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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I thought you were going to cut me—Muriel!" said the strange man.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And the young ladies?" gasped Lady Purcell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Get in, Muriel!" she cried.

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

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

"Hamilton-Clarke," said the Inspector.

"Had ridden so hard in order to stop them."

"Er—quite so," said the Inspector.

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

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

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

The rest of the sentence was lost.

"Why, that is my wife!" said Sir Thomas. "What the deuce does she want here?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Muriel!" she exclaimed, "what have you got on you? And who—" She paused and stared at the Inspector. "Good gracious!" she cried, "why, it's Aubrey Hamilton!"



THE BAGMAN'S PONY

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What do you mean, sir?" shouted Carew, jumping up. "I'll not have any d——d bagmen coming here to insult me!"

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

"He called me a d——d bagman," says one, nearly tumbling down with laughing.

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

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

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

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

The first thing I saw was that the "Doctor's" stall was empty.

"How's this?" I said to the groom; "where's Mr. Leggett's horse?"

"The sahib has taken him away this morning."

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

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

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

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

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

"He is there, sahib, but he is only a kattiawa tattoo," which is the name for a common kind of mountain pony.

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

"Indeed, he is a gareeb kuch kam ki nahin," said the sais, meaning thereby a miserable beast, in the most intensified form, "and not fit to stand in the sahib's stable."

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

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

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

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

"You're all d——d funny," I said, "but I daresay you'll find he's left me something that is worth having."

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

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

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

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

"And I'll lay another thousand," says another fellow.

"Done with you too," said I.

Every one began to stare a bit then.

"Go to bed, Paddy," says the Colonel, "you're making an exhibition of yourself."

"Thank you, sir; I know pretty well what I'm talking about," said I; but, by George, I began privately to think I'd better pull myself together a bit, and I got out my book and began to hedge—laid three to one on the pony to do eleven miles in the hour, and four to one on him to do ten—all the fellows delighted to get their money on. I was to choose my own ground, and to have a fortnight to train the pony, and by the time I went to bed I stood to lose about L1,000.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Thank you," I said, "I think I'll keep my own, the pony's accustomed to it."

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

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

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

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

"Make the wheel go round," he said.

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

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

"What do you mean?" said I, pretty sharply.

"Look here," he said, setting the wheel going again. "You see here, Sar, it die, all in a minute, it jerk, doesn't die smooth. You see my wheel, Sar."

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

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

"All right!" said I with a sort of impulse, "I'll take it." And so I did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Keep back!" I shouted to her; "keep back, for pity's sake!"

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

"D——n it all! Le Bretton!" I yelled, as the pony broke for the second time, "can't you keep your wife away!"

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

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

"By Jove!" I gasped, "I'm done!"

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

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

* * * * *

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

But Mrs. Le Bretton never quite forgave me.



AN IRISH PROBLEM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Here!" she says, "go in there and wash yerself!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The monotonous and quiet Irish sentences followed one another again.

"That'll do. Now, William—"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Order now!" said Mr. Heraty severely.

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

"Ullan! What sort of English is that for an interpreter to be using! Do ye suppose the general public knows what is an ullan?" interrupted Mr. Heraty with lightning rapidity. "Explain that now!"

"Why, yer worship, sure anny one in the world'd know what the ullan on a sheep's back is!" said William, staggered by this sudden onslaught, "though there's some might call it the rebugh."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Lyden looked at his watch.

"Don't you think Sweeny might go on with his defence?" he remarked. "About the children, Sweeny—how many have ye?"

"I have four."

"And how old are they?"

"There's one o' thim is six years an another o' thim is seven—"

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

The defendant remained silent.

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

Here Darcy spoke again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"How d'ye know she was blind?" said Mr. Heraty quickly.

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

Sweeny firmly regarded Mr. Heraty.

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

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

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

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

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

"Are ye sure it wasn't the frog got the wakeness?" asked Dr. Lyden.

A gale of laughter swept round the court.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Sure I was satisfied to leave it to arbithration, but Darcy wasn't willin'." This statement was Sweeny's.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Lyden once more pulled out his watch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Lyden laughed for the first time.

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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



THE DANE'S BREECHIN'

PART I

The story begins at the moment when my brother Robert and I had made our final arrangements for the expedition. These were considerable. Robert is a fisherman who takes himself seriously (which perhaps is fortunate, as he rarely seems to take anything else), and his paraphernalia does credit to his enthusiasm, if not to his judgment. For my part, being an amateur artist, I had strapped together a collection of painting materials that would enable me to record my inspiration in oil, watercolour, or pastel, as the spirit might move me. We had ordered a car from Coolahan's public-house in the village; an early lunch was imminent.

The latter depended upon Julia; in fact it would be difficult to mention anything at Wavecrest Cottage that did not depend on Julia. We, who were but strangers and sojourners (the cottage with the beautiful name having been lent to us, with Julia, by an Aunt), felt that our very existence hung upon her clemency. How much more then luncheon, at the revolutionary hour of a quarter to one? Even courageous people are afraid of other people's servants, and Robert and I were far from being courageous. Possibly this is why Julia treated us with compassion, even with kindness, especially Robert.

"Ah, poor Masther Robert!" I have heard her say to a friend in the kitchen, who was fortunately hard of hearing, "ye wouldn't feel him in the house no more than a feather! An' indeed, as for the two o' thim, sich gallopers never ye seen! It's hardly they'd come in the house to throw the wet boots off thim! Thim'd gallop the woods all night like the deer!"

At half-past twelve, all, as I have said, being in train, I went to the window to observe the weather, and saw a covered car with a black horse plodding along the road that separated Wavecrest Cottage from the seashore. At our modest entrance gates it drew up, and the coachman climbed from his perch with a dignity befitting his flowing grey beard and the silver band on his hat.

A covered car is a vehicle peculiar to the south of Ireland; it resembles a two-wheeled waggonette with a windowless black box on top of it. Its mouth is at the back, and it has the sinister quality of totally concealing its occupants until the irrevocable moment when it is turned and backed against your front door steps. For this moment my brother Robert and I did not wait. A short passage and a flight of steps separated us from the kitchen; beyond the steps, and facing the kitchen door, a door opened into the garden. Robert slipped up heavily in the passage as we fled, but gained the garden door undamaged. The hall door bell pealed at my ear; I caught a glimpse of Julia, pounding chops with the rolling pin.

"Say we're out," I hissed to her—"gone out for the day! We are going into the garden!"

"Sure ye needn't give yerself that much trouble," replied Julia affably, as she snatched a grimy cap off a nail.

Nevertheless, in spite of the elasticity of Julia's conscience, the garden seemed safer.

In the garden, a plot of dense and various vegetation, decorated with Julia's lingerie, we awaited the sound of the departing wheels. But nothing departed. The breathless minutes passed, and then, through the open drawing-room window, we were aware of strange voices. The drawing-room window overlooked the garden thoroughly and commandingly. There was not a moment to lose. We plunged into the raspberry canes, and crouched beneath their embowered arches, and the fulness of the situation began to sink into our souls.

Through the window we caught a glimpse of a white beard and a portly black suit, of a black bonnet and a dolman that glittered with jet, of yet another black bonnet.

With Aunt Dora's house we had taken on, as it were, her practice, and the goodwill of her acquaintance. The Dean of Glengad and Mrs. Doherty were the very apex and flower of the latter, and in the party now installed in Aunt Dora's drawing-room I unhesitatingly recognised them, and Mrs. Doherty's sister, Miss McEvoy. Miss McEvoy was an elderly lady of the class usually described as being "not all there". The expression, I imagine, implies a regret that there should not be more. As, however, what there was of Miss McEvoy was chiefly remarkable for a monstrous appetite and a marked penchant for young men, it seems to me mainly to be regretted that there should be as much of her as there is.

A drive of nine miles in the heat of a June morning is not undertaken without a sustaining expectation of luncheon at the end of it. There were in the house three mutton chops to meet that expectation. I communicated all these facts to my brother. The consternation of his face, framed in raspberry boughs, was a picture not to be lightly forgotten. At such a moment, with everything depending on sheer nerve and resourcefulness, to consign Julia to perdition was mere self-indulgence on his part, but I suppose it was inevitable. Here the door into the garden opened and Julia came forth, with a spotless apron and a face of elaborate unconcern. She picked a handful of parsley, her black eyes questing for us among the bushes; they met mine, and a glance more alive with conspiracy it has not been my lot to receive. She moved desultorily towards us, gathering green gooseberries in her apron.

"I told them the two o' ye were out," she murmured to the gooseberry bushes. "They axed when would ye be back. I said ye went to town on the early thrain and wouldn't be back till night."

Decidedly Julia's conscience could stand alone.

"With that then," she continued, "Miss McEvoy lands into the hall, an' 'O Letitia,' says she, 'those must be the gentleman's fishing rods!' and then 'Julia!' says she, 'could ye give us a bit o' lunch?' That one's the imp!"

"Look here!" said Robert hoarsely, and with the swiftness of panic, "I'm off! I'll get out over the back wall."

At this moment Miss McEvoy put her head out of the drawing-room window and scanned the garden searchingly. Without another word we glided through the raspberry arches like departing fairies in a pantomine. The kindly lilac and laurestina bushes grew tall and thick at the end of the garden; the wall was high, but, as is usual with fruit-garden walls, it had a well-worn feasible corner that gave on to the lane leading to the village. We flung ourselves over it, and landed breathless and dishevelled, but safe, in the heart of the bed of nettles that plumed the common village ash-heap. Now that we were able, temporarily at all events, to call our souls our own, we (or rather I) took further stock of the situation. Its horrors continued to sink in. Driven from home without so much as a hat to lay our heads in, separated from those we loved most (the mutton chops, the painting materials, the fishing tackle), a promising expedition of unusual charm cut off, so to speak, in the flower of its youth—these were the more immediately obvious of the calamities which we now confronted. I preached upon them, with Cassandra eloquence, while we stood, indeterminate, among the nettles.

"And what, I ask you," I said perorating, "what on the face of the earth are we to do now?"

"Oh, it'll be all right, my dear girl," said Robert easily. Gratitude for his escape from the addresses of Miss McEvoy had apparently blinded him to the difficulties of the future. "There's Coolahan's pub. We'll get something to eat there—you'll see it'll be all right."

"But," I said, picking my way after him among the rusty tins and the broken crockery, "the Coolahans will think we're mad! We've no hats, and we can't tell them about the Dohertys."

"I don't care what they think," said Robert.

What Mrs. Coolahan may have thought, as we dived from the sunlight into her dark and porter-sodden shop, did not appear; what she looked was consternation.

"Luncheon!" she repeated with stupefaction, "luncheon! The dear help us, I have no luncheon for the like o' ye!"

"Oh, anything will do," said Robert cheerfully. His experiences at the London bar had not instructed him in the commissariat of his country.

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

Mrs. Coolahan's bleared eyes rolled wildly to mine, as seeking sympathy and sanity.

"With the will o' Pether!" she exclaimed, "how would I have cold beef? And as for cheese—!" She paused, and then, curiosity over-powering all other emotions. "What ails Julia Cronelly at all that your honour's ladyship is comin' to the like o' this dirty place for your dinner?"

"Oh, Julia's run away with a soldier!" struck in Robert brilliantly.

"Small blame to her if she did itself!" said Mrs. Coolahan, gallantly accepting the jest without a change of her enormous countenance, she's a long time waiting for the chance! Maybe ourselves'd go if we were axed! I have a nice bit of salt pork in the house," she continued, "would I give your honours a rasher of it?"

Mrs. Coolahan had probably assumed that either Julia was incapably drunk, or had been dismissed without benefit of clergy; at all events she had recognised that diplomatically it was correct to change the conversation.

We adventured ourselves into the unknown recesses of the house, and sat gingerly on greasy horsehair-seated chairs, in the parlour, while the bubbling cry of the rasher and eggs arose to heaven from the frying-pan, and the reek filled the house as with a grey fog. Potent as it was, it but faintly foreshadowed the flavour of the massive slices that presently swam in briny oil on our plates. But we had breakfasted at eight; we tackled them with determination, and without too nice inspection of the three-pronged forks. We drank porter, we achieved a certain sense of satiety, that on very slight provocation would have broadened into nausea or worse. All the while the question remained in the balance as to what we were to do for our hats, and for the myriad baggage involved in the expedition.

We finally decided to write a minute inventory of what was indispensable, and to send it to Julia by the faithful hand of Mrs. Coolahan's car-driver, one Croppy, with whom previous expeditions had placed us upon intimate terms. It would be necessary to confide the position to Croppy, but this we felt, could be done without a moment's uneasiness.

By the malignity that governed all things on that troublous day, neither of us had a pencil, and Mrs. Coolahan had to be appealed to. That she had by this time properly grasped the position was apparent in the hoarse whisper in which she said, carefully closing the door after her:—

"The Dane's coachman is inside!"

Simultaneously Robert and I removed ourselves from the purview of the door.

"Don't be afraid," said our hostess reassuringly, "he'll never see ye—sure I have him safe back in the snug! Is it a writing pin ye want, Miss?" she continued, moving to the door. "Katty Ann! Bring me in the pin out o' the office!"

The Post Office was, it may be mentioned, a department of the Coolahan public-house, and was managed by a committee of the younger members of the Coolahan family. These things are all, I believe, illegal, but they happen in Ireland. The committee was at present, apparently, in full session, judging by the flood of conversation that flowed in to us through the open door. The request for the pen caused an instant hush, followed at an interval by the slamming of drawers and other sounds of search.

"Ah, what's on ye delaying this way?" said Mrs. Coolahan irritably, advancing into the shop. "Sure I seen the pin with Helayna this morning."

At the moment all that we could see of the junior postmistress was her long bare shins, framed by the low-browed doorway, as she stood on the counter to further her researches on a top shelf.

"The Lord look down in pity on me this day!" said Mrs. Coolahan, in exalted and bitter indignation, "or on any poor creature that's striving to earn her living and has the likes o' ye to be thrusting to!"

We here attached ourselves to the outskirts of the search, which had by this time drawn into its vortex a couple of countrywomen with shawls over their heads, who had hitherto sat in decorous but observant stillness in the background. Katty Ann was rapidly examining tall bottles of sugar-stick, accustomed receptacles apparently for the pen. Helayna's raven fringe showed traces of a dive into the flour-bin. Mrs. Coolahan remained motionless in the midst, her eyes fixed on the ceiling, an exposition of suffering and of eternal remoteness from the ungodly.

We were now aware for the first time of the presence of Mr. Coolahan, a taciturn person, with a blue-black chin and a gloomy demeanour.

"Where had ye it last?" he demanded.

"I seen Katty Ann with it in the cow-house, sir," volunteered a small female Coolahan from beneath the flap of the counter.

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

"That the Lord Almighty might take me to Himself!" chanted Mrs. Coolahan. "Such a mee-aw! Such a thing to happen to me—the pure, decent woman! G'wout!" This, the imperative of the verb to retire, was hurtled at the tell-tale, who, presuming on her services, had incautiously left the covert of the counter, and had laid a sticky hand on her mother's skirts.

"Only that some was praying for me," pursued Mrs. Coolahan, "it might as well be the Inspector that came in the office, asking for the pin, an' if that was the way we might all go under the sod! Sich a mee-aw!"

"Musha! Musha!" breathed, prayerfully, one of the shawled women.

At this juncture I mounted on an up-ended barrel to investigate a promising lair above my head, and from this altitude was unexpectedly presented with a bird's-eye view of a hat with a silver band inside the railed and curtained "snug". I descended swiftly, not without an impression of black bottles on the snug table, and Katty Ann here slid in from the search in the cow-house.



"'Twasn't in it," she whined, "nor I didn't put it in it."

"For a pinny I'd give ye a slap in the jaw!" said Mr. Coolahan with sudden and startling ferocity.

"That the Lord Almighty might take me to Himself!" reiterated Mrs. Coolahan, while the search spread upwards through the house.

"Look here!" said Robert abruptly, "this business is going on for a week. I'm going for the things myself."

Neither I nor my remonstrances overtook him till he was well out into the street. There, outside the Coolahan door, was the Dean's inside car, resting on its shafts; while the black horse, like his driver, restored himself elsewhere beneath the Coolahan roof. Robert paid no heed to its silent warning.

"I must go myself. If I had forty pencils I couldn't explain to Julia the flies that I want!"

There comes, with the most biddable of men, a moment when argument fails, the moment of dead pull, when the creature perceives his own strength, and the astute will give in, early and imperceptibly, in order that he may not learn it beyond forgetting.

The only thing left to be done now was to accompany Robert, to avert what might be irretrievable disaster. It was now half-past one, and the three mutton chops and the stewed gooseberries must have long since yielded their uttermost to our guests. The latter would therefore have returned to the drawing-room, where it was possible that one or more of them might go to sleep. Remembering that the chops were loin-chops, we might at all events hope for some slight amount of lethargy. Again we waded through the nettles, we scaled the garden-wall, and worked our way between it and the laurestinas towards the door opposite the kitchen. 'There remained between us and the house an open space of about fifteen yards, fully commanded by the drawing-room window, veiling which, however, the lace curtains met in reassuring stillness. We rushed the interval, and entered the house softly. Here we were instantly met by Julia, with her mouth full, and a cup of tea in her hand. She drew us into the kitchen.

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

"Is it lunch?" replied Julia, through bread and butter; "there isn't a bit in the house but they have it ate! And the eggs I had for the fast-day for myself, didn't That One"—I knew this to indicate Miss McEvoy—"ax an omelette from me when she seen she had no more to get!"

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

"Faith, they are. 'Twas no good for them to stay in it! That One's lying up on the sofa in the dhrawing-room like any owld dog, and the Dane and Mrs. Doherty's dhrinking hot water—they have bad shtomachs, the craytures."

Robert opened the kitchen door and crept towards the dining-room, wherein, not long before the alarm, had been gathered all the essentials of the expedition. I followed him. I have never committed a burglary, but since the moment when I creaked past the drawing-room door, foretasting the instant when it would open, my sympathies are dedicated to burglars.