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.

[Illustration: SWEENY.]

“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’

PART I

The story begins at the moment when my brother Robert and I had made our

final arrangements for the expedition. These were considerable. Robert

is a fisherman who takes himself seriously (which perhaps is fortunate,

as he rarely seems to take anything else), and his paraphernalia does

credit to his enthusiasm, if not to his judgment. For my part, being an

amateur artist, I had strapped together a collection of painting

materials that would enable me to record my inspiration in oil,

watercolour, or pastel, as the spirit might move me. We had ordered a

car from Coolahan’s public-house in the village; an early lunch was

imminent.

The latter depended upon Julia; in fact it would be difficult to mention

anything at Wavecrest Cottage that did not depend on Julia. We, who were

but strangers and sojourners (the cottage with the beautiful name having

been lent to us, with Julia, by an Aunt), felt that our very existence

hung upon her clemency. How much more then luncheon, at the

revolutionary hour of a quarter to one? Even courageous people are

afraid of other people’s servants, and Robert and I were far from being

courageous. Possibly this is why Julia treated us with compassion, even

with kindness, especially Robert.

“Ah, poor Masther Robert!” I have heard her say to a friend in the

kitchen, who was fortunately hard of hearing, “ye wouldn’t feel him in

the house no more than a feather! An’ indeed, as for the two o’ thim,

sich gallopers never ye seen! It’s hardly they’d come in the house to

throw the wet boots off thim! Thim’d gallop the woods all night like the

deer!”

At half-past twelve, all, as I have said, being in train, I went to the

window to observe the weather, and saw a covered car with a black horse

plodding along the road that separated Wavecrest Cottage from the

seashore. At our modest entrance gates it drew up, and the coachman

climbed from his perch with a dignity befitting his flowing grey beard

and the silver band on his hat.

A covered car is a vehicle peculiar to the south of Ireland; it

resembles a two-wheeled waggonette with a windowless black box on top of

it. Its mouth is at the back, and it has the sinister quality of totally

concealing its occupants until the irrevocable moment when it is turned

and backed against your front door steps. For this moment my brother

Robert and I did not wait. A short passage and a flight of steps

separated us from the kitchen; beyond the steps, and facing the kitchen

door, a door opened into the garden. Robert slipped up heavily in the

passage as we fled, but gained the garden door undamaged. The hall door

bell pealed at my ear; I caught a glimpse of Julia, pounding chops with

the rolling pin.

“Say we’re out,” I hissed to her--“gone out for the day! We are going

into the garden!”

“Sure ye needn’t give yerself that much trouble,” replied Julia affably,

as she snatched a grimy cap off a nail.

Nevertheless, in spite of the elasticity of Julia’s conscience, the

garden seemed safer.

In the garden, a plot of dense and various vegetation, decorated with

Julia’s lingerie, we awaited the sound of the departing wheels. But

nothing departed. The breathless minutes passed, and then, through the

open drawing-room window, we were aware of strange voices. The

drawing-room window overlooked the garden thoroughly and commandingly.

There was not a moment to lose. We plunged into the raspberry canes, and

crouched beneath their embowered arches, and the fulness of the

situation began to sink into our souls.

Through the window we caught a glimpse of a white beard and a portly

black suit, of a black bonnet and a dolman that glittered with jet, of

yet another black bonnet.

With Aunt Dora’s house we had taken on, as it were, her practice, and

the goodwill of her acquaintance. The Dean of Glengad and Mrs. Doherty

were the very apex and flower of the latter, and in the party now

installed in Aunt Dora’s drawing-room I unhesitatingly recognised them,

and Mrs. Doherty’s sister, Miss McEvoy. Miss McEvoy was an elderly lady

of the class usually described as being “not all there”. The expression,

I imagine, implies a regret that there should not be more. As, however,

what there was of Miss McEvoy was chiefly remarkable for a monstrous

appetite and a marked penchant for young men, it seems to me mainly to

be regretted that there should be as much of her as there is.

A drive of nine miles in the heat of a June morning is not undertaken

without a sustaining expectation of luncheon at the end of it. There

were in the house three mutton chops to meet that expectation. I

communicated all these facts to my brother. The consternation of his

face, framed in raspberry boughs, was a picture not to be lightly

forgotten. At such a moment, with everything depending on sheer nerve

and resourcefulness, to consign Julia to perdition was mere

self-indulgence on his part, but I suppose it was inevitable. Here the

door into the garden opened and Julia came forth, with a spotless apron

and a face of elaborate unconcern. She picked a handful of parsley, her

black eyes questing for us among the bushes; they met mine, and a glance

more alive with conspiracy it has not been my lot to receive. She moved

desultorily towards us, gathering green gooseberries in her apron.

“I told them the two o’ ye were out,” she murmured to the gooseberry

bushes. “They axed when would ye be back. I said ye went to town on the

early thrain and wouldn’t be back till night.”

Decidedly Julia’s conscience could stand alone.

“With that then,” she continued, “Miss McEvoy lands into the hall, an’

‘O Letitia,’ says she, ‘those must be the gentleman’s fishing rods!’ and

then ‘Julia!’ says she, ‘could ye give us a bit o’ lunch?’ That one’s

the imp!”

“Look here!” said Robert hoarsely, and with the swiftness of panic, “I’m

off! I’ll get out over the back wall.”

At this moment Miss McEvoy put her head out of the drawing-room window

and scanned the garden searchingly. Without another word we glided

through the raspberry arches like departing fairies in a pantomine. The

kindly lilac and laurestina bushes grew tall and thick at the end of

the garden; the wall was high, but, as is usual with fruit-garden walls,

it had a well-worn feasible corner that gave on to the lane leading to

the village. We flung ourselves over it, and landed breathless and

dishevelled, but safe, in the heart of the bed of nettles that plumed

the common village ash-heap. Now that we were able, temporarily at all

events, to call our souls our own, we (or rather I) took further stock

of the situation. Its horrors continued to sink in. Driven from home

without so much as a hat to lay our heads in, separated from those we

loved most (the mutton chops, the painting materials, the fishing

tackle), a promising expedition of unusual charm cut off, so to speak,

in the flower of its youth--these were the more immediately obvious of

the calamities which we now confronted. I preached upon them, with

Cassandra eloquence, while we stood, indeterminate, among the nettles.

“And what, I ask you,” I said perorating, “what on the face of the earth

are we to do now?”

“Oh, it’ll be all right, my dear girl,” said Robert easily. Gratitude

for his escape from the addresses of Miss McEvoy had apparently blinded

him to the difficulties of the future. “There’s Coolahan’s pub. We’ll

get something to eat there--you’ll see it’ll be all right.”

“But,” I said, picking my way after him among the rusty tins and the

broken crockery, “the Coolahans will think we’re mad! We’ve no hats, and

we can’t tell them about the Dohertys.”

“I don’t care what they think,” said Robert.

What Mrs. Coolahan may have thought, as we dived from the sunlight into

her dark and porter-sodden shop, did not appear; what she looked was

consternation.

“Luncheon!” she repeated with stupefaction, “luncheon! The dear help us,

I have no luncheon for the like o’ ye!”

“Oh, anything will do,” said Robert cheerfully. His experiences at the

London bar had not instructed him in the commissariat of his country.

“A bit of cold beef, or just some bread and cheese.”

Mrs. Coolahan’s bleared eyes rolled wildly to mine, as seeking sympathy

and sanity.

“With the will o’ Pether!” she exclaimed, “how would I have cold beef?

And as for cheese--!” She paused, and then, curiosity over-powering all

other emotions. “What ails Julia Cronelly at all that your honour’s

ladyship is comin’ to the like o’ this dirty place for your dinner?”

“Oh, Julia’s run away with a soldier!” struck in Robert brilliantly.

“Small blame to her if she did itself!” said Mrs. Coolahan, gallantly

accepting the jest without a change of her enormous countenance, “she’s a

long time waiting for the chance! Maybe ourselves’d go if we were axed!

I have a nice bit of salt pork in the house,” she continued, “would I

give your honours a rasher of it?”

Mrs. Coolahan had probably assumed that either Julia was incapably

drunk, or had been dismissed without benefit of clergy; at all events

she had recognised that diplomatically it was correct to change the

conversation.

We adventured ourselves into the unknown recesses of the house, and sat

gingerly on greasy horsehair-seated chairs, in the parlour, while the

bubbling cry of the rasher and eggs arose to heaven from the frying-pan,

and the reek filled the house as with a grey fog. Potent as it was, it

but faintly foreshadowed the flavour of the massive slices that

presently swam in briny oil on our plates. But we had breakfasted at

eight; we tackled them with determination, and without too nice

inspection of the three-pronged forks. We drank porter, we achieved a

certain sense of satiety, that on very slight provocation would have

broadened into nausea or worse. All the while the question remained in

the balance as to what we were to do for our hats, and for the myriad

baggage involved in the expedition.

We finally decided to write a minute inventory of what was

indispensable, and to send it to Julia by the faithful hand of Mrs.

Coolahan’s car-driver, one Croppy, with whom previous expeditions had

placed us upon intimate terms. It would be necessary to confide the

position to Croppy, but this we felt, could be done without a moment’s

uneasiness.

By the malignity that governed all things on that troublous day, neither

of us had a pencil, and Mrs. Coolahan had to be appealed to. That she

had by this time properly grasped the position was apparent in the

hoarse whisper in which she said, carefully closing the door after

her:--

“The Dane’s coachman is inside!”

Simultaneously Robert and I removed ourselves from the purview of the

door.

“Don’t be afraid,” said our hostess reassuringly, “he’ll never see

ye--sure I have him safe back in the snug! Is it a writing pin ye want,

Miss?” she continued, moving to the door. “Katty Ann! Bring me in the

pin out o’ the office!”

The Post Office was, it may be mentioned, a department of the Coolahan

public-house, and was managed by a committee of the younger members of

the Coolahan family. These things are all, I believe, illegal, but they

happen in Ireland. The committee was at present, apparently, in full

session, judging by the flood of conversation that flowed in to us

through the open door. The request for the pen caused an instant hush,

followed at an interval by the slamming of drawers and other sounds of

search.

“Ah, what’s on ye delaying this way?” said Mrs. Coolahan irritably,

advancing into the shop. “Sure I seen the pin with Helayna this

morning.”

At the moment all that we could see of the junior postmistress was her

long bare shins, framed by the low-browed doorway, as she stood on the

counter to further her researches on a top shelf.

“The Lord look down in pity on me this day!” said Mrs. Coolahan, in

exalted and bitter indignation, “or on any poor creature that’s striving

to earn her living and has the likes o’ ye to be thrusting to!”

We here attached ourselves to the outskirts of the search, which had by

this time drawn into its vortex a couple of countrywomen with shawls

over their heads, who had hitherto sat in decorous but observant

stillness in the background. Katty Ann was rapidly examining tall

bottles of sugar-stick, accustomed receptacles apparently for the pen.

Helayna’s raven fringe showed traces of a dive into the flour-bin. Mrs.

Coolahan remained motionless in the midst, her eyes fixed on the

ceiling, an exposition of suffering and of eternal remoteness from the

ungodly.

We were now aware for the first time of the presence of Mr. Coolahan, a

taciturn person, with a blue-black chin and a gloomy demeanour.

“Where had ye it last?” he demanded.

“I seen Katty Ann with it in the cow-house, sir,” volunteered a small

female Coolahan from beneath the flap of the counter.

Katty Ann, with a vindictive eye at the tell-tale, vanished.

“That the Lord Almighty might take me to Himself!” chanted Mrs.

Coolahan. “Such a mee-aw! Such a thing to happen to me--the pure, decent

woman! G’wout!” This, the imperative of the verb to retire, was hurtled

at the tell-tale, who, presuming on her services, had incautiously left

the covert of the counter, and had laid a sticky hand on her mother’s

skirts.

“Only that some was praying for me,” pursued Mrs. Coolahan, “it might as

well be the Inspector that came in the office, asking for the pin, an’

if that was the way we might all go under the sod! Sich a mee-aw!”

“Musha! Musha!” breathed, prayerfully, one of the shawled women.

At this juncture I mounted on an up-ended barrel to investigate a

promising lair above my head, and from this altitude was unexpectedly

presented with a bird’s-eye view of a hat with a silver band inside the

railed and curtained “snug”. I descended swiftly, not without an

impression of black bottles on the snug table, and Katty Ann here slid

in from the search in the cow-house.

[Illustration: “MUSHA! MUSHA!”]

“’Twasn’t in it,” she whined, “nor I didn’t put it in it.”

“For a pinny I’d give ye a slap in the jaw!” said Mr. Coolahan with

sudden and startling ferocity.

“That the Lord Almighty might take me to Himself!” reiterated Mrs.

Coolahan, while the search spread upwards through the house.

“Look here!” said Robert abruptly, “this business is going on for a

week. I’m going for the things myself.”

Neither I nor my remonstrances overtook him till he was well out into

the street. There, outside the Coolahan door, was the Dean’s inside car,

resting on its shafts; while the black horse, like his driver, restored

himself elsewhere beneath the Coolahan roof. Robert paid no heed to its

silent warning.

“I must go myself. If I had forty pencils I couldn’t explain to Julia

the flies that I want!”

There comes, with the most biddable of men, a moment when argument

fails, the moment of dead pull, when the creature perceives his own

strength, and the astute will give in, early and imperceptibly, in order

that he may not learn it beyond forgetting.

The only thing left to be done now was to accompany Robert, to avert

what might be irretrievable disaster. It was now half-past one, and the

three mutton chops and the stewed gooseberries must have long since

yielded their uttermost to our guests. The latter would therefore have

returned to the drawing-room, where it was possible that one or more of

them might go to sleep. Remembering that the chops were loin-chops, we

might at all events hope for some slight amount of lethargy. Again we

waded through the nettles, we scaled the garden-wall, and worked our way

between it and the laurestinas towards the door opposite the kitchen.

There remained between us and the house an open space of about fifteen

yards, fully commanded by the drawing-room window, veiling which,

however, the lace curtains met in reassuring stillness. We rushed the

interval, and entered the house softly. Here we were instantly met by

Julia, with her mouth full, and a cup of tea in her hand. She drew us

into the kitchen.

“Where are they, Julia?” I whispered. “Have they had lunch?”

“Is it lunch?” replied Julia, through bread and butter; “there isn’t a

bit in the house but they have it ate! And the eggs I had for the

fast-day for myself, didn’t That One”--I knew this to indicate Miss

McEvoy--“ax an omelette from me when she seen she had no more to get!”

“Are they out of the dining-room?” broke in Robert.

“Faith, they are. ’Twas no good for them to stay in it! That One’s lying

up on the sofa in the dhrawing-room like any owld dog, and the Dane and

Mrs. Doherty’s dhrinking hot water--they have bad shtomachs, the

craytures.”

Robert opened the kitchen door and crept towards the dining-room,

wherein, not long before the alarm, had been gathered all the

essentials of the expedition. I followed him. I have never committed a

burglary, but since the moment when I creaked past the drawing-room

door, foretasting the instant when it would open, my sympathies are

dedicated to burglars.

In two palpitating journeys we removed from the dining-room our

belongings, and placed them in the kitchen; silence, fraught with dire

possibilities, still brooded over the drawing-room. Could they all be

asleep, or was Miss McEvoy watching us through the keyhole? There

remained only my hat, which was upstairs, and at this, the last moment,

Robert remembered his fly-book, left under the clock in the dining-room.

I again passed the drawing-room in safety, and got upstairs, Robert

effecting at the same moment his third entry into the dining-room. I was

in the act of thrusting in the second hat pin when I heard the

drawing-room door open. I admit that, obeying the primary instinct of

self-preservation, my first impulse was to lock myself in; it passed,

aided by the recollection that there was no key. I made for the landing,

and from thence viewed, in a species of trance, Miss McEvoy crossing the

hall and entering the dining-room. A long and deathly pause followed.

She was a small woman; had Robert strangled her? After two or three

horrible minutes a sound reached me, the well-known rattle of the

side-board drawer. All then was well--Miss McEvoy was probably looking

for the biscuits, and Robert must have escaped in time through the

window. I took my courage in both hands and glided downstairs. As I

placed my foot on the oilcloth of the hall, I was confronted by the

nightmare spectacle of my brother creeping towards me on all-fours

through the open door of the dining-room, and then, crowning this

already over-loaded moment, there arose a series of yells from Miss

McEvoy as blood-curdling as they were excusable, yet, as even in my

maniac flight to the kitchen I recognised, something muffled by Marie

biscuit.

It seems to me that the next incident was the composite and shattering

collision of Robert, Julia and myself in the scullery doorway, followed

by the swift closing of the scullery-door upon us by Julia; then the

voice of the Dean of Glengad, demanding from the house at large an

explanation, in a voice of cathedral severity. Miss McEvoy’s reply was

to us about as coherent as the shrieks of a parrot, but we plainly heard

Julia murmur in the kitchen:--

“May the devil choke ye!”

Then again the Dean, this time near the kitchen door. “Julia! Where is

the man who was secreted under the dinner-table?”

I gripped Robert’s arm. The issues of life and death were now in Julia’s

hands.

“Is it who was in the dining-room, your Reverence?” asked Julia, in

tones of respectful honey; “sure that was the carpenter’s boy, that came

to quinch a rat-hole. Sure we’re destroyed with rats.”

“But,” pursued the Dean, raising his voice to overcome Miss McEvoy’s

continuous screams of explanation to Mrs. Doherty, “I understand that he

left the room on his hands and knees. He must have been drunk!”

“Ah, not at all, your Reverence,” replied Julia, with almost

compassionate superiority, “sure that poor boy is the gentlest crayture

ever came into a house. I suppose ’tis what it was he was ashamed like

when Miss McEvoy comminced to screech, and faith he never stopped nor

stayed till he ran out of the house like a wild goose!”

We heard the Dean reascend the kitchen steps, and make a statement of

which the words “drink” and “Dora” alone reached us. The drawing-room

door closed, and in the release from tension I sank heavily down upon a

heap of potatoes. The wolf of laughter that had been gnawing at my

vitals broke loose.

“Why did you go out of the room on your hands and knees?” I moaned,

rolling in anguish on the potatoes.

“I got under the table when I heard the brute coming,” said Robert,

with the crossness of reaction from terror, “then she settled down to

eat biscuits, and I thought I could crawl out without her seeing me”

“_Ye can come out_!” said Julia’s mouth, appearing at a crack of the

scullery door, “I have as many lies told for ye--God forgive me!--as’d

bog a noddy!”

This mysterious contingency might have impressed us more had the artist

been able to conceal her legitimate pride in her handiwork. We emerged

from the chill and varied smells of the scullery, retaining just

sufficient social self-control to keep us from flinging ourselves with

grateful tears upon Julia’s neck. Shaken as we were, the expedition

still lay open before us; the game was in our hands. We were winning by

tricks, and Julia held all the honours.

PART II

Perhaps it was the clinging memory of the fried pork, perhaps it was

because all my favourite brushes were standing in a mug of soft soap on

my washing stand, or because Robert had in his flight forgotten to

replenish his cigarette case, but there was no doubt but that the

expedition languished.

There was no fault to be found with the setting. The pool in which the

river coiled itself under the pine-trees was black and brimming, the

fish were rising at the flies that wrought above it, like a spotted net

veil in hysterics, the distant hills lay in sleepy undulations of every

shade of blue, the grass was warm, and not unduly peopled with ants. But

some impalpable blight was upon us. I ranged like a lost soul along the

banks of the river--a lost soul that is condemned to bear a burden of

some two stone of sketching materials, and a sketching umbrella with a

defective joint--in search of a point of view that for ever eluded me.

Robert cast his choicest flies, with delicate quiverings, with

coquettish withdrawals; had they been cannon-balls they could hardly

have had a more intimidating effect upon the trout. Where Robert fished

a Sabbath stillness reigned, beyond that charmed area they rose like

notes of exclamation in a French novel. I was on the whole inclined to

trace these things back to the influence of the pork, working on systems

weakened by shock; but Robert was not in the mood to trace them to

anything. Unsuccessful fishermen are not fond of introspective

suggestions. The member of the expedition who enjoyed himself beyond any

question was Mrs. Coolahan’s car-horse. Having been taken out of the

shafts on the road above the river, he had with his harness on his

back, like Horatius, unhesitatingly lumbered over a respectable bank and

ditch in the wake of Croppy, who had preceded him with the reins. He was

now grazing luxuriously along the river’s edge, while his driver smoked,

no less luxuriously, in the background.

“Will I carry the box for ye, Miss?” Croppy inquired compassionately,

stuffing his lighted pipe into his pocket, as I drifted desolately past

him. “Sure you’re killed with the load you have! This is a rough owld

place for a lady to be walkin’. Sit down, Miss. God knows you have a

right to be tired.”

It seemed that with Croppy also the day was dragging, doubtless he too

had lunched on Mrs. Coolahan’s pork. He planted my camp-stool and I sank

upon it.

“Well, now, for all it’s so throublesome,” he resumed, “I’d say painting

was a nice thrade. There was a gintleman here one time that was a

painther--I used to be dhrivin’ him. Faith! there wasn’t a place in the

counthry but he had it pathrolled. He seen me mother one day--cleaning

fish, I b’lieve she was, below on the quay--an’ nothing would howld him

but he should dhraw out her picture!” Croppy laughed unfilially. “Well,

me mother was mad. ‘To the divil I pitch him!’ says she; ‘if I wants me

photograph drew out I’m liable to pay for it,’ says she, ‘an’ not to be

stuck up before the ginthry to be ped for the like o’ that!’ ’Tis for;

you bein’ so handsome!’ says I to her. She was black mad altogether

then. ‘If that’s the way,’ says she, ‘it’s a wondher he wouldn’t ax

yerself, ye rotten little rat,’ says she, ‘in place of thrying could he

make a show of yer poor little ugly little cock-nosed mother!’ ‘Faith!’

says I to her, ‘I wouldn’t care if the divil himself axed it, if he give

me a half-crown and nothing to do but to be sittin’ down!’”

The tale may or may not have been intended to have a personal

application, but Croppy’s fat scarlet face and yellow moustache,

bristling beneath a nose which he must have inherited from his mother,

did not lend themselves to a landscape background, and I fell to

fugitive pencil sketches of the old white car-horse as he grazed round

us. It was thus that I first came to notice a fact whose bearing upon

our fortunes I was far from suspecting. The old horse’s harness was of

dingy brown leather, with dingier brass mountings; it had been

frequently mended, in varying shades of brown, and, in remarkable

contrast to the rest of the outfit, the breeching was of solid and

well-polished black leather, with silver buckles. It was not so much the

discrepancy of the breeching as its respectability that jarred upon me;

finally I commented upon it to Croppy.

[Illustration: “CROPPY.”]

His cap was tilted over the maternal nose, he glanced at me sideways

from under its peak.

“Sure the other breechin’ was broke, and if that owld shkin was to go

the lin’th of himself without a breechin’ on him he’d break all before

him! There was some fellas took him to a funeral one time without a

breechin’ on him, an’ when he seen the hearse what did he do but to rise

up in the sky.”

Wherein lay the moral support of a breeching in such a contingency it is

hard to say. I accepted the fact without comment, and expressed a regret

that we had not been indulged with the entire set of black harness.

Croppy measured me with his eye, grinned bashfully, and said:--

“Sure it’s the Dane’s breechin’ we have, Miss! I daresay he’d hardly get

home at all if we took any more from him!”

The Dean’s breeching! For an instant a wild confusion of ideas deprived

me of the power of speech. I could only hope that Croppy had left him

his gaiters! Then I pulled myself together.

“Croppy,” I said in consternation, “how did you get it? Did you borrow

it from the coachman?”

“Is it the coachman!” said Croppy tranquilly. “I did not, Miss. Sure he

was asleep in the snug.”

“But can they get home without it?”

A sudden alarm chilled me to the marrow.

“Arrah, why not, Miss? That black horse of the Dane’s wouldn’t care if

there was nothing at all on him!”

I heard Robert reeling in his line--had he a fish? Or, better still, had

he made up his mind to go home?

As a matter of fact, neither was the case; Robert was merely fractious,

and in that particular mood when he wished to have his mind

imperceptibly made up for him, while prepared to combat any direct

suggestion. From what quarter the ignoble proposition that we should go

home arose is immaterial. It is enough to say that Robert believed it to

be his own, and that, before he had time to reconsider the question, the

tactful Croppy had crammed the old white horse into the shafts of the

car.

It was by this time past five o’clock, and a threatening range of clouds

was rising from seaward across the west. Things had been against us from

the first, and if the last stone in the sling of Fate was that we were

to be wet through before we got home, it would be no more than I

expected. The old horse, however, addressed himself to the eight Irish

miles that lay between him and home with unexpected vivacity. We swung

in the ruts, we shook like jellies on the merciless patches of broken

stones, and Croppy stimulated the pace with weird whistlings through

his teeth, and heavy prods with the butt of his whip in the region of

the borrowed breeching.

Now that the expedition had been shaken off and cast behind us, the

humbler possibilities of the day began to stretch out alluring hands.

There was the new box from the library; there was the afternoon post;

there was a belated tea, with a peaceful fatigue to endear all. We

reached at last the welcome turn that brought us into the coast road. We

were but three miles now from that happy home from which we had been

driven forth, years ago as it seemed, at such desperate hazard. We drove

pleasantly along the road at the top of the cliffs. The wind was behind

us; a rising tide plunged and splashed far below. It was already raining

a little, enough to justify our sagacity in leaving the river, enough to

lend a touch of passion to the thought of home and Julia.

The grey horse began to lean back against the borrowed breeching, the

chains of the traces clanked loosely. We had begun the long zig-zag

slant down to the village. We swung gallantly round the sharp turn

half-way down the hill.

And there, not fifty yards away, was the Dean’s inside car, labouring

slowly, inevitably, up to meet us. Even in that stupefying moment I was

aware that the silver-banded hat was at a most uncanonical angle.

Behind me on the car was stowed my sketching umbrella; I tore it from

the retaining embrace of the camp-stool, and unfurled its unwieldy tent

with a speed that I have never since achieved. Robert, on the far side

of the car, was reasonably safe. The inestimable Croppy quickened up.

Cowering beneath the umbrella, I awaited the crucial moment at which to

shift its protection from the side to the back. The sound of the

approaching wheels told me that it had almost arrived, and then,

suddenly, without a note of warning, there came a scurry of hoofs, a

grinding of wheels, and a confused outcry of voices. A violent jerk

nearly pitched me off the car, as Croppy dragged the white horse into

the opposite bank; the umbrella flew from my hand and revealed to me the

Dean’s bearded coachman sitting on the road scarcely a yard from my

feet, uttering large and drunken shouts, while the covered car hurried

back towards the village with the unforgettable yell of Miss McEvoy

bursting from its curtained rear. The black horse was not absolutely

running away, but he was obviously alarmed, and with the long hill

before him anything might happen.

“They’re dead! They’re dead!” said Croppy, with philosophic calm; “’twas

the parasol started him.”

As he spoke, the black horse stumbled, the laden car ran on top of him

like a landslip, and, with an abortive flounder, he collapsed beneath

it. Once down, he lay, after the manner of his kind, like a dead thing,

and the covered car, propped on its shafts, presented its open mouth to

the heavens. Even as I sped headlong to the rescue in the wake of Robert

and Croppy, I fore-knew that Fate had after all been too many for us,

and when, an instant later, I seated myself in the orthodox manner upon

the black horse’s winker, and perceived that one of the shafts was

broken, I was already, in spirit, making up beds with Julia for the

reception of the party.

To this mental picture the howls of Miss McEvoy during the process of

extraction from the covered car lent a pleasing reality.

Only those who have been in a covered car under similar circumstances

can at all appreciate the difficulty of getting out of it. It has once,

in the streets of Cork, happened to me, and I can best compare it to

escaping from the cabin of a yacht without the aid of a companion

ladder. From Robert I can only collect the facts that the door jammed,

and that, at a critical juncture, Miss McEvoy had put her arms round his

neck.

* * * * *

The programme that Fate had ordained was carried out to its ultimate

item. The party from the Deanery of Glengad spent the night at Wavecrest

Cottage, attired by subscription, like the converts of a Mission; I

spent it in the attic, among trunks of Aunt Dora’s old clothes, and

rats; Robert, who throughout had played an unworthy part, in the night

mail to Dublin, called away for twenty-four hours on a pretext that

would not have deceived an infant a week old.

Croppy was firm and circumstantial in laying the blame on me and the

sketching umbrella.

“Sure, I seen the horse wondhering at it an’ he comin’ up the hill to

us. ’Twas that turned him.”

The dissertation in which the Dean’s venerable coachman made the entire

disaster hinge upon the theft of the breeching was able, but cannot

conveniently be here set down.

For my part, I hold with Julia.

“’Twas Helayna gave the dhrink to the Dane’s coachman! The low curséd

thing! There isn’t another one in the place that’d do it! I’m told the

priest was near breaking his umbrella on her over it.”

“MATCHBOX”

It was the event of Mr. John Denny’s life that he valued highest. It is

twenty years now since it took place, and many other things have

happened to him, such as going to England to give evidence in the

Parnell Commission, and matrimony, and taking the second prize in the

Lightweight Hunter Class at the Dublin Horse Show. But none of them, not

even the trip to London, possesses quite the same fortunate blend of the

sublime and the ridiculous that gives this incident such a perennial

success at the Hunt and Agricultural Show dinners which are the dazzling

breaks in the monotony of Mr. Denny’s life, and he prized it

accordingly.

Mr. Johnny Denny--or Dinny Johnny as he was known to his wittier

friends--was a young man of the straightest sect of the Cork buckeens, a

body whose importance justifies perhaps a particular description of one

of their number. His profession was something imperceptibly connected

with the County Grand Jury Office, and was quite over-shadowed in winter

by the gravities of hunting, and in summer by the gallantries of the

Militia training; for, like many of his class, he was a captain in the

Militia. He was always neatly dressed; his large moustache looked as if

it shared with his boots the attention of the blacking brush. No cavalry

sergeant in Ballincollig had a more delicately bowed leg, nor any

creature, except, perhaps, a fox-terrier interviewing a rival, a more

consummate swagger. He knew every horse and groom in all the leading

livery stables, and, in moments of expansion, would volunteer to name

the price at which any given animal could be safeguarded from any given

veterinary criticism. With all these not specially attractive qualities,

however, Dinny Johnny was, and is, a good fellow in his way. His temper

was excellent, his courage indisputable; he has never been known to give

any horse--not even a hireling--less than fair play, and a tendency to

ride too close to hounds has waned since time, like an Irish elector,

has taken to emphasising himself by throwing stones, and Dinny Johnny,

once ten stone, now admits to riding 13.7.

In those days, before the inertia that creeps like mildew over country

householders had begun to form, Mr. Denny was in the habit of making

occasional excursions into remote parts of the County Cork in search of

those flowers of pony perfection that are supposed to blush unseen in

any sufficiently mountainous and unknown country, and the belief in

which is the touch of wild poetry that keeps alive the soul of the

amateur horse coper. He had never met the pony of his dreams, but he had

not lost faith in it, and though he would range through the Bantry fair

with a sour eye, behind the sourness there was ever a kindling spark of

hope.

Towards the end of October, in the year ‘83, Mr. Denny received an

invitation from an old friend to go down to “the West”--thus are those

regions east of the moon, and west of the sun, and south-west of

Drimoleague Junction, designated in the tongue of Cork civilisation--to

“look at a colt,” and with a saddle and bridle in the netting and a

tooth-brush in his pocket he set his face for the wilderness. I have no

time to linger over the circumstances of the deal. Suffice it to say

that, after an arduous haggle, Mr. Denny bought the colt, and set forth

the same day to ride him by easy stages to his future home.

It was a wet day, wet with the solid determination of a western day, and

the loaded clouds were flinging their burden down on the furze, and the

rocks, and the steep, narrow road, with vindictive ecstacy. They also

flung it upon Mr. Denny, and both he and his new purchase were glad to

find a temporary shelter in one of the many public-houses of a village

on the line of march. He was sitting warming himself at an indifferent

turf fire, and drinking a tumbler of hot punch, when the sound of loud

voices outside drew him to the window. In front of a semi-circle of blue

frieze coats, brown frieze trousers and slouched black felt hats, stood

a dejected grey pony, with a woman at its head and a lanky young man on

its back; and it was obvious to Mr. Denny that a transaction, of an even

more fervid sort than that in which he had recently engaged, was toward.

“Fifteen pound!” screamed the woman, darting a black head on the end of

a skinny neck out of the projecting hood of her cloak with the swiftness

of a lizard; “fifteen pound, James Hallahane, and the divil burn the

ha’penny less that I’ll take for her!”

The elderly man to whom this was addressed continued to gaze steadily at

the ground, and turning his head slightly away, spat unostentatiously.

The other men moved a little, vaguely, and one said in a tone of remote

soliloquy:--

“She wouldn’t go tin pound in Banthry fair.”

“Tin pound!” echoed the pony’s owner shrilly. “Ah, God help ye, poor

man! Here, Patsey, away home wid ye out o’ this. It’ll be night, and

dark night itself before--”

“I’ll give ye eleven pounds,” said James Hallahane, addressing the toes

of his boots. The young man on the pony turned a questioning eye towards

his mother, but her sole response was a drag at the pony’s head to set

it going; swinging her cloak about her, she paddled through the slush

towards the gate, supremely disregarding the fact that a gander, having

nerved himself and his harem to the charge, had caught the ragged skirt

of her dress in his beak, and being too angry to let go, was being

whirled out of the yard in her train.

Dinny Johnny ran to the door, moved by an impulse for which I think the

hot whisky and water must have been responsible.

“I’ll give you twelve pounds for the pony, ma’am!” he called out.

A quarter of an hour later, when he and the publican were tying a

tow-rope round the pony’s lean neck, Mr. Denny was aware of a sinking of

the heart as he surveyed his bargain. It looked, and was, an utterly

degraded little object, as it stood with its tail tucked in between its

drooping hindquarters, and the rain running in brown streams down its

legs. Its lips were decorated with the absurd, the almost incredible

moustache that is the consequence among Irish horses of a furze diet (I

would hesitatingly direct the attention of the male youth of Britain to

this singular but undoubted fact), and although the hot whisky and

water had not exaggerated the excellence of its shoulder and the iron

soundness of its legs, it had certainly reversed the curve of its neck

and levelled the corrugations of its ribs.

“You could strike a bally match on her, this minute, if it wasn’t so

wet!” thought Mr. Denny, and with the simple humour that endeared him to

his friends he christened the pony “Matchbox” on the spot.

“And it’s to make a hunther of her ye’d do?” said the publican, pulling

hard at the knot of the tow-rope. “Begor’, I know that one. If there was

forty men and their wives, and they after her wid sticks, she wouldn’t

lep a sod o’ turf. Well, safe home, sir, safe home, and mind out she

wouldn’t kick ye. She’s a cross thief,” and with this valediction Dinny

Johnny went on his way.

There was no disputing the fact of the pony’s crossness.

“She’s sourish-like in her timper,” Jimmy, Mr. Denny’s head man,

observed to his subordinate not long after the arrival, and the

subordinate, tenderly stroking a bruised knee, replied:--

“Sour! I niver see the like of her! Be gannies, the divil’s always busy

with her!”

On one point, however, the grey pony proved better than had been

anticipated. Without the intervention of the forty married couples she

took to jumping at once.

“It comes as aisy to her as lies to a tinker,” said Jimmy to a

criticising friend; “the first day ever I had her out on a string she

wint up to the big bounds fence between us and Barrett’s as indipindant

as if she was going to her bed; and she jumped it as flippant and as

crabbéd--By dam, she’s as crabbéd as a monkey!”

In those days Mr. Standish O’Grady, popularly known as “Owld Sta’,” had

the hounds, and it need scarcely be said that Mr. Denny was one of his

most faithful followers. This season he had not done as well as usual.

The colt was only turning out moderately, and though the pony was

undoubtedly both crabbéd and flippant, she could not be expected to do

much with nearly twelve stone on her back. It happened, therefore, that

Mr. Denny took his pleasure a little sadly, with his loins girded in

momentary expectation of trouble, and of a sudden refusal from the colt

to jump until the crowd of skirters and gap-hunters drew round, and

escape was impossible until Mrs. Tom Graves’s splinty old carriage horse

had ploughed its way through the bank, and all those whom he most

contemned had flaunted through the breach in front of him. He rode the

pony now and then, but he more often lent her to little Mary O’Grady,

“Owld Sta’s” untidy, red-cheeked, blue-eyed, and quite uneducated

little girl. It was probable that Mary could only just write her name,

and it was obvious that she could not do her hair; but she was afraid of

nothing that went on four legs--in Ireland, at least--and she had the

divine gift of “hands”. From the time when she was five, up till now,

when she was fifteen, Mr. Denny had been her particular adherent, and

now he found a chastened pleasure in having his eye wiped by Mary, on

the grey pony; moreover, experience showed him that if anything would

persuade the colt to jump freely, it was getting a lead from the little

mare.

“Upon my soul, she wasn’t such a bad bargain after all,” he thought one

pleasant December day as he jogged to the Meet, leading “Matchbox,” who

was fidgeting along beside him with an expression of such shrewishness

as can only be assumed by a pony mare; “if it wasn’t that Mary likes

riding her I’d make her up a bit and she’d bring thirty-five anywhere.”

There had been, that autumn, a good deal of what was euphemistically

described as “trouble” in that district of the County Cork which Mr.

Denny and the Kilcronan hounds graced with their society, and when Mr.

O’Grady and his field assembled at the Curragh-coolaghy cross-roads, it

was darkly hinted that if the hounds ran over a certain farm not far

from the covert, there might be more trouble.

Dinny Johnny, occupied with pulling up Mary O’Grady’s saddle girths, and

evading the snaps with which “Matchbox” acknowledged the attention,

thought little of these rumours.

“Nonsense!” he said; “whatever they do they’ll let the hounds alone.

Come on, Mary, you and me’ll sneak down to the north side of the wood.

He’s bound to break there, and we’ve got to take every chance we can

get.”

Curragh-coolaghy covert was a large, ill-kept plantation that straggled

over a long hillside fighting with furze-bushes and rocks for the right

of possession; a place wherein the young hounds could catch and eat

rabbits to their heart’s content comfortably aware that the net of

brambles that stretched from tree to tree would effectually screen them

from punishment. From its north-east side a fairly smooth country

trended down to a river, and if the fox did not fulfil Mr. Denny’s

expectations by breaking to the north, the purplish patch that showed

where, on the further side of the river, Madore Wood lay, looked a point

for which he would be likely to make. Conscious of an act which he would

have loudly condemned in any one else, Mr. Denny, followed by Mary, like

his shadow, rode quietly round the long flank of the covert to the

north-east corner. They sat in perfect stillness for a few minutes, and

then there came a rustling on the inside of the high, bracken-fringed

fence which divided them from the covert. Then a countryman’s voice said

in a cautious whisper:--

“Did he put in the hounds yit?”

“He did,” said another voice, “he put them in the soud-aisht side;

they’ll be apt to get it soon.”

“Get what?” thought Dinny Johnny, all his bristles rising in wrath as

the idea of a drag came to him.

“There! they’re noising now!” said the first voice, while a whimper or

two came from far back in the wood. “Maybe there’ll not be so much chat

out o’ thim afther once they’ll git to Madore!”

“’Twas a pity Scanlan wouldn’t put the mate in here and have done with

it,” said the second voice. “Owld Sta’ll niver let them run a dhrag.”

“Yirrah, what dhrag man! ’Twas the fox himself they had, and he cut open

to make a good thrail, and the way Scanlan laid it the devil himself

wouldn’t know ’twas a dhrag, and they have little Danny Casey below to

screech he seen the fox--”

At the same instant the whimpers swelled into a far-away chorus, that

grew each moment fainter and more faint. Much as Mr. Denny desired to

undertake the capture of the imparters of these interesting facts, he

knew that he had now no time to attempt it, and, with a shout to Mary,

he started the colt at full gallop up the rough hillside, round the

covert, while the grey pony scuttled after him as nimbly as a rabbit.

The colt seemed to realise the stress of the occasion, and jumped

steadily enough; but the last fence on to the road was too much for his

nerves, and, having swerved from it with discomposing abruptness, he

fell to his wonted tactics of rearing and backing.

Mr. Denny permitted himself one minute in which to establish the

fruitlessness of spurs, whip and blasphemy in this emergency, and then,

descending to his own legs, he climbed over the fence into the road and

ran as fast as boots and tops would let him towards the point whence the

cry of the hounds was coming, ever more and more faintly. In a moment or

two he returned, out of breath, to where the faithful Mary awaited him.

“It’s no good, Mary,” he said, wiping the perspiration from his

forehead; “they’re running like blazes to the south along through the

furze. I suppose the devils took it that way to humbug your father, and

then they’ll turn for the bridge and run into Madore; and there’s the

end of the hounds.”

Mary, who regarded the hounds as the chief, if not the only, object of

existence, looked at him with scared eyes, while the colour died out of

her round cheeks.

“Will they be poisoned, Mr. Denny?” she gasped.

“Every man jack of them, if your father doesn’t twig it’s a drag, and

whip ’em off,” replied Mr. Denny, with grim brevity.

“Couldn’t we catch them up?” cried Mary, almost incoherent from

excitement and horror.

“They’ve gone half-a-mile by this, and that brute,” this with an eye of

concentrated hatred at the colt, “won’t jump a broom-stick.”

“But let me try,” urged Mary, maddened by the assumption of masculine

calm which Mr. Denny’s despair had taken on; “or--oh, Mr. Denny, if you

rode ‘Matchbox’ yourself straight to Madore across the river, you’d be

in time to whip them off!”

“By Jove!” said Dinny Johnny, and was silent. I believe that was the

moment at which the identity of the future Mrs. Denny was made clear to

him.

“And you’ll have to ride her in my saddle!” went on Mary at lightning

speed, taking control of the situation in a manner prophetic of her

future successful career as a matron. “There isn’t time to change--”

“The devil I shall!” said Dinny Johnny, and an unworthy thought of what

his friends would say flitted across his mind.

“And you’ll have to sit sideways, because the lowest crutch is so far

back there’s not room for your leg if you sit saddleways,” continued his

preceptor breathlessly. “I know it--Jimmy said so when he rode her to

the meet for me last week. Oh hurry--hurry! How slow you are!”

Mr. Denny never quite knew how he got into the horrors of the saddle,

still less how he and “Matchbox” got into the road. At one acute moment,

indeed, he had believed he was going to precede her thither, but they

alighted more or less together, and turning her, by a handy gap, into

the field on the other side of the road, he set off at a precarious

gallop, followed by the encouraging shrieks of Mary.

“Thank the Lord there’s no one looking, and it’s a decent old saddle

with a pommel on the offside,” he said to himself piously, while he

grasped the curving snout of the pommel in question, “I’d be a dead man

this minute only for that.”

He felt as though he were wedged in among the claws of a giant crab, but

without the sense of retention that might be hoped for under such

circumstances. The lowest crutch held one leg in aching durance; there

was but just room for the other between the two upper horns, and the

saddle was so short and hollow in the seat that its high-ridged cantle

was the only portion from which he derived any support--a support that

was suddenly and painfully experienced after each jump. He could see,

very far off, the pink coat of “Owld Sta’” following a line which seemed

each moment to be turning more directly for Madore, and in his agony he

gave the pony an imprudent dig of the spur that sent her on and off a

boggy fence in two goat-like bounds, and gave the sunlight opportunity

to play intermittently upon the hollow seat of the saddle. She had never

carried him so well, and as she put her little head down and raced at

the fences, the unfortunate Dinny Johnny felt that though he was

probably going to break his neck, no one would ever be able to mention

his early demise without a grin.

Field after field fled by him in painful succession till he found

himself safe on the farther side of a big stone-faced “double,” the last

fence before the river.

“Please God I’ll never be a woman again!” ejaculated Mr. Denny as he

wedged his left leg more tightly in behind the torturing leaping horn,

“that was a hairy old place! I wish Mary saw the pair of us coming up on

to it like new-born stags!”

Had Mary seen him and “Matchbox” a moment later, emerging separately

from a hole in mid stream, her respect might not have prevented her

from laughing, but the fact remains that the pair got across somehow.

At the top of the hill beyond the river Dinny Johnny saw the hounds for

the first time. They had checked on the road by the bridge, but now he

heard them throwing their tongues as they hit the line again, the fatal

line that was leading them to the covert. Even at this moment, Mr. Denny

could not restrain an admiration that would appear to most people

ill-timed.

“Aren’t they going the hell of a docket!” he exclaimed fondly, “and good

old Chantress leading the lot of them, the darling! It’ll be a queer

thing now, if I don’t get there in time!”

Blown though the pony was, he knew instinctively that he had not yet

come to the end of her, and he drove her along at a canter until he

reached a lane that encircled the covert, along which he would have to

go to intercept the hounds. As he jumped into it he was suddenly aware

of a yelling crowd of men and boys, who seemed, with nightmare

unexpectedness, to fill all the lane behind him. He knew what they were

there for, and oblivious of the lamentable absurdity of his appearance,

he turned and roared out a defiance as he clattered at full speed down

the stony lane. It seemed like another and almost expected episode in

the nightmare when he became aware of a barricade of stones, built

across the road to a height of about four feet, with along the top of

it--raising it to what, on a fourteen hand pony, looked like

impossibility--the branch of a fir-tree, with all its bristling twigs

left on it.

He heard the cry of the hounds clearly now; they were within a couple of

fields of the covert. Dinny Johnny drove his left spur into the little

mare’s panting side, let go the crutch, took hold of her head in the way

that is unmistakable, and faced her at the barricade. As he did so a

countryman sprang up at his right hand and struck furiously at him with

a heavy potato spade. The blow was aimed at Dinny Johnny, but the moment

was miscalculated, and it fell on “Matchbox” instead. The sharp blade

gashed her hind quarter, but with a spring like a frightened deer she

rose to the jump. For one supreme moment Dinny Johnny thought she had

cleared it, but at the next her hind legs had caught in the branch, and

with a jerk that sent her rider flying over her head, she fell in a heap

on the road. Fortunately for Mr. Denny, he was a proficient in the art

of falling, and though his hands were cut, and blood was streaming down

his face, he was able to struggle up, and run on towards the cry of the

hounds. There was still time; panting and dizzy, and half-blinded with

his own blood, he knew that there was still time, and he laboured on,

heedless of everything but the hounds. A high wall divided the covert

from the lane, and he could see the gate that was the sole entrance to

the wood on this side standing open. It was an iron gate, very high,

with close upright iron bars and Chantress was racing him to get there

first, Chantress, with all the pack at her heels.

* * * * *

Dinny Johnny won. It was a very close thing between him and Chantress,

and that good hound’s valuable nose came near being caught as the gates

clanged together, but Dinny Johnny was in first. Then he flung himself

at the pack, whipping, slashing, and swearing like a madman, as indeed

he was for the moment. He had often whipped for Mr. O’Grady, and the

hounds knew him, but without the solid abetting of the wall and the

gate, he would have had but a poor chance. As it was, he whipped them

back into the field up which they had run, and as he did so, “Owld Sta’”

came puffing up the hill, with about a dozen of the field hard at his

heels.

“Poison!” gasped Dinny Johnny, falling down at full length on the grass,

“the wood’s poisoned!”

When they went back to look for “Matchbox” she was still lying in the

bohireen. Her bridle had vanished, and so had the pursuing countrymen.

Mary O’Grady’s saddle was broken, and could never be used again, and no

more could “Matchbox,” because she had broken her neck.

And so the hounds, whom she had saved, subsequently ate her; but one of

her little hoofs commemorates her name, and as Mr. Denny, with its

assistance, lights his after-dinner pipe, he often heaves an appropriate

sigh, and remarks: “Well, Mary, we’ll never get the like of that pony

again”.

“AS I WAS GOING TO BANDON FAIR”

The first glimpse was worthy the best traditions of an Irish horse-fair.

The train moved slowly across a bridge; beneath it lay the principal

street of Bandon, seething with horses, loud with voices, and as the

engine-driver, with the stern humour of his kind, let loose the usual

assortment of sounds, it seemed as though the roadway below boiled over.

Horses reared, plunged and stampeded, while high above the head of a

long-tailed chestnut a countryman floated forth into space, a vision, in

its brief perfectness, delightfully photographed on the retina.

From the moment of leaving the railway station the fair was all

pervading. It appeared that the whole district had turned horse dealer.

The cramped side pavements of the town failed to accommodate the

ceaseless promenade of those whose sole business lay in criticising the

companion promenade of horses in the narrow street. They haled horses

before them with the aplomb of a colonel of cavalry buying remounts.

“Hi! bay horse! Pull in here! Foxy mare! Hi, boy, bring up that foxy

mare!”

The ensuing comments, though mainly of a damaging nature, were

understood on both sides to be no more than conventional dismissals. The

bay horse and the foxy mare were re-absorbed in the stream; their

critics directed their attentions elsewhere with unquenched assiduity.

It is the truest, most changeless trait of Irish character, the desire

to stand well with the horse, to be his confidant, his physician, his

exponent. It is comparable to the inborn persuasion in the heart of

every man that he is a judge of wine.

The procession of horses in the long, narrow street makes the brain

swim. Hardly has the eye taken in the elderly and astute hunter with the

fired hocks, whose forelegs look best in action, when it is dazzled by

the career of a cart-horse, scourged to a mighty canter by a boy with a

rope’s end, or it is horrified by the hair-breadth escape of a group of

hooded countrywomen from before the neighing charge of a two-year-old in

a halter and string. Yet these things are the mere preliminary to the

fair. At the end of the town a gap broken in a fence admits to a long

field on a hillside. The entrance is perilous, and before it is achieved

may involve more than one headlong flight to the safe summit of a

friendly wall, as the young horses protest, and whirl, and buck with the

usual fatuity of their kind. Once within the fair field there befal the

enticements of the green apple, of the dark-complexioned sweetmeat

temptingly denominated “Peggy’s leg,” of the “crackers”--that is, a

confection resembling dog biscuit sown with caraway seeds--and, above

all, of the “crubeens,” which, being interpreted, means “pigs’ feet,”

slightly salted, boiled, cold, wholly abominable. Here also is the

three-card trick, demonstrated by a man with the incongruous accent of

Whitechapel and a defiant eye, that even through the glaze of the second

stage of drunkenness held the audience and yet was ’ware of the

disposition of the nine of hearts. Here is the drinking booth, and here

sundry itinerant vendors of old clothes, and--of all improbable

commodities to be found at a horse-fair--wall-paper. Neither has much

success. The old-clothes woman casts down a heap of singularly repellant

rags before a disparaging customer; she beats them with her fists,

presumably to show their soundness in wind and limb: a cloud of

germ-laden dust arises.

“Arrah!” she says; “the divil himself wouldn’t plaze ye in clothes.”

The wall-paper man is not more fortunate. “Look at that for a nate

patthern!” he says ecstatically, “that’d paper a bed! Come now, ma’am,

wan an’ thrippence!”

The would-be purchaser silently tests it with a wrinkled finger and

thumb, and shakes her head.

“Well, I declare to ye now, that’s a grand paper. If ye papered a room

with that and put a hen in it she’d lay four eggs!” But not even the

consideration of its value as an æsthetic stimulant can compass the

sale of the one-and-threepenny wall-paper.

Down at this end of the fair field congregate the three-year-olds and

two-year-olds; they pierce the air with their infant squeals and neighs,

they stamp, and glare, and strike attitudes with absurd statuesqueness,

while their owners sit on a bank above them, playing them like fish on

the end of a long rope, and fabling forth their perfections with

tireless fancy. The perils of the way increase at every moment. In and

out among the restless heels the onlooker must steer his course, up into

the ampler space on the hill-top, where the horses stand in more open

order and a general view is possible.

Much may be learned at Bandon Fair of how the County Cork hunter is

arrived at, of the Lord Hastings colt out of a high-bred Victor mare; of

New Laund, of Speculation, of Whalebone, of the ancient and well-nigh

mythical Druid, whose name adds a lustre to any pedigree. These things

are matters far more real and serious than English history to every man

and boy in the fair field, whether he is concerned in practical

horse-dealing or not. Even the mere visitor is fired with the

acquisition of knowledge, and, in the intervals of saving his life,

casts a withering eye on hocks and forelegs, and cultivates the gloomy

silence that distinguishes the buyer.

It can hardly fail to attract the attention of the inquirer that, in the

highest walks of horsiness, the desire to appear horsey has been left

behind. These shining ones have passed beyond symbols of canes, of

gaiters, of straws in the mouth; it is as though they craved that

incognito which for them is for ever impossible. Bandon Fair was

privileged to have drawn two such into its shouting vortex. One wears a

simple suit of black serge, with trousers of a godly fulness; in it he

might fitly hand round the plate in church. His manner is almost

startlingly candid, his speech, what there is of it, is ungarnished with

stable slang, his face might belong to an imperfectly shaved archbishop.

Yesterday he bought twenty young horses; next week he will buy forty

more; next year he will place them in the English shires at prices never

heard of in Bandon, and, be it added, they will as a rule be worth the

money. Here is another noted judge of horseflesh, in knickerbocker

breeches that seem to have been made at home for some one else, in

leather gaiters of unostentatious roominess and rusticity. Though the

August day is innocent of all suggestion of rain, he carries instead of

a riding cane a matronly umbrella. When he rides a horse, and he rides

several with a singularly intimate and finished method, he hands the

umbrella to a reverential bystander; when the trial is over the umbrella

is reassumed. If anything were needed to accent its artless domesticity,

it would be the group of boys, horse copers in ambition, possibly in

achievement, who sit in a row under a fence, with their teeth grimly

clenched upon clay pipes, their eyes screwed up in perpetual and

ungenial observation. Their conversation is telegraphic, smileless,

esoteric, and punctuated with expectoration. If Phaeton and the horses

of the sun were to take a turn round the fair field these critics would

find little in them to commend. They are in the primary phase of a

life-long art; perhaps with time and exceptional favours of fortune it

may be given to them to learn the disarming mildness, the simplicity,

that, like a water-lily, is the perfected outcome of the deep.

[Illustration: A HIERARCH OF HORSE-DEALING.]

Before two o’clock the magnates of the fair had left it, taking with

them the cream of its contents, and in humbler people such a hunger

began to assert itself as came near bringing even crubeens and Peggy’s

leg within the sphere of practical politics. While slowly struggling

through the swarming street the perfume of mutton chops stole

exquisitely forth from the door of one of the hotels, accompanied by the

sound of a subdued fusillade of soda-water corks; over the heads of

the filthy press of people round the entrance and the thirsty throng at

the bar might be seen a procession of gaitered legs going upstairs to

luncheon. It seemed an excellent idea. The air within was blue with

tobacco smoke, flushed henchwomen staggered to and fro with arms spread

wide across trays of whiskies and sodas, opening doors revealed rooms

full of men, mutton chops and mastication. There was wildness in the eye

of the attendant as she took the order for yet another luncheon. She

fled, with the assurance that it would be ready immediately, yet

subsequent events suggested that even while she spoke the sheep that was

to respond to that thirty-fifth order for mutton chops was browsing in

the pastures of Bandon.

For eyes that had last looked on food at 7 A.M., neither the view of the

street obtainable from the first floor parlour window, nor even the

contemplation of the remarkable sacred pictures that adorned its walls,

had the interest they might have held earlier in the day, and the dirty

cruet-stand on the dirtier tablecloth was endued with an almost hypnotic

fascination in its suggestion of coming sustenance. At the end of the

first hour a stupor verging on indifference had set in; it was far on in

the second when the dish of fried mutton chops, the hard potatoes, and

the tepid whiskies and sodas were flung upon the board. No preliminary

to a week’s indigestion had been neglected, and a deserved success was

the result.

The business of the fair was still transacted at large throughout the

hotel. From behind the mound of mutton chops a buyer shoved a roll of

dirty one-pound notes round the potato dish, and after due haggling

received back one, according to the mystic Irish custom of “luck-penny”.

On the sofa two farmers carried on a transaction in which the swap of a

colt, boot money, and luck-penny were blended into one trackless maze of

astuteness and arithmetic. On the wall above them a print in which

Ananias and Sapphira were the central figures gave a simple and suitable

finish to the scene.

THE ABERDEEN UNIVERSITY PRESS LIMITED.