heraty; “have done with this baldherdash! William, tell Darcy some one must go fetch his mother, for as wake as she is she could walk half a mile!” Mr. Heraty here drew forth an enormous white pocket-handkerchief and trumpeted angrily in its depths.

Darcy raised his small blue eyes with their thick lashes, and took a look at his judge. There was a gabbled interchange of Irish between him and the interpreter.

“He says she could not, yer worship, nor as much as one perch.”

“Ah, what nonsense is this!” said Mr. Heraty testily; “didn’t I see the woman meself at Mass last Sunday?”

Darcy’s reply was garnished with a good deal more gesticulation than usual, and throughout his speech the ironic smile on Sweeny’s face was a masterpiece of quiet expression.

“He says,” said William, “that surely she was at Mass last Sunday, the same as your worship says, but ’twas on the way home that she was taking a wall, and a stone fell on her and hurted her finger and the boot preyed on it, and it has her desthroyed.”

At this culmination of the misadventures of Mrs. Darcy the countenances of the general public must again have expressed some of the bewilderment that they felt.

“Perhaps William will be good enough to explain,” said Dr. Lyden, permitting a faint smile to twitch the foxy moustache, “how Mrs. Darcy’s boot affected her finger?”

William’s skinny hand covered his frog mouth with all a deserving schoolboy’s embarrassment at being caught out in a bad translation.

“I beg yer worships’ pardon,” he said, in deep confusion, “but sure your worships know as well as meself that in Irish we have the one word for your finger or your toe.”

“There’s one thing I know very well anyhow,” said Dr. Lyden, turning to his colleague, “I’ve no more time to waste sitting here talking about old Kit Darcy’s fingers and toes! Let the two o’ them get arbitrators and settle it out of court. There’s nothing between them now only the value of the sheep.”

“Sure I was satisfied to leave it to arbithration, but Darcy wasn’t willin’.” This statement was Sweeny’s.

“So you were willin’ to have arbithration before you came into coort at all?” said Mr. Heraty, eyeing the tall defendant with ominous mildness. “William, ask Darcy is this the case.”

Darcy’s reply, delivered with a slow, sarcastic smile, provoked a laugh from the audience.

“Oh, ho! So that was the way, was it!” cried Mr. Heraty, forgetting to wait for the translation. “Ye had your wife’s cousin to arbithrate! Small blame to Darcy he wasn’t willin’! It’s a pity ye didn’t say your wife herself should arbithrate when ye went about it! You would hardly believe the high opinion Sweeny here has of his wife,” continued the Chairman in illuminative excursus to Dr. Lyden; “sure he had all the women wild below at my shop th’ other night sayin’ his wife was the finest woman in Ireland! Upon my soul he had!”

“If I said that,” growled the unfortunate Sweeny, “it was a lie for me.”

“Don’t ye think it might be a good thing now,” suggested the indefatigable doctor, in his mournful tuneful voice, “to call a few witnesses to give evidence as to whether Mrs. Michael Sweeny is the finest woman in Ireland or no?”

“God knows, gentlemen, it’s a pity ye haven’t more to do this day,” said Sweeny, turning at length upon his tormentors, “I’d sooner pay the price of the sheep than be losin’ me time here this way.”

“See, now, how we’re getting to the rights of it in the latter end,” commented Dr. Lyden imperturbably. “Sweeny began here by saying”--he checked off each successive point on his fingers--“that the sheep wasn’t Darcy’s at all. Then he said that his children of eight and nine years of age were too young to set the dog on the sheep. Then, that if the dog hunted her it was no more than she deserved for constant trespass. Then he said that the sheep was so old and blind that she committed suicide in his end of the lake in order to please herself and to spite him; and, last of all, he tells us that he offered to compensate Darcy for her before he came into court at all!”

“And on top of that,” Mr. Heraty actually rose in his seat in his exquisite appreciation of the position, “on top of that, mind you, after he has the whole machinery of the law and the entire population of Letterbeg attending on him for a matter o’ two hours, he informs us that we’re wasting his valuable time!”

Mr. Heraty fixed his eyes in admirable passion--whether genuine or not we are quite incapable of pronouncing--upon Sweeny, who returned the gaze with all the gloom of an unfortunate but invincibly respectable man.

Dr. Lyden once more pulled out his watch.

“It might be as well for us,” he said languidly, “to enter upon the inquiry as to the value of the sheep. That should take about another three-quarters of an hour. William, ask Darcy the price he puts on the sheep.”

Every emotion has its limits. We received with scarce a stirring of surprise the variations of sworn testimony as to the value of the sheep. Her price ranged from one pound, claimed by Darcy and his adherents, to sixpence, at which sum her skin was unhesitatingly valued by Sweeny. Her age swung like a pendulum between two years and fourteen, and, finally, in crowning proof of her worth and general attractiveness, it was stated that her own twin had been sold for fifteen shillings to the police at Dhulish, “ere last week”. At this re-entrance into the case of the personal element Mr. Heraty’s spirits obviously rose.

“I think we ought to have evidence about this,” he said, fixing the police officer with a dangerous eye. “Mr. Cox, have ye anny of the Dhulish police here?”

Mr. Cox, whose only official act up to the present had been the highly beneficial one of opening the window, admitted with a grin that two of the Dhulish men were in the court.

“Well, then!” continued the Chairman, “Mr. Cox, maybe ye’d kindly desire them to step forward in order that the court may be able to estimate from their appearance the nutritive qualities of the twin sisther of Darcy’s sheep.”

At this juncture we perceived, down near the crowded doorway, two tall and deeply embarrassed members of the R.I.C. hastily escaping into the street.

“Well, well; how easy it is to frighten the police!” remarked the Chairman, following them with a regretful eye. “I suppose, afther all, we’d betther put a price on the sheep and have done with it. In my opinion, when there’s a difficulty like this--what I might call an accident--between decent men like these (for they’re both decent men, and I’ve known them these years), I’d say both parties should share what hardship is in it. Now, doctor, what shall we give Darcy? I suppose if we gave him 8s. compensation and 2s. costs we’d not be far out?”

Dr. Lyden, already in the act of charging his pipe, nodded his head.

Sweeny began to fumble in his pockets, and drawing out a brownish rag, possibly a handkerchief, knotted in several places, proceeded to untie one of the knots. The doctor watched him without speaking. Ultimately, from some fastness in the rag a half-sovereign was extracted, and was laid upon the table by Sweeny. The clerk, a well-dressed young gentleman, whose attitude had throughout been one of the extremest aloofness, made an entry in his book with an aggressively business-like air.

“Well, that’s all right,” remarked Dr. Lyden, getting lazily on his legs and looking round for his hat; “it’s a funny thing, but I notice that the defendant brought the exact sum required into court with him.”

“I did! And I’m able to bring more than it, thanks be to God!” said Sweeny fiercely, with all the offended pride of his race. “I have two pounds here this minute--”

“If that’s the way with ye, may be ye’d like us to put a bigger fine on ye!” broke in Mr. Heraty hotly, in instant response to Sweeny’s show of temper.

Dr. Lyden laughed for the first time.

“Mr. Heraty’s getting cross now, in the latter end,” he murmured explanatorily to the general public, while he put on an overcoat, from the pocket of which protruded the Medusa coils of a stethoscope.

* * * * *

Long before the arrival of the mail-car that was to take us away, the loafers and the litigants had alike been swallowed up, apparently by the brown, hungry hillsides; possibly also, some of them, by Mr. Heraty’s tap-room. Again we clambered to our places among the inevitable tourists and their inevitable bicycles, again the laden car lumbered heavily yet swiftly along the bog roads that quivered under its weight, while the water in the black ditches on either side quivered in sympathy. The tourists spoke of the vast loneliness, unconscious of the intricate network of social life that lay all around them, beyond their ken, far beyond their understanding. They spoke authoritatively of Irish affairs; mentioned that the Irish were “a bit ’ot tempered,” but added that “all they wanted was fair play”.

They had probably been in Ireland for a week or fortnight. They had come out of business centres in England, equipped with circular tickets, with feeling hearts, and with the belief that two and two inevitably make four; whereas in Ireland two and two are just as likely to make five, or three, and are still more likely to make nothing at all.

Never will it be given to them to understand the man of whom our friend Sweeny was no more than a type. How can they be expected to realise that a man who is decorous in family and village life, indisputably God-fearing, kind to the poor, and reasonably honest, will enmesh himself in a tissue of sworn lies before his fellows for the sake of half a sovereign and a family feud, and that his fellows will think none the worse of him for it.

These things lie somewhere near the heart of the Irish problem.

THE DANE’S BREECHIN’