"He said sir, if it wasn't that she was something out of condition, he'd recommend you to send her out to the lions at the Zoo!"

The specimen of veterinary humour had hardly the success that had been hoped for it. Rupert Gunning's face was so remarkably void of appreciation that Mr. Brennan abruptly relapsed into gloom.

"He said he'd only be wasting his time with her, sir; he might as well go stitch a bog-hole as them wounds the window gave her; the tendon of the near fore is the same as in two halves with it, let alone the shoulder, that's worse again with her pitching out on the point of it."

"Was that all he had to say?" demanded the mare's owner.

"Well, beyond those remarks he passed about the Zoo, I should say it was, sir," admitted Mr. Brennan.

There was another pause, during which Rupert asked himself what the devil he was to do with the mare, and Mr. Brennan, thoroughly aware that he was doing so, decorously thumbed the brim of his hat.

"Maybe we might let her get the night, sir," he said, after a respectful interval, "and you might see her yourself in the morning—"

"I don't want to see her. I know well enough what she looks like," interrupted his client irritably. "Anyhow, I'm crossing to England to-night, and I don't choose to miss the boat for the fun of looking at an unfortunate brute that's cut half to pieces!"

Mr. Brennan cleared his throat. "If you were thinking to leave her in my stables, sir," he said firmly, "I'd sooner be quit of her. I've only a small place, and I'd lose too much time with her if I had to keep her the way she is. She might be on my hands three months and die at the end of it."

The clock here struck the quarter, at which Mr. Gunning ought to start for his train at Westland Row.

"You see, sir—" recommenced Brennan. It was precisely at this point that Mr. Gunning lost his temper.

"I suppose you can find time to shoot her," he said, with a very red face. "Kindly do so to-night!"

Mr. Brennan's arid countenance revealed no emotion. He was accustomed to understanding his clients a trifle better than they understood themselves, and inscrutable though Mr. Gunning's original motive in buying the mare had been, he had during this interview yielded to treatment and followed a prepared path.

That night, in the domestic circle, he went so far as to lay the matter before Mrs. Brennan.

"He picked out a mare that was as poor as a raven—though she's a good enough stamp if she was in condition—and tells me to buy her. 'What price will I give, sir?' says I. 'Ye'll give what they're askin',' says he, 'and that's sixty sovereigns!' I'm thirty years buying horses, and such a disgrace was never put on me, to be made a fool of before all Dublin! Going giving the first price for a mare that wasn't value for the half of it! Well; he sees the mare then, cut into garters below in Nassau Street. Devil a hair he cares! Nor never came down to the stable to put an eye on her! 'Shoot her!' says he, leppin' up on a car. 'Westland Row!' says he to the fella'. 'Drive like blazes!' and away with him! Well, no matter; I earned my money easy, an' I got the mare cheap!"

Mrs. Brennan added another spoonful of brown sugar to the porter that she was mulling in a sauce-pan on the range.

"Didn't ye say it was a young lady that owned the mare, James?" she asked in a colourless voice.

"Well, you're the devil, Mary!" replied Mr. Brennan in sincere admiration.

The mail-boat was as crowded as is usual on the last night of the Horse Show week. Overhead flowed the smoke river from the funnels, behind flowed the foam river of wake; the Hill of Howth receded apace into the west, and its lighthouse glowed like a planet in the twilight. Men with cigars, aggressively fit and dinner-full, strode the deck in couples, and thrashed out the Horse Show and Leopardstown to their uttermost husks.

Rupert Gunning was also, but with excessive reluctance, discussing the Horse Show. As he had given himself a good deal of trouble in order to cross on this particular evening, and as any one who was even slightly acquainted with Miss Fitzroy must have been aware that she would decline to talk of anything else, sympathy for him is not altogether deserved. The boat swung softly in a trance of speed, and Miss Fitzroy, better known to a large circle of intimates as Fanny Fitz, tried to think the motion was pleasant. She had made a good many migrations to England, by various routes and classes. There had indeed been times of stress when she had crossed unostentatiously, third class, trusting that luck and a thick veil might save her from her friends, but the day after she had sold a horse for sixty pounds was not the day for a daughter of Ireland to study economics. The breeze brought warm and subtle wafts from the machinery; it also blew wisps of hair into Fanny Fitz's eyes and over her nose, in a manner much revered in fiction, but in real life usually unbecoming and always exasperating. She leaned back on the bench and wondered whether the satisfaction of crowing over Mr. Gunning compensated her for abandoning the tranquil security of the ladies' cabin.

Mr. Gunning, though less contradictious than his wont, was certainly one of the most deliberately unsympathetic men she knew. None the less he was a man, and some one to talk to, both points in his favour, and she stayed on.

"I just missed meeting the man who bought my mare," she said, recurring to the subject for the fourth time; "apparently he didn't think her 'a leggy, long-backed brute,' as other people did, or said they did!"

"Did many people say it?" asked Mr. Gunning, beginning to make a cigarette.

"Oh, no one whose opinion signified!" retorted Fanny Fitz, with a glance from her charming, changeful eyes that suggested that she did not always mean quite what she said. "I believe the dealer bought her for a Leicestershire man. What she really wants is a big country where she can extend herself."

Mr. Gunning reflected that by this time the grey mare had extended herself once for all in Brennan's back-yard: he had done nothing to be ashamed of, but he felt abjectly guilty.

"If I go with Maudie to Connemara again next year," continued Fanny, "I must look out for another. You'll come too, I hope? A little opposition is such a help in making up one's mind! I don't know what I should have done without you at Leenane last June!"

Perhaps it was the vision of early summer that the words called up; perhaps it was the smile, half-seen in the semi-dark, that curved her provoking lips; perhaps it was compunction for his share in the tragedy of the Connemara mare; but possibly without any of these explanations Rupert would have done as he did, which was to place his hand on Fanny Fitz's as it lay on the bench beside him.

She was so amazed that for a moment she wildly thought he had mistaken it in the darkness for his tobacco pouch. Then, jumping with a shock to the conclusion that even the unsympathetic Mr. Gunning shared most men's views about not wasting an opportunity, she removed her hand with a jerk.

"Oh! I beg your pardon!" said Rupert pusillanimously. Miss Fitzroy fell back again on the tobacco pouch theory.

At this moment the glowing end of a cigar deviated from its orbit on the deck and approached them.

"Is that you, Gunning? I thought it was your voice," said the owner of the cigar.

"Yes, it is," said Mr. Gunning, in a tone singularly lacking in encouragement. "Thought I saw you at dinner, but couldn't be sure."

As a matter of fact, no one could have been more thoroughly aware than he of Captain Carteret's presence in the saloon.

"I thought so too!" said Fanny Fitz, from the darkness, "Captain Carteret wouldn't look my way!"

Captain Carteret gave a somewhat exaggerated start of discovery, and threw his cigar over the side. He had evidently come to stay.

"How was it I didn't see you at the Horse Show?" he said.

"The only people one ever sees there are the people one doesn't want to see," said Fanny, "I could meet no one except the auctioneer from Craffroe, and he always said the same thing. 'Fearful sultry, Miss Fitzroy! Have ye a purchaser yet for your animal, Miss Fitzroy? Ye have not! Oh, fie, fie!' It was rather funny at first, but it palled."

"I was only there one day," said Captain Carteret; "I wish I'd known you had a horse up, I might have helped you to sell."

"Thanks! I sold all right," said Fanny Fitz magnificently. "Did rather well too!"

"Capital!" said Captain Carteret vaguely. His acquaintance with Fanny extended over a three-day shooting party in Kildare, and a dance given by the detachment of his regiment at Enniscar, for which he had come down from the depot. It was not sufficient to enlighten him as to what it meant to her to own and sell a horse for the first time in her life.

"By-the-bye, Gunning," he went on, "you seemed to be having a lively time in Nassau Street yesterday! My wife and I were driving in from the polo, and we saw you in the thick of what looked like a street row. Some one in the club afterwards told me it was a horse you had only just bought at the Show that had come to grief. I hope it wasn't much hurt?"

There was a moment of silence—astonished, inquisitive silence on the part of Miss Fitzroy temporary cessation of the faculty of speech on that of Mr. Gunning. It was the moment, as he reflected afterwards, for a clean, decisive lie, a denial of all ownership; either that, or the instant flinging of Captain Carteret overboard.

Unfortunately for him, he did neither; he lied partially, timorously, and with that clinging to the skirts of the truth that marks the novice.

"Oh, she was all right," he said, his face purpling heavily in the kindly darkness. "What was the polo like, Carteret?"

"But I had no idea that you had bought a horse!" broke in Fanny Fitz, in high excitement. "Why didn't you tell Maudie and me? What is it like?"

"Oh, it's—she's just a cob—a grey cob—I just picked her up at the end of the show."

"What sort of a cob? Can she jump? Are you going to ride her with Freddy's hounds?" continued the implacably interested Fanny.

"I bought her as—as a trapper, and to do a bit of carting," replied Rupert, beginning suddenly to feel his powers of invention awakening; "she's quite a common brute. She doesn't jump."

"She seems to have jumped pretty well in Nassau Street," remarked Captain Carteret; "as well as I could see in the crowd, she didn't strike me as if she'd take kindly to carting."

"Well, I do think you might have told us about it!" reiterated Fanny Fitz. "Men are so ridiculously mysterious about buying or selling horses. I simply named my price and got it. I see nothing to make a mystery about in a deal; do you, Captain Carteret?"

"Well, that depends on whether you are buying or selling," replied Captain Carteret.

But Fate, in the shape of a turning tide and a consequent roll, played for once into the hands of Rupert Gunning. The boat swayed slowly, but deeply, and a waft of steam blew across Miss Fitzroy's face. It was not mere steam; it had been among hot oily things, stealing and giving odour. Fanny Fitz was not ill, but she knew that she had her limits, and that conversation, save of the usual rudimentary kind with the stewardess, were best abandoned.

Miss Fitzroy's movements during the next two and a half months need not be particularly recorded. They included—

1. A week in London, during which the sixty pounds, or a great part of it, acquired by the sale of the Connemara mare, passed imperceptibly into items, none of which, on a strict survey of expenditure, appeared to exceed three shillings and nine pence.

2. A month at Southsea, with Rupert Gunning's sister, Maudie Spicer, where she again encountered Captain Carteret, and entered aimlessly upon a semi-platonic and wholly unprofitable flirtation with him. During this epoch she wore out the remnant of her summer clothes and laid in substitutes; rather encouraged than otherwise by the fact that she had long since lost touch with the amount of her balance at the bank.

3. An expiatory and age-long sojourn of three weeks with relatives at an Essex vicarage, mitigated only by persistent bicycling with her uncle's curate. The result, as might have been predicted by any one acquainted with Miss Fitzroy, was that the curate's affections were diverted from the bourne long appointed for them, namely, the eldest daughter of the house, and that Fanny departed in blackest disgrace, with the single consolation of knowing that she would never be asked to the vicarage again.

Finally she returned, third-class, to her home in Ireland, with nothing to show for the expedition except a new and very smart habit, and a vague assurance that Captain Carteret would give her a mount now and then with Freddy Alexander's hounds. Captain Carteret was to be on detachment at Enniscar.



PART II

Mr. William Fennessy, lately returned from America, at present publican in Enniscar and proprietor of a small farm on its outskirts, had taken a grey mare to the forge.

It was now November, and the mare had been out at grass for nearly three months, somewhat to the detriment of her figure, but very much to her general advantage. Even in the south-west of Ireland it is not usual to keep horses out quite so late in the year, but Mr. Fennessy, having begun his varied career as a travelling tinker, was not the man to be bound by convention. He had provided the mare with the society of a donkey and two sheep, and with the shelter of a filthy and ruinous cowshed. Taking into consideration the fact that he had only paid seven pounds ten shillings for her, he thought this accommodation was as much as she was entitled to.

She was now drooping and dozing in a dark corner of the forge, waiting her turn to be shod, while the broken spring of a car was being patched, as shaggy and as dirty a creature as had ever stood there.

"Where did you get that one?" inquired the owner of the car of Mr. Fennessy, in the course of much lengthy conversation.

"I got her from a cousin of my own that died down in the County Limerick," said Mr. Fennessy in his most agreeable manner. "'Twas himself bred her, and she was near deshtroyed fallin' back on a harra' with him. It's for postin' I have her."

"She's shlack enough yet," said the carman.

"Ah, wait awhile!" said Mr. Fennessy easily, "in a week's time when I'll have her clipped out, she'll be as clean as amber."

The conversation flowed on to other themes.

It was nearly dark when the carman took his departure, and the smith, a silent youth with sore eyes, caught hold of one of the grey mare's fetlocks and told her to "lift!" He examined each hoof in succession by the light of a candle stuck in a bottle, raked his fire together, and then, turning to Mr. Fennessy, remarked:—

"Ye'd laugh if ye were here the day I put a slipper on this one, an' she afther comin' out o' the thrain—last June it was. 'Twas one Connolly back from Craffroe side was taking her from the station; him that thrained her for Miss Fitzroy. She gave him the two heels in the face." The glow from the fire illumined the smith's sardonic grin of remembrance. "She had a sandcrack in the near fore that time, and there's the sign of it yet."

The Cinderella-like episode of the slipper had naturally not entered into Mr. Fennessy's calculations, but he took the unforeseen without a change of countenance.

"Well, now," he said deliberately, "I was sayin' to meself on the road a while ago, if there was one this side o' the counthry would know her it'd be yerself."

The smith took the compliment with a blink of his sore eyes.

"Annyone'd be hard set to know her now," he said.

There was a pause, during which a leap of sparks answered each thump of the hammer on the white hot iron, and Mr. Fennessy arranged his course of action.

"Well, Larry," he said, "I'll tell ye now what no one in this counthry knows but meself and Patsey Crimmeen. Sure I know it's as good to tell a thing to the ground as to tell it to yerself!"

He lowered his voice.

"'Twas Mr. Gunning of Streamstown bought that one from Miss Fitzroy at the Dublin Show, and a hundhred pound he gave for her!"

The smith mentally docked this sum by seventy pounds, but said, "By dam!" in polite convention.

"'Twasn't a week afther that I got her for twinty-five pounds!"

The smith made a further mental deduction equally justified by the facts; the long snore and wheeze of the bellows filled the silence, and the dirty walls flushed and glowed with the steady crescendo and diminuendo of the glow.

The ex-tinker picked up the bottle with the candle. "Look at that!" he said, lowering the light and displaying a long transverse scar beginning at the mare's knee and ending in an enlarged fetlock.

"I seen that," said the smith.

"And look at that!" continued Mr. Fennessy, putting back the shaggy hair on her shoulder. A wide and shiny patch of black skin showed where the hatter's plate glass had flayed the shoulder. "She played the divil goin' through the streets, and made flitthers of herself this way, in a shop window. Gunning give the word to shoot her. The dealer's boy told Patsey Crimmeen. 'Twas Patsey was caring her at the show for Miss Fitzroy. Shtan' will ye!"—this to the mare, whose eyes glinted white as she flung away her head from the light of the candle.

"Whatever fright she got she didn't forget it," said the smith.



"I was up in Dublin meself the same time," pursued Mr. Fennessy. "Afther I seem' Patsey I took a sthroll down to Brennan's yard. The leg was in two halves, barrin' the shkin, and the showldher swoll up as big as a sack o' meal. I was three or four days goin' down to look at her this way, and I seen she wasn't as bad as what they thought. I come in one morning, and the boy says to me, 'The boss has three horses comin' in to-day, an' I dunno where'll we put this one.' I goes to Brennan, and he sitting down to his breakfast, and the wife with him. 'Sir,' says I, 'for the honour of God sell me that mare!' We had hard strugglin' then. In the latther end the wife says, 'It's as good for ye to part her, James,' says she, 'and Mr. Gunning'll never know what way she went. This honest man'll never say where he got her.' 'I will not, ma'am,' says I. 'I have a brother in the postin' line in Belfast, and it's for him I'm buyin' her.'"

The, process of making nail-holes in the shoe seemed to engross the taciturn young smith's attention for the next minute or two.

"There was a man over from Craffroe in town yesterday," he observed presently, "that said Mr. Gunning was lookin' out for a cob, and he'd fancy one that would lep."

He eyed his work sedulously as he spoke.

Something, it might have been the light of the candle, woke a flicker in Mr. Fennessy's eye. He passed his hand gently down the mare's quarter.

"Supposing now that the mane was off her, and something about six inches of a dock took off her tail, what sort of a cob d'ye think she'd make, Larry?"

The smith, with a sudden falsetto cackle of laughter, plunged the shoe into a tub of water, in which it gurgled and spluttered as if in appreciation of the jest.



PART III

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, Lord!" ejaculated Captain Carteret.

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

"He'll not be much advantage when he does come," said Captain Carteret spitefully.

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

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

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

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

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

"Are you—do you mean to tell me you are going to dance with a black face?" he demanded in bitter and incongruous wrath.

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, I couldn't possibly do that!" said Rupert hastily, alarmed as well as indignant; "I'm afraid I really must go now—"

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

"You're deserting us!" she said, looking up at him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fanny looked at him sideways from under her lashes.

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

Rupert forgot his wrath, forgot even the twanging banjo.

"I've just got another cob," he said quickly; "she jumps very well, and if you'd like to hunt her next Tuesday—"

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

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

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

"Oh, nothing!" said Fanny.

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

"I tell you I've done nothing to him," said Fanny Fitz guiltily.

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

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

"Oh, he's a rotter!" said Captain Carteret conclusively.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why not?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I'm afraid there seems no way out of it for you," said Rupert offendedly.

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

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

"God help her, the crayture! She looks like a servant that'd be bate out with work!"

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

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

"Very," replied Fanny.

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

"I've been wondering what I've done to be put into Coventry like this!"

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

"I!" he stammered, "not care to speak to you! You ought to know—"

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

Rupert Gunning remained abjectly and dumfoundedly silent.

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

"It's all perfectly true," said Rupert, in a low voice.

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

"Then I think there's no more to be said!" said Fanny hotly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Get hold of the mare," shouted Rupert, "or she'll jump the gate!"

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

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

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

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



A GRAND FILLY

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Go round, Captain!" shouted Trinder; "it's a bad place!"

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

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

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

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

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

"Ma'am, ma'am!" I heard, "ye'll pull the tail off him!"

"Twisht the tink-an now, Bridgie! Twisht it!"

"Holy Biddy! the masther'll kill us!"

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

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

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

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

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



A NINETEENTH-CENTURY MIRACLE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I'll pay you well if you will take a message there for me—" began Mrs. Pat.

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

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

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

"He was cut in a ditch," she said shortly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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



HIGH TEA AT McKEOWN'S

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

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

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

"Neither of you'll get her. She's going ploughing the Craughmore."

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

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

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

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

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

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