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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of In Mr. Knox's Country, by 
+E. OEnone Somerville and Martin Ross
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: In Mr. Knox's Country
+
+Author: E. OEnone Somerville
+        Martin Ross
+
+Illustrator: E. OEnone Somerville
+
+Release Date: November 19, 2011 [EBook #38062]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN MR. KNOX'S COUNTRY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Cover]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Frontispiece: "If ever you see hounds pointing this way, don't spare
+spurs to get to the cliff before them!"  [Page 4.]]
+
+
+
+
+
+In Mr. Knox's Country
+
+By
+
+E. [OE]. Somerville and Martin Ross
+
+
+  Authors of "Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.," "Further
+  Experiences of an Irish R.M.," "Some Irish Yesterdays,"
+  "All on the Irish Shore," "Dan Russel the Fox,"
+  "The Real Charlotte," etc. etc. etc.
+
+
+
+
+With 8 Illustrations by E. [OE]. Somerville
+
+
+
+
+  Longmans, Green and Co.
+  39 Paternoster Row, London
+  Fourth Avenue & 30th Street, New York
+  Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras
+  1915
+
+All rights reserved
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+    I. THE AUSSOLAS MARTIN CAT
+   II. THE FINGER OF MRS. KNOX
+  III. THE FRIEND OF HER YOUTH
+   IV. HARRINGTON'S
+    V. THE MAROAN PONY
+   VI. MAJOR APOLLO RIGGS
+  VII. WHEN I FIRST MET DR. HICKEY
+ VIII. THE BOSOM OF THE McRORYS
+   IX. PUT DOWN ONE AND CARRY TWO
+    X. THE COMTE DE PRALINES
+   XI. THE SHOOTING OF SHINROE
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+"If ever you see hounds pointing this way, don't spare spurs to get
+  to the cliff before them!" . . . . . . . . . . . . . _Frontispiece_
+
+Kitty the Shakes
+
+"I heard scald-crow laughter behind me in the shawls"
+
+"Lyney's a tough dog!"
+
+"Walkin' Aisy"
+
+James
+
+Miss Cooney O'Rattigan
+
+Miss Larkie McRory
+
+
+
+
+IN MR. KNOX'S COUNTRY
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE AUSSOLAS MARTIN CAT
+
+Flurry Knox and I had driven some fourteen miles to a tryst with one
+David Courtney, of Fanaghy.  But, at the appointed cross-roads, David
+Courtney was not.  It was a gleaming morning in mid-May, when
+everything was young and tense and thin and fit to run for its life,
+like a Derby horse.  Above us was such of the spacious bare country as
+we had not already climbed, with nothing on it taller than a thorn-bush
+from one end of it to the other.  The hill-top blazed with yellow
+furze, and great silver balls of cloud looked over its edge.  Nearly as
+white were the little white-washed houses that were tucked in and out
+of the grey rocks on the hill-side.
+
+"It's up there somewhere he lives," said Flurry, turning his cart
+across the road; "which'll you do, hold the horse or go look for him?"
+
+I said I would go to look for him.  I mounted the hill by a wandering
+bohireen resembling nothing so much as a series of bony elbows; a
+white-washed cottage presently confronted me, clinging, like a
+sea-anemone, to a rock.  I knocked at the closed door, I tapped at a
+window held up by a great, speckled foreign shell, but without success.
+Climbing another elbow, I repeated the process at two successive
+houses, but without avail.  All was as deserted as Pompeii, and, as at
+Pompeii, the live rock in the road was worn smooth by feet and scarred
+with wheel tracks.
+
+An open doorway faced me; I stooped beneath its lintel and asked of
+seeming vacancy if there were "anyone inside."  There was no reply.  I
+advanced into a clean kitchen, with a well-swept earthen floor, and was
+suddenly aware of a human presence very close to me.
+
+A youngish woman, with a heavy mop of dark hair, and brown eyes staring
+at the opposite wall, was sitting at the end of a settle behind the
+door.  Every bit of her was trembling.  She looked past me as if I did
+not exist.  Feeling uncertain as to whether she or I were mad, I put to
+her my question as to where David Courtney lived, without much
+expectation of receiving an answer.
+
+Still shaking from head to foot, and without turning her eyes, she
+replied:
+
+"A small piece to the north.  The house on the bare rock."
+
+The situation showed no symptom of expansion; I faltered thanks to her
+profile and returned to Flurry.
+
+The house of David Courtney produced David Courtney's large and
+handsome wife, who told us that Himself was gone to a funeral, and all
+that was in the village was gone to it, but there was a couple of the
+boys below in the bog.
+
+"What have they done with those cubs?" asked Flurry.
+
+Mrs. Courtney shot at him a dark-blue side-glance, indulgent and
+amused, and, advancing to the edge of her rock terrace, made a trumpet
+of her hands and projected a long call down the valley.
+
+"Mikeen!  Con!  Come hither!"
+
+From a brown patch in the green below came a far-away response, and we
+presently saw two tall lads coming towards us, running up the hill as
+smoothly and easily as a couple of hounds.  Their legs were bare and
+stained with bog-mould, they were young and light and radiant as the
+May weather.
+
+I did not withhold my opinion of them from their proprietor.
+
+"Why, then, I have six more as good as them!" replied Mrs. Courtney,
+her hands on her hips.
+
+We took the horse from the shafts and pushed him, deeply suspicious,
+into a darksome lair, in one corner of which glimmered a pale object,
+either pig or calf.  When this was done we followed Mikeen and Con up
+through blossoming furze and blue-grey rock to the ridge of the hill,
+and there came face to face with the vast blue dazzle of the Atlantic,
+with a long line of cliffs standing it off, in snowy lather, as far as
+eye could follow them into the easterly haze.
+
+"That's the cliff over-right you now," said one of the boys, pointing
+downwards, with a hand dark with bog-stuff, to a grey and green wedge
+thrust out into the blue.  "It's there where she have her den.  She
+have a pat' down for herself in it--it's hardly a bird could walk
+it--the five pups was following her, and two o' them rolled down into
+the strand, and our dogs held them.  Ourselves was below in the cove
+gathering seaweed."
+
+"Make a note of it now, Major," said Flurry, "and if ever you see
+hounds pointing this way, don't spare spurs to get to the cliff before
+them!"
+
+"Why don't you get them out and blow up the place?"
+
+"Is it get them out of that hole!" said one of the boys.  "If all the
+foxes in Europe was inside in it you couldn't get them out!"
+
+"We mightn't want them either," said Flurry, his eye ranging the face
+of the cliff, and assimilating its uncompromising negations.
+
+"Then there's plenty that would!" returned Mikeen, looking at us with
+an eye as blue and bright as the sea.  "There was a man east here that
+cot a fox and her five young ones in the one night, and he got three
+half-crowns for every lad o' them!"
+
+"He'd be turned out of hell for doing that," said Flurry, very severely.
+
+We went back to the cottage on the rock, and the matter entered upon
+its more serious phase.  I took no part in the negotiations, and
+employed myself in converse with Mrs. Courtney, who--it may not be out
+of place to recall--informed me, amongst other domestic details, that
+the farm wouldn't carry all the children she had, and that nowadays,
+when the ger'rls would be going to America, it's white nightdresses and
+flannelette nightdresses she should give them; and further, that she
+thought, if she lived to be as old as a goat, she'd never see them so
+tasty.
+
+On the way home I asked Flurry what he was going to do with the two
+cubs, now immured in a market basket under the seat of the dog-cart.
+
+Flurry was ambiguous and impenetrable; there were certain matters in
+which Flurry trusted nobody, knowing the darkness of his own heart and
+the inelasticity of other people's points of view.
+
+"That woman, you know, that told you the way," he remarked, with
+palpable irrelevance, "'Kitty the Shakes,' they call her--they say she
+mightn't speak to anyone once in three months, and she shakes that way
+then.  It's a pity that was the house you went into first."
+
+[Illustration: Kitty the Shakes.]
+
+"Why so?" said I.
+
+"That's the why!" said Flurry.
+
+
+It was during the week following this expedition that Philippa and I
+stayed for a few days at Aussolas, where Flurry and Mrs. Flurry were
+now more or less permanently in residence.  The position of guest in
+old Mrs. Knox's house was one often fraught with more than the normal
+anxieties proper to guests.  Her mood was like the weather, a matter
+incalculable and beyond control; it governed the day, and was the _leit
+motif_ in the affairs of the household.  I hope that it may be given to
+me to live until my mood also is as a dark tower full of armed men.
+
+On the evening of our arrival my wife, whose perception of danger is
+comparable only to that of the wild elephant, warned me that Mrs. Knox
+was rheumatic, and that I was on no account to condole with her.  Later
+on the position revealed itself.  Mrs. Knox's Dublin doctor had ordered
+her to Buxton with as little delay as possible; furthermore, she was to
+proceed to Brighton for the summer, possibly for the winter also.  She
+had put Aussolas on a house agent's books, "out of spite," Flurry said
+sourly; "I suppose she thinks I'd pop the silver, or sell the feather
+beds."
+
+It was a tribute to Mrs. Knox's character that her grandson treated her
+as a combatant in his own class, and did not for an instant consider
+himself bound to allow her weight for either age or sex.
+
+At dinner that night Mrs. Knox was as favourable to me as usual; yet it
+was pointed out to me by Mrs. Flurry that she was wearing two shawls
+instead of one, always an indication to be noted as a portent of storm.
+At bridge she played a very sharp-edged game, in grimness scarcely
+mitigated by two well-brought-off revokes on the part of Philippa, who
+was playing with Flurry; a gross and unprincipled piece of chivalry on
+my wife's part that was justly resented by Mr. Knox.
+
+Next morning the lady of the house was invisible, and Mullins, her
+maid, was heard to lament to an unknown sympathiser on the back stairs
+that the divil in the wild woods wouldn't content her.
+
+In the grove at Aussolas, on a height behind the castle, romantically
+named Mount Ida, there is a half-circle of laurels that screens, with
+pleasing severity, an ancient bench and table of stone.  The spot
+commands a fair and far prospect of Aussolas Lake, and, nearer at hand,
+it permitted a useful outlook upon the kitchen garden and its affairs.
+When old Mrs. Knox first led me thither to admire the view, she
+mentioned that it was a place to which she often repaired when the cook
+was on her trail with enquiries as to what the servants were to have
+for dinner.
+
+Since our expedition to Fanaghy the glory of the weather had remained
+unshaken, and each day there was a shade of added warmth in the
+sunshine and a more caressing quality in the wind.  Flurry and I went
+to Petty Sessions in the morning, and returned to find that Mrs. Knox
+was still in her room, and that our respective wives were awaiting us
+with a tea-basket in the classic shades of Mount Ida.  Mrs. Knox had
+that mysterious quality of attraction given to some persons, and some
+dogs, of forming a social vortex into which lesser beings inevitably
+swim; yet I cannot deny that her absence induced a sneaking sensation
+of holiday.  Had she been there, for example, Mrs. Flurry would
+scarcely have indicated, with a free gesture, the luxuriance of the
+asparagus beds in the kitchen garden below, nor promised to have a
+bundle of it cut for us before we went home; still less would she and
+Philippa have smoked cigarettes, a practice considered by Mrs. Knox to
+be, in women, several degrees worse than drinking.
+
+To us there, through the green light of young beech leaves and the
+upstriking azure glare of myriads of bluebells, came the solid presence
+of John Kane.  It would be hard to define John Kane's exact status at
+Aussolas; Flurry had once said that, whether it was the house, or the
+garden, or the stables, whatever it'd be that you wanted to do, John
+Kane'd be in it before you to hinder you; but that had been in a moment
+of excusable irritation, when John Kane had put a padlock on the oat
+loft, and had given the key to Mrs. Knox.
+
+John Kane now ascended to us, and came to a standstill, with his soft
+black hat in his hands; it was dusty, so were his boots, and the
+pockets of his coat bulked large.  Among the green drifts and flakes of
+the pale young beech leaves his bushy beard looked as red as a
+squirrel's tail.
+
+"I have the commands here, Master Flurry," he began, "and it's to
+yourself I'd sooner give them.  As for them ger'rls that's inside in
+the kitchen, they have every pup in the place in a thrain at the back
+door, and, if your tobacco went asthray, it's me that would be blemt."
+
+"The commands"--_i.e._ some small parcels--were laid on the stone
+table, minor pockets yielded an assortment of small moneys that were
+each in turn counted and placed in heaps by their consort parcels.
+
+"And as for the bottle, the misthress wrote down for me," said John
+Kane, his eye rounding up his audience like a sheep-dog, "I got me
+'nough with the same bottle.  But sure them's the stupidest people in
+Hennessy's!  'Twas to Hennessy himself I gave the misthress's paper,
+and he was there looking at it for a while.  'What have she in it?'
+says he to me.  'How would I know,' says I, 'me that have no learning?'
+He got the spy-glass to it then, and 'twas shortly till all was in the
+shop was gethered in it looking at it.  'Twould take an expairt to read
+it!' says one fella----"
+
+"True for him!" said Flurry.
+
+"----  'She have written it in Latin!' says Hennessy.  'Faith she's
+able to write it that way, or anny other way for yee!' says I.  'Well,
+I'll tell ye now what ye'll do,' says Hennessy.  'There's a boy in the
+Medical Hall, and he's able to read all languages.  Show it to him,'
+says he.  I showed it then to the boy in the Medical Hall.  Sure, the
+very minute he looked at it--'Elliman's Embrocation,' says he."  John
+Kane waved his hand slightly to one side; his gestures had throughout
+been supple and restrained.  "Sure them's the stupidest people in
+Hennessy's!"
+
+My sympathies were with the house of Hennessy; I, too, had encountered
+Mrs. Knox's handwriting, and realised the high imaginative and
+deductive qualities needed in its interpreter.  No individual word was
+decipherable, but, with a bold reader, groups could be made to conform
+to a scheme based on probabilities.
+
+"You can tell the mistress what they were saying at Hennessy's about
+her," said Flurry.
+
+"I will, your honour," replied John, accepting the turn in the
+conversation as easily as a skilful motorist changes gear.  "I suppose
+you'll have a job for me at Tory Lodge when I get the sack from the
+misthress?"
+
+"No, but they tell me I'm to be put on the Old Age Pension Committee,"
+returned Flurry, "and I might get a chance to do something for you if
+you'd give over dyeing that beard you have."
+
+"I'm sorry to say it's the Almighty is dyeing my beard for me, sir,"
+replied John Kane, fingering a grey streak on his chin, "and I think
+He's after giving yourself a touch, too!"  He glanced at the side of
+Flurry's head, and his eye travelled on to mine.  There was an almost
+flagrant absence of triumph in it.
+
+He put aside a beechen bough with his hand; "I'll leave the things on
+the hall table for you, sir," he said, choosing the perfect moment for
+departure, and passed out of sight.  The bough swung into place behind
+him; it was like an exit in a pastoral play.
+
+"She never told me about the embrocation," said Sally, leaning back
+against the mossed stones of the bench and looking up into the web of
+branches.  "She never will admit that she's ill."
+
+"Poor old Mrs. Knox!" said Philippa compassionately, "I thought she
+looked so ill last night when she was playing bridge.  Such a tiny
+fragile thing, sitting wrapped up in that great old chair----"
+
+Philippa is ineradicably romantic, yet my mind, too, dwelt upon the old
+autocrat lying there, ill and undefeated, in the heart of her ancient
+fortress.
+
+"Fragile!" said Flurry, "you'd best not tell her that.  With my
+grandmother no one's ill till they're dead, and no one's dead till
+they're buried!"
+
+Away near the house the peacock uttered his defiant screech, a note of
+exclamation that seemed entirely appropriate to Aussolas; the
+turkey-cock in the yard accepted the challenge with effusion, and from
+further away the voice of Mrs. Knox's Kerry bull, equally instant in
+taking offence, ascended the gamut of wrath from growl to yell.
+Blended with these voices was another--a man's voice, in loud harangue,
+advancing down the long beech walk to the kitchen garden.  As it
+approached, the wood-pigeons bolted in panic, with distracted clappings
+of wings, from the tall firs by the garden wall in which they were wont
+to sit arranging plans of campaign with regard to the fruit.  We sat in
+tense silence.  The latch of the garden gate clicked, and the voice
+said in stentorian tones:
+
+"----My father 'e kept a splendid table!"
+
+"I hear wheels!" breathed Sally Knox.
+
+A hawthorn tree and a laburnum tree leaned over the garden gate, and
+from beneath their canopy of cream and pale gold there emerged the
+bath-chair of Mrs. Knox, with Mrs. Knox herself seated in it.  It was
+propelled by Mullins--even at that distance the indignation of Mullins
+was discernible--and it progressed up the central path.  Beside it
+walked the personage whose father had kept a splendid table.
+Parenthetically it may be observed that he did credit to it.
+
+"Glory be to Moses!  Look at my grandmother!" said Flurry under his
+breath.  "How fragile she is!  Who the dickens has she got hold of?"
+
+"He thinks she's deaf, anyhow," said Sally.
+
+"That's where he makes the mistake!" returned Flurry.
+
+"I don't see your glawss, Mrs. Knox," shouted the stout gentleman.
+
+"That's very possible," replied the incisive and slightly cracked voice
+of Mrs. Knox, "because the little that is left of it is in the mortar
+on the wall, to keep thieves out, which it fails to do."
+
+The pair passed on, and paused, still in high converse, at the
+asparagus beds; Mullins, behind the bath-chair, wiped her indignant
+brow.
+
+"You'll go home without the asparagus," whispered Flurry, "she has
+every stick of it counted by now!"
+
+They moved on, heading for the further gate of the garden.
+
+"I'll bet a sovereign he's come after the house!" Flurry continued,
+following the _cortège_ with a malevolent eye.
+
+Later, when we returned to the house, we found a motor-bicycle, dusty
+and dwarfish, leaning against the hall door steps.  Within was the
+sound of shouting.  It was then half-past seven.
+
+"Is it possible that she's keeping him for dinner?" said Sally.
+
+"Take care he's not staying for the night!" said Flurry.  "Look at the
+knapsack he has on the table!"
+
+"There's only one room he can possibly have," said Mrs. Flurry, with a
+strange and fixed gaze at her lord, "and that's the James the Second
+room.  The others are cleared for the painters."
+
+"Oh, that will be all right," replied her lord, easily.
+
+When I came down to dinner I found the new arrival planted on his
+short, thick legs in front of the fireplace, still shouting at Mrs.
+Knox, who, notwithstanding the sinister presence of the two shawls of
+ill-omen, was listening with a propitious countenance.  She looked very
+tired, and I committed the _gaucherie_ of saying I was sorry to hear
+she had not been well.
+
+"Oh, that was nothing!" said Mrs. Knox, with a wave of her tiny,
+sunburnt, and bediamonded hand.  "I've shaken that off, 'like dewdrops
+from the lion's mane!'  This is Mr. Tebbutts, from--er--England, Major
+Yeates."
+
+Mr. Tebbutts, after a bewildered stare, presumably in search of the
+lion, proclaimed his gratification at meeting me, in a voice that might
+have been heard in the stable yard.
+
+At dinner the position developed apace.  The visitor was, it appeared,
+the representative of a patriarchal family, comprising samples of all
+the relationships mentioned in the table of affinities, and
+_fortissimo_, and at vast length, he laid down their personal histories
+and their various requirements.  It was pretty to see how old Mrs.
+Knox, ill as she looked, and suffering as she undoubtedly was, mastered
+the bowling.
+
+Did the Tebbutts ladies exact bathing for their young?  The lake
+supplied it.
+
+("It's all mud and swallow-holes!" said Flurry in an audible aside.)
+
+Did the brothers demand trout fishing? the schoolboys rabbit shooting?
+the young ladies lawn tennis and society?--all were theirs, especially
+the latter.  "My grandson and his wife will be within easy reach in
+their own house, Tory Lodge!"
+
+The remark about the swallow-holes had not been lost upon the Lady of
+the Lake.
+
+Mrs. Knox had her glass of port at dessert, an act equivalent to
+snapping her rheumatic fingers in our faces, and withdrew, stiff but
+erect, and still on the best of terms with her prospective tenant.  As
+I held the door open for her, she said to me:
+
+"''Twas whispered in heaven, 'twas muttered in hell.'"
+
+By an amazing stroke of luck I was enabled to continue:
+
+"'And echo caught softly the sound as it fell!'" with a glance at Mr.
+Tebbutts that showed I was aware the quotation was directed at his
+missing aspirates.
+
+As the door closed, the visitor turned to Flurry and said impressively:
+
+"There's just one thing, Mr. Knox, I should like to mention, if you
+will allow me.  Are the drains quite in order?"
+
+"God knows," said Flurry, pulling hard at a badly-lighted cigarette and
+throwing himself into a chair by the turf fire.
+
+"Mrs. Knox's health has held out against them for about sixty years," I
+remarked.
+
+"Well, as to that," replied Mr. Tebbutts, "I feel it is only right to
+mention that the dear old lady was very giddy with me in the garden
+this afternoon."
+
+Flurry received this remarkable statement without emotion.
+
+"Maybe she's taken a fancy to you!" he said brutally.  "If it wasn't
+that it was whipped cream."
+
+Mr. Tebbutts' bulging eyes sought mine in complete mystification; I
+turned to the fire, and to it revealed my emotions.  Flurry was not at
+all amused.
+
+"Well--er--I understood her maid to say she 'ad bin ailing," said the
+guest after a pause.  "I'd have called it a kind of a megrim myself,
+and, as I say, I certainly perceived a sort of charnel-'ouse smell in
+the room I'm in.  And look 'ere, Mr. Knox, 'ere's another thing.  'Ow
+about rats?  You know what ladies are; there's one of my
+sisters-in-law, Mrs. William Tebbutts, who'd just scream the 'ouse down
+if she 'eard the 'alf of what was goin' on behind the panelling in my
+room this evening."
+
+"Anyone that's afraid of rats had better keep out of Aussolas," said
+Flurry, getting up with a yawn.
+
+"Mr. Tebbutts is in the James the Second room, isn't he?" said I, idly.
+"Isn't that the room with the powdering-closet off it?"
+
+"It is," said Flurry.  "Anything else you'd like to know?"
+
+I recognised that someone had blundered, presumably myself, and made a
+move for the drawing-room.
+
+Mrs. Knox had retired when we got there; my wife and Mrs. Flurry
+followed suit as soon as might be; and the guest said that, if the
+gentlemen had no objection, he thought he'd turn in too.
+
+Flurry and I shut the windows--fresh air is a foible of the female
+sex--heaped turf on the fire, drew up chairs in front of it, and
+composed ourselves for that sweetest sleep of all, the sleep that has
+in it the bliss of abandonment, and is made almost passionate by the
+deep underlying knowledge that it can be but temporary.
+
+How long we had slumbered I cannot say; it seemed but a moment when a
+door opened in our dreams, and the face of Mr. Tebbutts was developed
+before me in the air like the face of the Cheshire cat, only without
+the grin.
+
+"Mr. Knox!  Gentlemen!" he began, as if he were addressing a meeting.
+The thunder had left his voice; he stopped to take breath.  He was in
+his shirt and trousers, and the laces of his boots trailed on the floor
+behind him.  "I've 'ad a bit of a start upstairs.  I was just winding
+up my watch at the dressing-table when I saw some kind of an animal
+gloide past the fireplace and across the room----"
+
+"What was it like?" interrupted Flurry, sitting up in his chair.
+
+"Well, Mr. Knox, it's 'ard to say what it was like.  It wasn't a cat,
+nor yet it wasn't what you could call a squirrel----"
+
+Flurry got on to his feet.
+
+"By the living Jingo!" he said, turning to me an awestruck countenance;
+"he's seen the Aussolas Martin Cat!"
+
+I had never before heard of the Aussolas Martin Cat, and it is
+indisputable that a slight chill crept down my backbone.
+
+Mr. Tebbutts' eyes bulged more than ever, and his lower lip fell.
+
+"What way did it go?" said Flurry; "did it look at you?"
+
+"It seemed to disappear in that recess by the door," faltered the seer
+of the vision; "it just vanished!"
+
+"I don't know if it's for my grandmother or for me," said Flurry in a
+low voice, "but it's a death in the house anyway."
+
+The colour in Mr. Tebbutts' face deepened to a glossy sealing-wax red.
+
+"If one of you gents would come upstairs with me," he said, "I think
+I'll just get my traps together.  I can be back at the 'otel in 'alf an
+'our----"
+
+Flurry and I accompanied Mr. Tebbutts to the James the Second room.
+Over Mrs. Knox's door there were panes of glass, and light came forth
+from them.  (It is my belief that Mrs. Knox never goes to bed.)  We
+trod softly as we passed it, and went along the uncarpeted boards of
+the Musicians' Gallery above the entrance hall.
+
+There certainly was a peculiar odour in the James the Second room, and
+the adjective "charnel-'ouse" had not been misapplied.
+
+I thought about a dead rat, and decided that the apparition had been
+one of the bandit tribe of tawny cats that inhabited the Aussolas
+stables.  And yet legends of creatures that haunted old houses and
+followed old families came back to me; of one in particular, a tale of
+medieval France, wherein "a yellow furry animal" ran down the throat of
+a sleeping lady named Sagesse.
+
+Mr. Tebbutts, by this time fully dressed, was swiftly bestowing a brush
+and comb in his knapsack.  Perhaps he, too, had read the legend about
+Madame Sagesse.  Flurry was silently, and with a perturbed countenance,
+examining the room; rapping at the panelling and peering up the
+cavernous chimney; I heard him sniff as he did so.  Possibly he also
+held the dead-rat theory.  He opened the flap in the door of the
+powdering-closet, and, striking a match, held it through the opening.
+I looked over his shoulder, and had a glimpse of black feathers on the
+floor, and a waft of a decidedly "charnel-'ouse" nature.  "Damn!"
+muttered Flurry to himself, and slammed down the flap.
+
+"I think, sir," said Mr. Tebbutts, with his knapsack in his hand and
+his cap on his head, "I must ask you to let Mrs. Knox know that this
+'ouse won't suit Mrs. William Tebbutts.  You might just say I was
+called away rather sudden.  Of course, you won't mention what I saw
+just now--I wouldn't wish to upset the pore old lady----"
+
+We followed him from the room, and treading softly as before, traversed
+the gallery, and began to descend the slippery oak stairs.  Flurry was
+still looking furtively about him, and the thought crossed my mind that
+in the most hard-headed Irishman there wanders a vein of superstition.
+
+Before we had reached the first landing, the violent ringing of a
+handbell broke forth in the room with the light over the door, followed
+by a crash of fire-irons; then old Mrs. Knox's voice calling
+imperatively for Mullins.
+
+There was a sound of rushing, slippered feet, a bumping of furniture;
+with a squall from Mullins the door flew open, and I was endowed with a
+never-to-be-forgotten vision of Mrs. Knox, swathed in hundreds of
+shawls, in the act of hurling the tongs at some unseen object.
+
+Almost simultaneously there was a scurry of claws on the oak floor
+above us, Mrs. Knox's door was slammed, and something whizzed past me.
+I am thankful to think that I possess, as a companion vision to that of
+Mrs. Knox, the face of Mr. Tebbutts with the candle light on it as he
+looked up from the foot of the stairs and saw the Aussolas Martin Cat
+in his track.
+
+"Look out, Tebbutts!" yelled Flurry.  "It's you he's after!"
+
+Mr. Tebbutts here passed out of the incident into the night, and the
+Aussolas Martin Cat was swallowed up by a large hole in the surbase in
+the corner of the first landing.
+
+"He'll come out in the wine-cellar," said Flurry, with the calm that
+was his in moments of crisis, "the way the cat did."
+
+I pulled myself together.
+
+"What's happened to the other Fanaghy cub?" I enquired with, I hope,
+equal calmness.
+
+"He's gone to blazes," replied Flurry; "there isn't a wall in this
+house that hasn't a way in it.  I knew I'd never have luck with them
+after you asking the way from Kitty the Shakes."
+
+As is usual in my dealings with Flurry, the fault was mine.
+
+While I reflected on this, the stillness of the night was studded in a
+long and diminishing line by the running pant of the motor-bicycle.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE FINGER OF MRS. KNOX
+
+A being stood in a dark corner under the gallery of the hall at
+Aussolas Castle; a being who had arrived noiselessly on bare feet, and
+now revealed its presence by hard breathing.
+
+"Come in, Mary," commanded old Mrs. Knox without turning her head;
+"make up the fire."
+
+"I will, ma'am," murmured the being, advancing with an apologetic eye
+upon me, and an undulating gait suggestive of a succession of incipient
+curtsies.
+
+She was carrying an armful of logs, and, having stacked them on the
+fire in a heap calculated to set alight any chimney less roomy than the
+Severn Tunnel, she retired by way of the open hall door with the same
+deferential stealth with which she had entered.
+
+"The hen-woman," explained Mrs. Knox casually, "the only person in this
+place who knows a dry log from a wet one."
+
+Like all successful rulers, Mrs. Knox had the power of divining in her
+underlings their special gifts, and of wresting them to the sphere in
+which they shone, no matter what their normal functions might be.  She
+herself pervaded all spheres.
+
+"There's no pie but my grandmother has a finger in it," was Flurry
+Knox's epitome of these high qualities; a sour tribute from one
+freebooter to another.
+
+"If the Mistress want a thing she mus' have it!" was the comment of
+John Kane, the gamekeeper, as he threw down the spade with which he was
+digging out a ferret, and armed himself with a holly-bush wherewith to
+sweep the drawing-room chimney.
+
+As Mrs. Knox and I sat by the hen-woman's noble fire, and gossiped, the
+cook panted in with the tea-tray; the butler, it appeared, had gone out
+to shoot a rabbit for dinner.  All these things pointed to the fact
+that Mrs. Knox's granddaughter-in-law, Mrs. Flurry, was not, at the
+moment, in residence at Aussolas.  The Jungle was creeping in; Sally
+Knox, by virtue, I suppose, of her English mother, spasmodically
+endeavoured to keep it out, but with her departure the Wild triumphed.
+
+It was an October afternoon, grey and still; the hall door stood open,
+as indeed it always did at Aussolas, and on the topmost of the broad
+limestone steps Mrs. Knox's white woolly dog sat, and magisterially
+regarded lake and wood and lawn.  The tawny bracken flowed like a sea
+to the palings that bounded the lawn; along its verge squatted the
+rabbits, motionless for the most part, sometimes languidly changing
+their ground, with hops like the dying efforts of a mechanical toy.
+The woolly dog had evidently learned in many fruitless charges the
+futility of frontal attack; a close and menacing supervision from the
+altitude of the steps was all that was consistent with dignity, but an
+occasional strong shudder betrayed his emotion.  The open door framed
+also a pleasing view of my new car, standing in beautiful repose at the
+foot of the steps, splashed with the mud of a twenty-mile run from an
+outlying Petty Sessions Court; her presence added, for me, the touch of
+romance.
+
+It was twilight in the back of the hall by the fireplace; the flames of
+the logs, branching like antlers, made a courteous and not too
+searching inquisition into dark corners, and lighted with a very
+suitable evasiveness Mrs. Knox's Witch of Endor profile.  She wore her
+usual velvet bonnet; the rest of her attire recalled to my memory the
+summary of it by her kinswoman, Lady Knox, "A rag bag held together by
+diamond brooches."  Yet, according to her wont, her personality was the
+only thing that counted; it reduced all externals to a proper
+insignificance.
+
+The object of my visit had ostensibly been to see her grandson, but
+Flurry was away for the night.
+
+"He's sleeping at Tory Lodge," said Mrs. Knox.  "He's cubbing at
+Drumvoortneen, and he has to start early.  He tried to torment me into
+allowing him to keep the hounds in the yard here this season, but I had
+the pleasure of telling him that old as I might be, I still retained
+possession of my hearing, my sense of smell, and, to a certain extent,
+of my wits."
+
+"I should have thought," I said discreetly, "that Tory Lodge was more
+in the middle of his country."
+
+"Undoubtedly," replied Flurry's grandmother; "but it is not in the
+middle of my straw, my meal, my buttermilk, my firewood, and anything
+else of mine that can be pilfered for the uses of a kennel!"  She
+concluded with a chuckle that might have been uttered by a scald-crow.
+
+I was pondering a diplomatic reply, when the quiet evening was rent by
+a shrill challenge from the woolly dog.
+
+"Thy sentinel am I!" he vociferated, barking himself backwards into the
+hall, in proper strategic retreat upon his base.
+
+A slow foot ascended the steps, and the twilight in the hall deepened
+as a man's figure appeared in the doorway; a middle-aged man, with his
+hat in one hand, and in the other a thick stick, with which he was
+making respectfully intimidating demonstrations to the woolly dog.
+
+"Who are you?" called out Mrs. Knox from her big chair.
+
+"I'm Casey, your ladyship," replied the visitor in a deplorable voice,
+"from Killoge."
+
+"Cornelius Casey?" queried Mrs. Knox.
+
+"No, but his son, your honour ma'am, Stephen Casey, one of the tenants."
+
+"Well, come in, Stephen," said Mrs. Knox affably, supplementing her
+spectacles with a gold-rimmed single eye-glass, and looking at him with
+interest.  "I knew your father well in old times, when he used to stop
+the earths in Killoge Wood for the Colonel.  They tell me that's all
+cut down now?"
+
+"There's not the boiling of a kettle left in it afther Goggin, my
+lady!" said Casey eagerly.  Mrs. Knox cut him short.
+
+"Many a good hunt the Colonel had out of Killoge, and I too, for the
+matter of that!" she added, turning to me; "my cousin Bessie Hamilton
+and I were the only huntresses in the country in those days, and people
+thought us shocking tomboys, I believe.  Now, what with driving motors
+and riding astride, the gentlemen are all ladies, and the ladies are
+gentlemen!"  With another scald-crow chuckle she turned to Casey.  "Did
+your father ever tell you of the great hunt out of Killoge into the
+Fanaghy cliffs?"
+
+"He did, your ladyship, he did!" responded Casey, with a touch of life
+in his lamentable voice.  "Often he told me that it knocked fire from
+his eyes to see yourself facing in at the Killoge river."
+
+"I was riding Bijou, the grandmother of old Trinket, in that run," said
+Mrs. Knox, leaning back in her chair, with a smile that had something
+of the light of other days in it.
+
+I remembered the story that Colonel Knox had run away with her after a
+hunt, and wondered if that had been the occasion when she had knocked
+fire from the eyes of Cornelius Casey.
+
+Her thin old hand drooped in momentary languor over the arm of her
+chair; and the woolly dog thrust his nose under it, with a beady eye
+fixed upon the hot cakes.
+
+"Here!" said Mrs. Knox, sitting up, and throwing a buttery bun on the
+floor.  "Be off with you!  Well, Casey," she went on, "what is it you
+want with me?"
+
+"Great trouble I got, Mrs. Knox, your honour ma'am," replied Casey from
+the door-mat, "great trouble entirely."  He came a step or two nearer.
+He had a long, clean-shaved face, with mournful eyes, like a sick
+bloodhound, and the enviable, countryman's thatch of thick, strong
+hair, with scarcely a touch of grey in it.
+
+"That Goggin, that has the shop at Killoge Cross, has me processed.
+I'm pairsecuted with him; and the few little bastes I has, and me
+donkey and all--" his voice thinned to a whimper, "he's to drive them
+to-morrow----"
+
+"I suppose that's Goggin, the Gombeen?" said Mrs. Knox; "how were you
+fool enough to get into dealings with him?"
+
+The statement of Casey's wrongs occupied quite ten minutes, and was
+generous in detail.  His land was bad, ever and always.  The grass that
+was in it was as bare as that you could pick pins in it.  He had no
+pushing land at all for cattle.  Didn't he buy a heifer at Scabawn fair
+and the praisings she got was beyant all raves, and he had her one
+month, and kinder company he never had, and she giving seven pints at
+every meal, and wasn't that the divil's own produce?  One month,
+indeed, was all he had her till she got a dropsy, and the dropsy
+supported her for a while, and when it left her she faded away.  And
+didn't his wife lose all her hens in one week?  "They fell dead on her,
+like hailstones!"  He ceased, and a tear wandered down the channels in
+his long cheek.
+
+"How much do you owe Goggin?" asked Mrs. Knox sharply.
+
+What Casey owed to Goggin had, as might have been expected, but a
+remote relation to the sum that Goggin was now endeavouring to extract
+from Casey.  At the heart of the transaction was a shop account,
+complicated by loans of single pounds (and in my mind's eye I could
+see, and with my mind's nose I could smell, the dirty crumpled notes).
+It was further entangled by per-contra accounts of cribs of turf,
+scores of eggs, and a day's work now and again.  I had, from the
+judgment seat, listened to many such recitals, so, apparently, had Mrs.
+Knox, judging by the ease with which she straightened Casey's devious
+narrative at critical points, and shepherded him to his facts, like a
+cunning old collie steering a sheep to its pen.  The conclusion of the
+matter was that Goggin was, on the morrow, to take possession of
+Casey's remaining stock, consisting of three calves, a donkey, and a
+couple of goats, in liquidation of a debt of £15, and that he, Stephen
+Casey, knew that Mrs. Knox would never be satisfied to see one of her
+own tenants wronged.
+
+"I have no tenants," replied Mrs. Knox tartly; "the Government is your
+landlord now, and I wish you joy of each other!"
+
+"Then I wish to God it was yourself we had in it again!" lamented
+Stephen Casey; "it was better for us when the gentry was managing their
+own business.  They'd give patience, and they'd have patience."
+
+"Well, that will do now," said Mrs. Knox; "go round to the servants'
+hall and have your tea.  I'll see what I can do."
+
+There was silence while Stephen Casey withdrew.  As the sound of his
+hobnailed tread died away the woolly dog advanced very stiffly to the
+hall door, and, with his eyes fixed on the departing visitor, licked
+his lips hungrily.
+
+"When those rascals in Parliament took our land from us," said Mrs.
+Knox, flinging a sod of turf on to the huge fire with practised aim,
+"we thought we should have some peace, now we're both beggared and
+bothered!"  She turned upon me a countenance like that of an ancient
+and spectacled falcon.  "Major Yeates!  You have often offered me a
+drive in your motor-car.  Will you take me to Killoge to-morrow
+morning?"
+
+It was a brisk and windy morning, with the sharpness of 9 A.M. in it,
+when Mullins, Mrs. Knox's tirewoman, met me at the hall door of
+Aussolas with her arms full of shawls, and a countenance dark with doom
+and wrath.  She informed me that it was a shame for me to be enticing
+the Mistress out of her bed at this hour of the morning, and that she
+would get her death out of it.  I was repudiating this soft impeachment
+(which had indeed some flavour of the Restoration drama about it), when
+the companion of my flight appeared.
+
+"How would anyone know the minute--" continued Mullins, addressing the
+universe, "that this what's-this-I'll-call-it wouldn't turn into a
+bog-hole?"  She put this conundrum while fiercely swaddling her
+mistress in cloak upon cloak.  I attempted no reply, and Mrs. Knox,
+winking both eyes at me over the rim of the topmost shawl, was hoisted
+into the back of the car; as we glided away I had, at all events, the
+consolation of knowing that, in the event of an accident, Mrs. Knox in
+her cloaks would float from the car as softly and bulkily as a bumble
+bee.
+
+As we ran out of the gates on to the high road I remembered that my
+passenger's age was variously reckoned at from ninety to a hundred, and
+thought it well to ask her if fifteen miles an hour would be too fast
+for pleasure.
+
+"You can't go too fast to please me," replied Mrs. Knox, through the
+meshes of a Shetland shawl.  "When I was a girl I rode a fourteen-hand
+pony to the fourteenth milestone on the Cork road in a minute under the
+hour!  I think you should be able to double that!"
+
+I replied to this challenge with twenty miles an hour, which, with a
+head wind and a bad road, I considered to be fast enough for any old
+lady.  As a matter of fact it was too fast for her costume.  We had run
+some eight or nine miles before, looking back, I noticed that a change
+of some sort had occurred.
+
+"Oh, the red one blew away long ago!" screamed Mrs. Knox against the
+wind; "it doesn't matter, I shall get it back--I'll ask Father Scanlan
+to speak about it at Mass next Sunday.  There's a veil gone too--how
+frantic Mullins will be!"
+
+A skirl of laughter came from the recesses of the remaining shawls.
+
+We were running now on a level road under the lee of a long line of
+hills; a strip of plantation, gay with the yellows and greens of
+autumn, clung to a steep slope ahead of us, and, at the top of it, some
+ragged pines looked like blots against the sky.  As we neared it, a
+faint and long-drawn call came from the height; presently among the
+tree-trunks we saw hounds, like creatures in a tapestry hunting scene,
+working up and up through the brown undergrowth.  I slackened speed.
+
+"'Pon my honour, we've hit off the Hunt!" exclaimed Mrs. Knox.
+
+As she spoke there was a responsive yelp from a tract of briars in the
+lower part of the wood; two or three couples jostled downwards to their
+comrade, and a full chorus, led by the soprano squeals of the Hunt
+terrier, arose and streamed along the wood above the road.  I came to a
+full stop, and, just in front of us, a rabbit emerged very quietly from
+the fence of the wood, crept along in the ditch, and disappeared in a
+hole in the bank.  The hounds still uttered the classic pæans of the
+Chase; hoofs clattered in a steep lane on the hill-side, and Flurry
+Knox charged on to the road a little ahead of us.
+
+"Forrad, forrad, forrad!" he shouted as he came.
+
+"Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit!" cackled his grandmother at him in malevolent
+imitation.
+
+I let the car go, and as we flew past him he asked me, sideways out of
+a very red face, what the devil I was doing there.  It was evident that
+Mrs. Knox's observation had been accepted in the spirit in which it was
+offered.
+
+"That will do my young gentleman no harm!" said Mrs. Knox complacently,
+as we became a speck in the distance.
+
+It was about ten o'clock when we ran down a valley between steep hills
+to Killoge cross-roads.  The hill-sides were set thick with tree
+stumps, like the crowded headstones of a cemetery, with coarse grass
+and briars filling the spaces between them.  Here and there a slender,
+orphaned ash sapling, spared because despised, stood among the havoc,
+and showed with its handful of yellow leaves what the autumn colours
+might once have been here.  A starkly new, cemented public-house, with
+"J. Goggin" on the name board, stood at the fork of the roads.
+Doubtless into it had flowed the blood-money of the wood; it
+represented the alternative offered to the community by Mr. Goggin.  I
+slowed up and looked about me.
+
+"I suppose this is--or was--Killoge Wood?" I said to my passenger.
+
+Mrs. Knox was staring through her spectacles at the devastated
+hill-side.
+
+"Ichabod, Ichabod!" she murmured, and leaned back in her place.
+
+A man got up from a heap of stones by the roadside and came slowly
+towards the car.
+
+"Well, Stephen," began Mrs. Knox irritably, "what about the cattle?  He
+looks as if he were walking behind his own coffin!" she continued in a
+loud aside to me.
+
+Stephen Casey removed his hat, and with it indicated a group composed
+of three calves--and nothing can look as dejected as an ill-fed,
+under-bred calf--two goats, and a donkey, attended by a boy with a
+stick, and a couple of cur dogs.
+
+"Himself and the sheriff's man is after driving them, my lady," replied
+their proprietor, and proceeded to envelop the name of Goggin in a
+flowing mantle of curses.
+
+"There, that will do for the present," said Mrs. Knox peremptorily, as
+Casey, with tears streaming down his face, paused to catch his wind.
+"Where's Goggin?"
+
+"The two of them is inside in the shop," answered the miserable Casey,
+still weeping copiously.
+
+I drove over to the public-house, thinking that if Casey could not put
+up a better fight than this it would be difficult to do much for him.
+The door of the pub was already filled by the large and decent figure
+of Mr. Goggin, who advanced to meet us, taking off his hat
+reverentially; I remembered at once his pale and pimpled face, his pink
+nose, his shabby grey and yellow beard.  He had been before me in a
+matter of selling drink on Sunday, and had sailed out of court in
+stainless triumph, on sworn evidence that he was merely extending
+hospitality to some friends that had come to make a match for a niece
+of his own, and were tired after walking the land and putting a price
+on the cattle.
+
+"Well, Goggin," said Mrs. Knox, waving towards the hill-side a tiny
+hand in a mouldy old black kid glove, "you've done a great work here!
+You've destroyed in six months what it took the Colonel and the Lord
+Almighty eighty years to make.  That's something to be proud of!"
+
+Goggin, again, and with even deeper reverence, removed his hat, and
+murmured something about being a poor man.
+
+"It was your own grandfather that planted those trees for the Colonel,"
+continued Mrs. Knox, diving, as it were, into an ancient armoury and
+snatching a rusty weapon from the wall.
+
+"That's the case, ma'am," replied Mr. Goggin solemnly.  "The Lord have
+mercy on his soul!"
+
+"You'll be wanting mercy on your own soul in the next world, if you
+meet the Colonel there!" said Mrs. Knox unhesitatingly.
+
+"I mightn't have the honour of meeting the Colonel there, ma'am!"
+tittered Goggin sycophantically.
+
+"You might not indeed," responded Mrs. Knox, "but you might find your
+grandfather making up a good fire for you with the logs out of Killoge
+Wood!"
+
+"Ha, ha!  That's good, faith!" said a fat voice from the
+porter-flavoured depths of the pub.  I recognised among other half-seen
+faces the round cheeks and bristling moustache of little M'Sweeny, the
+sheriff's officer, at Goggin's elbow.
+
+"And what's this I hear about Stephen Casey?" went on Mrs. Knox, in
+shrill and trenchant tones, delivering her real attack now that she had
+breached the wall.  "You lent him five pounds two years ago, and now
+you're driving all his stock off!  What do you call that, I'd thank you
+to tell me?"
+
+In the discussion that followed I could almost have been sorry for
+Goggin, so entirely over-weighted was he by Mrs. Knox's traditional
+prestige, by my official position, by knowledge of the unseen audience
+in the pub, and by the inherent rottenness of his case.  Nevertheless,
+the defence put forward by him was a very creditable work of art.  The
+whole affair had its foundation in a foolish philanthropy, the outcome
+of generous instincts exploited to their utmost, only, indeed, kept
+within bounds by Mr. Goggin's own financial embarrassments.  These he
+primarily referred back to the excessive price extorted from him by
+Mrs. Knox's agent for the purchase of his land under the Act; and
+secondarily to the bad debts with which Stephen Casey and other
+customers had loaded him in their dealings with his little shop.  There
+were moments when I almost had to accept Mr. Goggin's point of view, so
+well-ordered and so mildly stated were his facts.  But Mrs. Knox's
+convictions were beyond and above any possibility of being shaken by
+mere evidence; she has often said to me that if all justice magistrates
+were deaf there would be more done.  She herself was not in the least
+deaf, but she knew Mr. Goggin, which did as well.
+
+"Fifteen pounds worth of stock to pay a debt that was never more than
+£7!  What do you call that, Major Yeates?"
+
+She darted the question at me.
+
+I had, some little time before, felt my last moment of sympathy with
+Goggin expire, and I replied with considerable heat that, if Mrs. Knox
+would forgive my saying so, I called it damned usury.
+
+From this point the Affaire Casey went out swiftly on an ebb tide.  It
+was insinuated by someone, M'Sweeny, I think, that an instalment of
+five pounds might be accepted, and the eyes of Goggin turned,
+tentatively, to Mrs. Knox.  It has always been said of that venerable
+warrior that if there were a job to be done for a friend she would work
+her fingers to the bone, but she would never put them in her pocket.  I
+observed that the eye of Goggin, having failed in its quest of hers,
+was concentrating itself upon me.  The two walls of a corner seemed to
+rise mysteriously on either side of me; I suddenly, and without
+premeditation, found myself promising to be responsible for the five
+pounds.
+
+Before the glow of this impulse had time to be succeeded by its too
+familiar reaction, the broken, yet persistent cry of hounds came to my
+ear.  It advanced swiftly, coming, seemingly, from higher levels, into
+the desolated spaces that had once been Killoge Wood.  From the inner
+depths of Mrs. Knox's wrappings the face of the woolly dog amazingly
+presented itself; from the companion depths of the public-house an
+equally unexpected party of _convives_ burst forth and stood at gaze.
+Mrs. Knox tried to stand up, was borne down by the sheer weight of rugs
+and the woolly dog, glared at me for a tense moment, and hissed,
+"They're coming this way!  Try to get a view!"
+
+Before the words had passed her lips someone in the group at the door
+vociferated, "Look at him above!  Look at him!"
+
+I looked "above," but could see nothing.  Not so the rest of the group.
+
+"Now! look at him going west the rock!  Now!  He's passing the little
+holly-tree--he's over the fence----"
+
+I bore, as I have so often borne, the exasperation of, as it were,
+hearing instead of seeing a cinematograph, but I saw no reason why I
+should submit to the presence of Mr. M'Sweeny, who had sociably sprung
+into the motor beside me in order to obtain a better view.
+
+"Look at him over the wall!" howled the cinematograph.  "Look at the
+size he is!  Isn't he the divil of a sheep!"
+
+It was at this moment that I first caught sight of the fox, about fifty
+yards on the farther side of Casey's assortment of live stock and their
+guardian cur dogs, gliding over the wall like a cat, and slipping away
+up the road.  At this point Mr. M'Sweeny, finding the disadvantage of
+his want of stature, bounded on to the seat beside me and uttered a
+long yell.
+
+"Hi!  At him!  Tiger, good dog!  Hi!  Rosy!"
+
+I cannot now say whether I smote M'Sweeny in the legs before he jumped,
+or if I merely accelerated the act; he appeared to be running before he
+touched the ground, and he probably took it as a send-off, administered
+in irrepressible fellow-feeling.
+
+Tiger and Rosy were already laying themselves out down the road, and
+their yelps streamed back from them like the sparks from an engine.
+The party at the door was suddenly in full flight after them with a
+swiftness and unanimity that again recalled the cinematograph.  They
+caught away with them Stephen Casey and his animals; and I had an
+enlivening glimpse of the donkey at the top of the hunt, braying as it
+went; of Goggin trying in vain to stem the companion flight of the
+calves.  The bend of the road hid them all from us; the thumping of
+heavy feet, the sobbing bray of the donkey, passed rapidly into
+remoteness, and Mrs. Knox and I were left with nothing remaining to us
+of the situation save the well-defined footmarks of M'Sweeny on the
+seat beside me (indelible, as I afterwards discovered).
+
+"Get on, Major Yeates!" screamed Mrs. Knox, above the barking of the
+woolly dog.  "We must see it out!"
+
+I started the car, and just before we in our turn rounded the corner I
+looked back, and saw the leading hounds coming down the hill-side.  I
+slackened and saw them drop into the road and there remain, mystified,
+no doubt, by the astonishing variety of scents, from goat to gombeen
+man, that presented themselves.  Of Flurry and his followers there was
+no sign.
+
+"Get on, get on," reiterated Mrs. Knox, divining, no doubt, my
+feelings; "we shall do no more harm than the rest!"
+
+I gave the car her head, knowing that whatever I did Flurry would have
+my blood.  In less than two minutes we were all but into Stephen
+Casey's goats, who, being yoked together in body but not in spirit,
+required the full width of the road for their argument.  We passed
+Stephen Casey and the gombeen man cornering the disputed calves in the
+sympathetic accord that such an operation demands.  As we neared
+M'Sweeny, who brought up the rear, the body of the hunt, still headed
+by the donkey, swept into a field on the left of the road.  The fox, as
+might have been expected, had passed from the ken of the cur dogs, and
+these, intoxicated by the incitements of their owners, now flung
+themselves, with the adaptability of their kind, into the pursuit of
+the donkey.
+
+I stopped and looked back.  The leading hounds were galloping behind
+the car; I recognised at their heads Rattler and Roman, the puppies I
+had walked, and for a moment was touched by this mark of affection.
+The gratification was brief.  They passed me without a glance, and with
+anticipatory cries of joy flung themselves into the field and joined in
+the chase of the donkey.
+
+"They'll kill him!" exclaimed Mrs. Knox, restraining with difficulty
+the woolly dog; "what good is Flurry that he can't keep with his
+hounds!"
+
+Galloping hoofs on the road behind us clattered a reply, accompanied by
+what I can only describe as imprecations on the horn, and Flurry
+hurtled by and swung his horse into the field over a low bank with all
+the dramatic fury of the hero rushing to the rescue of the leading
+lady.  It recalled the incidents that in the palmy days of the
+Hippodrome gloriously ended in a plunge into deep water, amid a salvo
+of firearms.
+
+In Flurry's wake came the rest of the pack, and with them Dr. Jerome
+Hickey.  "A great morning's cubbing!" he called out, snatching off his
+old velvet cap.  "Thirty minutes with an old fox, and now a nice burst
+with a jackass!"
+
+For the next three or four minutes shrieks, like nothing so much as
+forked lightning, lacerated the air, as the guilty hounds began to
+receive that which was their due.  It seemed possible that my turn
+would come next; I looked about to see what the chances were of turning
+the car and withdrawing as soon as might be, and decided to move on
+down the road in search of facilities.  We had proceeded perhaps a
+hundred yards without improving the situation, when my eye was caught
+by something moving swiftly through the furze-bushes that clothed a
+little hill on the right of the road.  It was brownish red, it slid
+into the deep furze that crested the hill, and was gone.
+
+Here was a heaven-sent peace-offering!
+
+"Tally-ho!" I bellowed, rising in my place and waving my cap high in
+air.  "Tally-ho, over!"
+
+The forked lightning ceased.
+
+"What way is he?" came an answering bellow from Flurry.
+
+"This way, over the hill!"
+
+The hounds were already coming to the holloa.  I achieved some very
+creditable falsetto screeches; I leaped from the car, and cheered and
+capped them over the fence; I shouted precise directions to the Master
+and Whip, who were now, with the clamours proper to their calling,
+steeplechasing into the road and out of it again, followed by two or
+three of the Field, including the new District Inspector of the Royal
+Irish Constabulary (recently come from Meath with a high reputation as
+a goer).  They scrambled and struggled up the hill-side, through rocks
+and furze (in connection with which I heard the new D.I. making some
+strenuous comments to his Meath hunter), the hounds streamed and
+screamed over the ridge of the hill, the riders shoved their puffing
+horses after them, topped it, and dropped behind it.  The furzy skyline
+and the pleasant blue and white sky above it remained serene and silent.
+
+I returned to the car, and my passenger, who, as I now realised, had
+remained very still during these excitements.
+
+"That was a bit of luck!" I said happily, inflated by the sense of
+personal merit that is the portion of one who has viewed a fox away.
+As I spoke I became aware of something fixed in Mrs. Knox's expression,
+something rigid, as though she were repressing emotion; a fear flashed
+through my mind that she was overtired, and that the cry of the hounds
+had brought back to her the days when she too had known what a first
+burst away with a fox out of Killoge Wood had felt like.
+
+"Major Yeates," she said sepulchrally, and yet with some inward thrill
+in her voice, "I think the sooner we start for home the better."
+
+I could not turn the car, but, rather than lose time, I ran it
+backwards towards the cross-roads; it was a branch of the art in which
+I had not become proficient, and as, with my head over my shoulder, I
+dodged the ditches, I found myself continually encountering Mrs. Knox's
+eye, and was startled by something in it that was both jubilant and
+compassionate.  I also surprised her in the act of wiping her eyes.  I
+wondered if she were becoming hysterical, and yearned for Mullins as
+the policeman (no doubt) yearns for the mother of the lost child.
+
+On the road near the public-house we came upon M'Sweeny, Goggin, and
+Casey, obviously awaiting us.  I stopped the car, not without
+reluctance.
+
+"That will be all right, Goggin," said Mrs. Knox airily; "we're in a
+hurry to get home now."
+
+The three protagonists looked at one another dubiously, and
+simultaneously cleared their throats.
+
+"I beg your pardon, Mrs. Knox, ma'am," began Mr. Goggin very
+delicately.  "Mr. M'Sweeny would be thankful to speak a word to you
+before you go."
+
+"Well, let him speak and be quick about it," returned Mrs. Knox, who
+seemed to have recovered remarkably from her moment of emotion.
+
+"You must excuse me, Major Yeates," said Mr. M'Sweeny, chivalrously
+selecting me as the person to whom to present the business end of the
+transaction, "but I'm afraid I must trouble you about that little
+matter of the five pounds that we arranged a while ago--I couldn't go
+back without it was settled----"
+
+Mr. Goggin coughed, and looked at his boots; Stephen Casey sighed
+heavily.
+
+At the same moment I thought I heard the horn.
+
+"I'm afraid I haven't got it with me," I said, pulling out a handful of
+silver and a half-sovereign.  "I suppose eighteen and sixpence wouldn't
+be any use to you?"
+
+Mr. M'Sweeny smiled deprecatingly, as at a passing jest, and again I
+heard the horn, several harsh and prolonged notes.
+
+Mrs. Knox leaned forward and poked me in the back with some violence.
+
+"Goggin will lend it to you," she said, with the splendid simplicity of
+a great mind.
+
+It must be recorded of Goggin that he accepted this singular inversion
+of the position like a gentleman.  We moved on to his house and he went
+in with an excellent show of alacrity to fetch the money wherewith I
+was to stop his own mouth.  It was while we were waiting that a small
+wet collie, reddish-brown in colour, came flying across the road, and
+darted in at the open door of the house.  Its tongue was hanging out,
+it was panting heavily.
+
+"I seen her going over the hill, and the hounds after her; I thought
+she wouldn't go three sthretches before they'd have her cot," said
+M'Sweeny pleasantly.  "But I declare she gave them a nice chase.  When
+she seen the Doctor beating the hounds, that's the time she ran."
+
+I turned feebly in my place and looked at Mrs. Knox.
+
+"It was a very natural mistake," she said, again wiping her eyes; "I
+myself was taken in for a moment--but only for a moment!" she added,
+with abominable glee.
+
+I gave her but one glance, laden with reproach, and turned to M'Sweeny.
+
+"You'll get the five pounds from Goggin," I said, starting the car.
+
+As we ran out of Killoge, at something near thirty miles an hour, I
+heard scald-crow laughter behind me in the shawls.
+
+[Illustration: "I heard scald-crow laughter behind me in the shawls."]
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE FRIEND OF HER YOUTH
+
+It has come to this with me, I am not the country-house visitor that I
+once was.  It is a sign of age, I suppose, and of growing unamiability;
+so, at any rate, my wife tells me.  For my part, I think it indicates a
+power of discriminating between the things that are good enough, and
+the infinitely more numerous things that are the reverse.
+
+"Do you mean to say this isn't good enough?" said Philippa, putting
+down the novel that, at 11 A.M., she was shamelessly reading, and
+indicating our surroundings with a swing of her open parasol.
+
+It was a perfect morning in August.  She and I were seated in
+incredible leisure, in comfortable basket chairs, on a space of sward
+that sank in pleasant curves to the verge of the summer sea.  We looked
+across three miles of burnished water to the Castle Manus hills, that
+showed mistily through grey veils of heat; in the middle distance a
+40-ton cutter yacht drowsed at anchor; at the end of the sward a
+strand, theatrical in the perfection of its pale sand and dark rocks,
+laid itself out to attract the bather.
+
+"I think it is very good," I replied, "but it won't last.  At any
+minute old Derryclare will come and compel me to go out trawling, or
+mending nets, or cutting up bait, or mucking out the dinghey----"
+
+"You may be thankful if he lets you off with that!" said Philippa,
+flitting from her first position and taking up one in advance of mine.
+
+Following the direction of her eyes, I perceived, as it were at the
+back of the stage, two mysterious, shrouded figures pursuing a swift
+course towards the house through a shrubbery of immense hydrangea
+bushes.  Their heads resembled monster black door-handles, round their
+shoulders hung flounces of black muslin; in gauntleted hands they bore
+trays loaded with "sections" of honey; even at a distance of fifty
+yards we could see their attendant _cortège_ of indignant bees.
+
+"Taken thirty pounds this morning!" shouted the leading door-handle,
+speeding towards the house.  "Splendid heather honey!"
+
+"You ought to show some interest," said my wife malignly.  "Go in and
+look at it.  He's your host!"
+
+"Not if he were all the hosts of Midian!" I said, but I felt shaken.
+
+I rose from my chair.
+
+"I'm going to the motor-house," I said firmly.
+
+"Very well, I shall bathe," replied Philippa.
+
+"I suppose you are aware that your old friend, Mr. Chichester, is at
+present in possession of the bathing cove," I returned, "and it might
+be as well to ascertain the opinion of your hostess on the subject of
+mixed bathing."
+
+"Did you observe that Lord Derryclare was wearing your new
+motor-gloves?" said Philippa as I moved away.
+
+I magnanimously left the last word with her.
+
+The Derryclares were in the habit of hurling themselves, at intervals,
+out of civilisation, and into the wilderness, with much the same zest
+with which those who live in the wilderness hurl themselves into
+civilisation.  In the wilderness, twenty miles from a railway station,
+they had built them a nest, and there led that variety of the simple
+life that is founded on good servants, old clothes, and a total
+indifference to weather.  Wandering friends on motor tours swooped
+occasionally out of space; married daughters, with intervals between
+visits to be filled in, arrived without warning, towing reluctant
+husbands (who had been there before).  Lost men, implicated with Royal
+Commissions and Congested Districts, were washed in at intervals; Lady
+Derryclare said she never asked anyone; people came.
+
+It is true that she had asked us, but the invitation had been given on
+our wedding-day, and had been put away with our duplicate wedding
+presents; we had now disinterred it, because I had bought a motor, and
+was still in the stage of enthusiasm when the amateur driver will beat
+up visits for his wife to pay.  I do not know how Chichester got there;
+he, like Lady Derryclare, dated from the benighted period before
+Philippa knew me, and I may admit that, in common with most husbands, I
+am not attracted by the male friends of my wife's youth.  If Chichester
+had been the type she fancied, was I merely a Super-Chichester?
+
+Chichester was an elderly young man, worn smooth by much visiting in
+country houses, and thoroughly competent in the avocations proper to
+his career.  He knew the best "stands" at half the shoots in Ireland,
+and could tell to half a crown the value set upon each by the keeper;
+if you gave him a map he could put a pudgy finger upon the good cooks
+as promptly as an archbishop upon his cathedral towns; he played a
+useful and remunerative game of bridge; to see his eye, critical, yet
+alight with healthful voracity, travelling down the array of dishes on
+the side-table at breakfast, and arranging unhesitatingly the order in
+which they were to be attacked, was a lesson to the heedless who blunt
+the fine edge of appetite with porridge.
+
+He faced me at lunch, plump and pink and shining after his bathe; he
+was clean-shaved (the only reliable remedy for a greying moustache, as
+I did not fail to point out to Philippa); it increased his resemblance
+to a well-fed and _passé_ schoolboy.  Old Derryclare, whose foible it
+was to believe that he never had any luncheon, was standing at the
+sideboard, devouring informally a slice of bread and honey.  One of his
+eyes was bunged up by bee-stings, and the end of his large nose shone
+red from the same cause.
+
+"Bill," he said, addressing his eldest son, "don't you forget to take
+those sections on board this afternoon."
+
+"No fear!" responded Bill, helping himself to a beaker of barley-water
+with hands that bore indelible traces of tar and motor grease.
+
+Bill was a vigorous youth, of the type that I have heard my friend
+Slipper describe as "a hardy young splinter"; he was supposed to be
+preparing for a diplomatic career, and in the meantime was apparently
+qualifying for the engine-room of a tramp steamer (of which, it may be
+added, his father would have made a most admirable skipper).
+
+"Great stuff, honey, with a rice-pudding," went on Bill.  "Mrs. Yeates,
+do you know I can make a topping rice-pudding?"
+
+I noticed that Chichester, who was seated next to Philippa, suddenly
+ceased to chew.
+
+"I can do you a very high-class omelette, too," continued Bill, bashing
+a brutal spoon into the fragile elegance of something that looked as if
+it were made of snow and spun glass.  "I'm not so certain about my
+mutton-chops and beefsteak, but I've had the knives sharpened, anyhow!"
+
+Chichester turned his head away, as from a jest too clownish to be
+worthy of attention.  His cheek was large, and had a tender, beefy
+flush in it.
+
+"In my house," he said to Philippa, "I never allow the knives to be
+sharpened.  If meat requires a sharp knife it is not fit to eat."
+
+"No, of course not!" replied Philippa, with nauseating hypocrisy.
+
+"The principle on which my wife buys meat," I said to the table at
+large, "is to say to the butcher, 'I want the best meat in your shop;
+but don't show it to me!'"
+
+"Mrs. Yeates is quite right," said Chichester seriously; "you should be
+able to trust your butcher."
+
+The door flew open, and Lady Derryclare strode in, wrestling as she
+came with the strings of a painting apron, whose office had been no
+sinecure.  She was tall and grey-haired, and was just sufficiently
+engrossed in her own pursuits to be an attractive hostess.
+
+"It was perfectly lovely out there on the _Sheila_," she said, handing
+the apron to the butler, who removed it from the room with respectful
+disapproval.  "If only she hadn't swung with the tide!  I found my
+sketch had more and more in it every moment--turning into a panorama,
+in fact!  Yachts would be perfect if they had long solid legs and stood
+on concrete."
+
+I said that I thought a small island would do as well.
+
+Lady Derryclare disputed this, and argued that an island would involve
+a garden, whereas the charm of a yacht was that one hideous bunch of
+flowers on the cabin table was all that was expected of it, and that
+kind people ashore always gave it vegetables.
+
+I said that these things did not concern me, as I usually neither
+opened my eyes or touched food while yachting.  I said this very
+firmly, being not without fear that I might yet find myself hustled
+into becoming one of the party that was to go aboard the _Sheila_ that
+very night.  They were to start on the top of the tide, that is to say,
+at 4 A.M. the following morning, to sail round the coast to a bay some
+thirty miles away, renowned for its pollack-fishing, and there to fish.
+Pollack-fishing, as a sport, does not appeal to me; according to my
+experience, it consists in hauling up coarse fish out of deep water by
+means of a hook baited with red flannel.  It might appear
+poor-spirited, even effeminate, but nothing short of a press-gang
+should get me on board the _Sheila_ that night.
+
+"Every expedition requires its martyr," said Lady Derryclare, helping
+herself to some of the best cold salmon it has been my lot to
+encounter, "it makes it so much pleasanter for the others; some one
+they can despise and say funny things about."
+
+"The situation may produce its martyr," I said.
+
+Lady Derryclare glanced quickly at me, and then at Chichester, who was
+now expounding to Philippa the method, peculiar to himself, by which he
+secured mountain mutton of the essential age.
+
+At nine-thirty that night I sat with my hostess and my wife, engaged in
+a domestic game of Poker-patience.  Shaded lights and a softly burning
+turf fire shed a mellow radiance; an exquisite completeness was added
+by a silken rustle of misty rain against the south window.
+
+"Do you think they'll start in this weather?" said Philippa
+sympathetically.
+
+"Seventy-five, and one full house, ten, that's eighty-five," said Lady
+Derryclare abstractedly.  "Start? you may be quite sure they'll start!
+Then we three shall have an empty house.  That ought to count at least
+twenty!"
+
+Lady Derryclare was far too good a hostess not to appreciate the charms
+of solitude; that Philippa and I should be looked upon as solitude was
+soothing to the heart of the guest, the heart that, however good the
+hostess, inevitably conceals some measure of apprehension.
+
+"Has Mr. Chichester been on board the _Sheila_?" I enquired, with
+elaborate unconcern.
+
+"_Never!_" said Lady Derryclare melodramatically.
+
+"I believe he has done some yachting?" I continued.
+
+"A five-hundred-ton steam yacht to the West Indies!" replied Lady
+Derryclare.  "Bathrooms and a _chef_----"
+
+There was a thumping of heavy feet outside the door, and the yacht
+party entered, headed by Lord Derryclare with a lighted lantern.  They
+were clad in oilskins and sou'-westers; Bill had a string of onions in
+one hand and a sponge-bag in the other; Chichester carried a large
+gold-mounted umbrella.
+
+"You look as if you were acting a charade," said Lady Derryclare,
+shuffling the cards for the next game, the game that would take place
+when the pleasure-seekers had gone forth into the rain.  "The word is
+Fare-well, I understand?"
+
+It occurred to me that to fare well was the last thing that Chichester
+was likely to do; and, furthermore, that the same thing had occurred to
+him.
+
+"'Fare thee well, my own Mary Anne!'" sang Lord Derryclare, in a voice
+like a bassoon, and much out of tune.  "It's a dirty night, but the
+glass is rising, and" (here he relapsed again into song) "'We are bound
+for the sea, Mary Anne!  We are bound for the sea!'"
+
+"Then we're to meet you on Friday?" said Philippa, addressing herself
+to Chichester in palpable and egregious consolation.
+
+"Dear lady," replied Chichester tartly, "in the South of Ireland it is
+quite absurd to make plans.  One is the plaything of the climate!"
+
+"All aboard," said Lord Derryclare, with a swing of his lantern.
+
+As they left the room the eye of Bill met mine, not without
+understanding.
+
+"Now D's perfectly happy," remarked Lady Derryclare, sorting her suits;
+"but I'm not quite so sure about the Super-Cargo."
+
+The game progressed pleasantly, and we heard the rain enwrap the house
+softly, as with a mantle.
+
+The next three days were spent in inglorious peace, not to say sloth.
+On one of them, which was wet, I cleared off outstanding letters and
+browsed among new books and innumerable magazines: on the others, which
+were fine, I ran the ladies in the car back into the hills, and
+pottered after grouse with a venerable red setter, while Lady
+Derryclare painted, and Philippa made tea.  When not otherwise
+employed, I thanked heaven that I was not on board the _Sheila_.
+
+On Thursday night came a telegram from the yacht:
+
+
+"Ronnie's flotilla in; luncheon party to-morrow; come early.--BILL."
+
+
+At nine o'clock the next morning we were on the road; there was a light
+northerly breeze, enough to dry the roads and to clear the sky of all
+save a few silver feathers of cloud; the heather was in bloom on the
+hills, the bogs were bronze and green, the mountains behind them were
+as blue as grapes; best of all, the car was running like a saint,
+floating up the minor hills, pounding unfalteringly up the big ones.
+She and I were still in the honeymoon stage, and her most normal
+virtues were to me miraculous; even my two ladies, though, like their
+sex, grossly utilitarian, and incapable, as I did not fail to assure
+them, of appreciating the poesy of mechanism, were complimentary.
+
+In that part of Ireland in which my lot is cast signposts do not exist.
+The residents, very reasonably, consider them to be superfluous, even
+ridiculous, in view of the fact that every one knows the way, and as
+for strangers, "haven't they tongues in their heads as well as
+another?"  It all tends to conversation and an increased knowledge of
+human nature.  Therefore it was that when we had descended from the
+hills, and found ourselves near the head of Dunerris Bay, at a junction
+of three roads, any one of which might have been ours, our only course
+was to pause there and await enlightenment.
+
+It came, plentifully, borne by an outside car, and bestowed by no less
+than four beautifully dressed young ladies.  I alighted and approached
+the outside car, and was instructed by the driver as to the route, an
+intricate one, to Eyries Harbour.  The young ladies offered
+supplementary suggestions; they were mysteriously acquainted with the
+fact that the _Sheila_ was our destination, and were also authorities
+on the movements of that section of the British Navy that was known to
+the family of Sub-Lieutenant the Hon. Ronald Cunningham as "Ronnie's
+Flotilla."
+
+"We met the yacht gentlemen at tea on Mr. Cunningham's torpedo-boat
+yesterday afternoon," volunteered the prettiest of the young ladies,
+with a droop of her eyelashes.
+
+The party then laughed, and looked at each other, as those do who have
+together heard the chimes at midnight.
+
+"Why, we're going to lunch with them to-day at the hotel at Ecclestown!
+And with you, too!" broke in another, with a sudden squeal of laughter.
+
+I said that the prospect left nothing to be desired.
+
+"Mr. Chichester invited us yesterday!" put in a third from the other
+side of the car.
+
+"I don't think it's pollack he'll order for luncheon," said the fourth
+of the party from under the driver's elbow, a flapper, with a slow,
+hoarse voice, and a heavy cold in her head.
+
+"Shut up, Katty, you brat!" said the eldest, with lightning utterance.
+
+The quartette again dissolved into laughter.  I said "Au revoir," and
+withdrew to report progress to my deeply interested passengers.
+
+As the outside car disappeared from view at a corner, the Flapper waved
+a large pocket-handkerchief to me.
+
+"You seem to have done wonderfully well in the time," said Lady
+Derryclare kindly.
+
+For half an hour or more we ran west along the southern shore of the
+great bay; Ecclestown, where Chichester's luncheon-party was to take
+place, was faintly visible on the further side.  So sparkling was the
+sea, so benign the breeze, that even I looked forward without anxiety,
+almost with enjoyment, to the sail across the bay.
+
+There is a bland and peaceful suggestion about the word village that is
+wholly inapplicable to the village of Eyries, a collection of dismal,
+slated cabins, grouped round a public-house, like a company of shabby
+little hens round a shabby and bedraggled cock.  The road that had
+conveyed us to this place of entertainment committed suicide on a weedy
+beach below, its last moments much embittered by chaotic heaps of
+timber, stones, and gravel.  A paternal Board was building a pier, and
+"mountains of gold was flying into it, but the divil a much would ever
+come out of it."
+
+This I was told by the publican as I bestowed the car in an outhouse in
+his yard, wherein, he assured me, "neither chick nor child would find
+it."
+
+The _Sheila_ was anchored near the mouth of the harbour; there was a
+cheerful air of expectancy about her, and her big mainsail was hoisted;
+her punt, propelled by Bill, was already tripping towards us over the
+little waves; the air was salt, and clean, and appetising.  Bill
+appeared to be in robust health; he had taken on a good many extra
+tones of sunburn, and it was difficult, on a cursory inspection, to
+decide where his neck ended and his brown flannel shirt began.
+
+"----Oh, a topping time!" he said, as we moved out over the green,
+clear water, through which glimmered to us the broken pots and pans of
+Eyries that lay below.  "Any amount of fish going.  We've had to give
+away no end."
+
+"I should like to hear what you've been giving Mr. Chichester to eat?"
+said Lady Derryclare suavely.
+
+"Well, there was the leg of mutton that we took with us; he ate that
+pretty well; and a sort of a hash next day, fair to middling."
+
+"And after that?" said his mother, with polite interest.
+
+"Well, after that," said Bill, leaning his elbows on his sculls and
+ticking off the items on his fingers, "we had boiled pollack, and fried
+pollack, and pollack _réchauffé aux fines herbes_--onions, you know----"
+
+Bill broke off artistically, and I recalled to myself a saying of an
+American sage, "Those that go down to the sea in ships see the works of
+the Lord, but those that go down to the sea in cutters see hell."
+
+"He went ashore yesterday," said Bill, resuming his narrative and the
+sculls, "and came aboard with a pig's face and a pot of jam that he got
+at the pub, and I say!--that pig's face!--Phew!  My aunt!"
+
+"'Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been,'" quoted Lady Derryclare.
+
+Philippa shuddered aloud.
+
+"But he's going to come level to-day," went on Bill; "he's standing us
+all lunch at the Ecclestown Hotel, Ronnie's skipper and all.  He spent
+a good half-hour writing out a menu, and Ronnie took it over last
+night.  We had tea on board Ronnie's ship, you know."
+
+We said we knew all about the tea-party and the guests.
+
+"Oh, you do, do you?" said Bill; "then you know a good deal!
+Chichester can tell you a bit more about the dark one if you like to
+ask him!"
+
+"He seems to have outgrown his fancy for fair people," I said.
+
+Philippa put her nose in the air.
+
+"He's gorgeously dressed for the occasion," continued Bill.
+
+"More than you are!" said his mother.
+
+"Oh, my one don't care.  No more does Ronnie's.  What they enjoyed was
+the engine-room."
+
+"It seems to me," said Lady Derryclare to Philippa, "that we are rather
+superfluous to this entertainment."
+
+Chichester stood at the gangway and helped the ladies on to the narrow,
+hog-backed deck of the _Sheila_.  He was indeed beautifully dressed,
+but to the critical eye it seemed that the spotless grey flannel suit
+hung a shade easier, and that the line of his cheek was less freshly
+rounded.  His nose had warmed to a healthful scarlet, but his eye was
+cold, and distinctly bleak.  He was silent, not, it was obvious to me,
+because he had nothing to say, but because he might have more to say
+than would be convenient.  In all senses save the literal one he
+suggested the simple phrase, "Fed up."  I felt for him.  As I saw the
+grim deck-bosses on which we might have to sit, and the dark mouth of
+the cabin in which we might have to eat, and tripped over a rope, and
+grasped at the boom, which yielded instead of supporting me, I thought
+with a lover's ardour of the superiority--whether as means of
+progression or as toy--of the little car, tucked away in the Eyries
+publican's back-yard, where neither chick nor child would find her.
+
+"You ought to have come with us, Yeates," said Derryclare, emerging
+from the companion-hatch with a fishing-line in his hand.  "Great
+sport! we got a hundred and fifty yesterday--beats trout-fishing!
+Doesn't it, Chichester?"
+
+Chichester smiled sarcastically and looked at his watch.
+
+"Quite right," said his lordship, twisting his huge hairy paw, and
+consulting the nickel time-keeper on his wrist.  "Time to be
+off--mustn't keep our young ladies waiting.  We'll slip across in no
+time with this nice breeze.  Regular ladies' day.  Now then, Bill! get
+that fores'l on her--we'll up anchor and be off!"
+
+There are few places in creation where the onlooker can find himself
+more painfully and perpetually _de trop_ than on the deck of a small
+yacht.  I followed the ladies to the saloon.  Chichester remained on
+deck.  As I carefully descended the companion-ladder I saw him looking
+again at his watch, and from it across the bay to the hazy white
+specks, some four miles away, in one of which assiduous waiters were
+even now, it might be, setting forth the repast that was to indemnify
+him for three days of pollack.
+
+"P'ff; I wonder if they ever open the windows," said Lady Derryclare,
+fitting herself skilfully into the revolving chair at the end of the
+cabin table.  "Do sit down--these starting operations are always
+lengthy."
+
+I took my seat, that is to say, I began to sit down in the air, well
+outside the flap of the table, and gradually inserted myself underneath
+it.  The bunch of flowers, foretold by Lady Derryclare, confronted us,
+packed suffocatingly into its vase, and even the least astute of the
+party (I allude to myself) was able unhesitatingly to place it as an
+attention from the fair ones of the outside car.  Behind my shoulders,
+a species of trough filled the interval between the back of the seat
+and the sloping side of the yacht; in it lay old tweed caps, old
+sixpenny magazines, field-glasses, cans of tobacco, and a well-worn box
+of "Patience" cards.  Above and behind it a rack made of netting was
+darkly charged with signal-flags, fishing-rods, and minor offal.
+
+"Think of them all, smoking here on a wet night," said Lady Derryclare
+with abhorrence; "with the windows shut and no shade on the lamp!  Let
+nothing tempt any of you to open the pantry door; we might see the
+pig's face.  Unfortunate George Chichester!"
+
+"I shouldn't pity him too much," said I.  "I expect he wouldn't take
+five pounds for his appetite this moment!"
+
+The rhythmic creak of the windlass told that the anchor was coming up.
+It continued for some moments, and then stopped abruptly.
+
+"Now then, all together!" said Lord Derryclare's voice.
+
+A pause, punctuated by heavy grunts of effort--then Bill's voice.
+
+"What the blazes is holding it?  Come on, Chichester, and put your back
+into it!"
+
+Chichester's back, ample as it would seem, had no appreciable effect on
+the situation.
+
+"You ought to go and help them, Sinclair," said my wife, with that
+readiness to offer a vicarious sacrifice that is so characteristic of
+wives.
+
+I said I would wait till I was asked.  I had not to wait long.
+
+I took my turn at the warm handle-bar of the windlass, and grunted and
+strove as strenuously as my predecessors.  The sun poured down in
+undesired geniality, the mainsail lurched and flapped; the boom tugged
+at its tether; the water jabbered and gurgled past the bows.
+
+"I think we're in the _consommé_!" remarked Bill, putting his hands in
+his pockets.
+
+"Here," said Lord Derryclare, with a very red face; "confound her!
+we'll sail her off it!"
+
+Chichester sat down in a deck-chair as remote as possible from his
+kind, and once again consulted his watch.  Bill took the tiller; ropes
+were hauled, slacked, made fast; the boom awoke to devastating life;
+the _Sheila_ swung, tilted over to the breeze, and made a rush for
+freedom.  The rush ended in a jerk, the anchor remained immovable, and
+the process was repeated in the opposite direction, with a vigour that
+restored Chichester abruptly to the bosom of society--in point of fact,
+my bosom.  He said nothing, or at least nothing to signify, as I
+assisted him to rise, but I felt as if I were handling a live shell.
+
+During the succeeding quarter of an hour the _Sheila_, so it seemed to
+my untutored mind, continued to sail in tangents towards all the points
+of the compass, and at the end of each tangent was brought up with an
+uncompromising negative from the anchor.  By that time my invariable
+yacht-headache was established, and all the other men in the ship were
+advancing, at a varying rate of progress, into a frame of mind that
+precluded human intercourse, and was entirely removed from perceiving
+any humour in the situation.
+
+Through all these affairs the sound of conversation ascended steadily
+through the main-hatch.  Lady Derryclare and my wife were playing
+Patience in the cabin, and were at the same time discussing intricate
+matters in connection with District Nurses, with that strange power of
+doing one thing and talking about another that I have often noticed in
+women.  It was at about this period that the small, rat-like head of
+Bill's kitchen-maid, Jimmy, appeared at the fore-hatch (accompanied by
+a reek of such potency that I immediately assigned it to the pig's
+face), and made the suggestion about the Congested Diver.  That the
+Diver, however congested, was a public official, engaged at the moment
+in laying the foundations of the Eyries Pier, did not, this being
+Ireland, complicate the situation.  The punt, with Bill, hot and
+taciturn, in the stern, sprang forth on her errand, smashing and
+bouncing through the sharpened edges of the little waves.  As I faced
+that dainty and appetising breeze, I felt the first pang of the same
+hunger that was, I knew, already gnawing Chichester like a wolf.
+
+"We must have fouled some old moorings," said Derryclare, coming up
+from the cabin, with a large slice of bread and honey in his hand, and
+an equanimity somewhat restored by a working solution of the problem.
+"Damn nuisance, but it can't be helped.  Better get something to eat,
+Chichester; you won't get to Ecclestown before three o'clock at the
+best."
+
+"No, thank you," said Chichester, without raising his eyes from the
+four-day-old paper that he was affecting to read.
+
+I strolled discreetly away, and again looked down through the skylight
+into the cabin.  The ladies were no longer there, and, in defiance of
+all nautical regulations, a spirit-lamp with a kettle upon it was
+burning on the table, a sufficient indication to a person of my
+experience that Philippa and Lady Derryclare had abandoned hope of the
+Ecclestown lunch and were making tea.  The prospect of something to
+eat, of any description, was not unpleasing; in the meantime I took the
+field-glasses, and went forward to follow, pessimistically, the
+progress of the punt in its search for the Diver.
+
+There was no one on the pier.  Bill landed, went up the beach, and was
+lost to sight in the yard of the public-house.
+
+"It must be he's at his dinner," said Jimmy at my elbow, descrying
+these movements with a vision that appeared to be equal to mine plus
+the field-glasses.  There was an interval, during which I transferred
+my attention to Ecclestown; its white hotel basked in sunshine, settled
+and balmy, as of the land of Beulah.  Its comfortable aspect suggested
+roast chicken, tingling glasses of beer, even of champagne.  A
+torpedo-boat, with a thread of smoke coming quietly from its foremost
+funnel, lay in front of the hotel.  It seemed as though it were
+enjoying an after-luncheon cigarette.
+
+"They're coming out now!" said Jimmy, with excitement; "it must be they
+were within in the house looking at the motor."
+
+I turned the field-glasses on Eyries; a fair proportion of its
+population was emerging from the yard of the public-house, and the
+length to which their scientific interest had carried them formed a
+pleasing subject for meditation.
+
+"There's the ha'past-one mail-car coming in," said Jimmy; "it's likely
+he'll wait for the letters now."
+
+The mirage of the Ecclestown lunch here melted away, as far as I was
+concerned, and with a resignation perfected in many Petty Sessions
+courts, I turned my appetite to humbler issues.  To those who have
+breakfasted at eight, and have motored over thirty miles of moorland,
+tea and sardines at two o'clock are a mere affair of outposts, that
+leave the heart of the position untouched.  Yet a temporary glow of
+achievement may be attained by their means, and the news brought back
+by Bill, coupled with a fresh loaf, that the Diver was coming at once,
+flattered the hope that the game was still alive.  Bill had also
+brought a telegram for Chichester.
+
+"Who has the nerve to tell Mr. Chichester that there's something to eat
+here?" said Lady Derryclare, minutely examining the butter.
+
+"Philippa is obviously indicated," I said malignly.  "She is the Friend
+of his Youth!"
+
+"You're all odious," said Philippa, sliding from beneath the flap of
+the table with the light of the lion-tamer in her eye.
+
+What transpired between her and the lion we shall never know.  She
+returned almost immediately, with a heightened colour, and the
+irrelevant information that the Diver had come on board.  The news had
+the lifting power of a high explosive.  We burst from the cabin and
+went on deck as one man, with the exception of my wife, who, with a
+forethought that did her credit, turned back to improvise a cosy for
+the teapot.
+
+The Diver was a large person, of few words, with a lowering brow and a
+heavy moustache.  He did not minimise the greatness of his
+condescension in coming aboard the yacht; he listened gloomily to the
+explanations of Lord Derryclare.  At the conclusion of the narrative he
+moved in silence to the bows and surveyed the situation.  His boat,
+containing the apparatus of his trade, was alongside; a stalwart
+underling, clad in a brown jersey, sat in the bows; in the stern was
+enthroned the helmet, goggling upon us like a decapitated motorist.  It
+imparted a thrill that I had not experienced since I read Jules Verne
+at school.
+
+"Here, Jeremiah," said the Diver.
+
+The satellite came on deck with the single sinuous movement of a salmon.
+
+The Diver motioned him to the windlass.  "We'll take a turn at this
+first," he said.
+
+They took each a handle, they bent to their task, and the anchor rose
+at their summons like a hot knife out of butter.
+
+Every man present, with the exception of the Diver and the satellite,
+made the simple declaration that he was damned, and it was in the
+period of paralysis following on this that a fresh ingredient was added
+to the situation.
+
+A giant voice filled the air, and in a windy bellow came the words:
+
+"Nice lot you are!"
+
+We faced about and saw "Ronnie's torpedo-boat" executing a sweeping
+curve in the mouth of Eyries Harbour.
+
+"Couldn't wait any longer!" proceeded the voice of the Megaphone.
+"We've got to pick up the others outside.  Thanks awfully for luncheon!
+Top-hole!"
+
+T.B. No. 1000 completed the curve and headed for the open sea with a
+white mane of water rising above her bows.  There was something else
+white fluttering at the stern.  I put up the field-glasses, and with
+their aid perceived upon the deck a party of four ladies, one of whom
+was waving a large pocket handkerchief.  The glasses were here taken
+out of my hand by Chichester, but not before I had identified the
+Flapper.
+
+What Chichester said of Ronnie was heard only by me, and possibly by
+Jimmy, who did not count.  I think it may have saved his life, being
+akin to opening a vein.  That I was the sole recipient of these
+confidences was perhaps due to the fact that the _Sheila_, so swiftly
+and amazingly untethered, here began to fall away to leeward, with all
+the wilful helplessness of her kind, and instant and general confusion
+was the result.  There were a few moments during which ropes, spars,
+and human beings pursued me wherever I went.  Then I heard Lord
+Derryclare's voice--"Let go that anchor again!"
+
+The sliding rattle of the chain followed, the anchor plunged; the
+_status quo_ was re-established.
+
+Chichester went ashore with the Diver to catch the outgoing mail-car.
+The telegram that had arrived with Bill was brought into action
+flagrantly, and was as flagrantly accepted.  (It was found,
+subsequently, on his cabin floor, and was to the effect that the
+cartridges had been forwarded as directed.) The farewells were made,
+the parting regrets very creditably accomplished, and we stood on the
+deck and saw him go, with his suit-case, his rods, his gun-case, heaped
+imposingly in the bow, his rug, and his coats, the greater and the
+less, piled beside him in the stern.
+
+The wind had freshened; the Diver and Jeremiah drove the boat into it
+with a will, and the heavy oars struck spray off the crests of the
+waves.  We saw Chichester draw forth the greater coat, and stand up and
+put it on.  The boat lurched, and he sat down abruptly, only to start
+to his feet again as if he had been stung by a wasp.  He thrust his
+hand into the pocket, and Philippa clutched my arm.
+
+"Could it have been into the pocket of his coat that I put the
+teapot----?" she breathed.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+HARRINGTON'S
+
+Breakfast was over; Philippa was feeding the dogs.  Philippa's cousin,
+Captain Andrew Larpent, R.E., was looking out of the window with that
+air of unemployment that touches the conscience of a host like a spur.
+Andrew did not smoke, a serious matter in a male guest, which means
+that there are, for him, no moments of lethargy, and that, when he
+idles, his idleness stands stark in the foreground against a clear sky,
+a reproach and a menace to his entertainers.
+
+It was a cold day about the middle of September, and there was an
+unrest among the trees that commemorated a night of storm; the gravel
+was wet, the lawn-tennis ground was strewn with sycamore leaves.
+
+"I suppose you'll say I'm drunk," said Andrew, "but the fact remains
+that I see two Natives coming up the drive."
+
+In the green tunnel that was the avenue at Shreelane were two dark
+figures; both were dressed in frock-coats, of which the tails fluttered
+meagrely in the wind; their faces were black; with the half-hearted
+blackness of a leg in a black silk stocking; one of them wore a tall
+hat.
+
+"This is what comes of leaving Calcutta without paying your bills," I
+suggested; "or perhaps it's a Missionary Deputation----"
+
+The Natives advanced into the middle distance.
+
+"It's the Sweep!" exclaimed Philippa.  "It's my beloved Cantillon!"
+
+She flung open the window.
+
+"Oh, Cantillon!" she cried, invoking the gentleman in the top-hat as if
+he were an idol, "I've been longing to see you!"
+
+The leading Native halted beneath the window and curtseyed.
+
+"I partly guessed it, my Lady!" he replied modestly, and curtseyed
+again.
+
+"Then why didn't you come before?" screamed Philippa, suppressing with
+difficulty the indignation of the dogs.
+
+"I had the toothache, my Lady, and a howlt in my poll," returned the
+sweep, in dignified narrative.  "I may say my hands was crackin' with
+the stren'th of pain, and these four days back there was the rumour of
+passpiration all over me, with respex to ye----"
+
+"I'll see you in the kitchen," said Philippa, shutting the window
+abruptly.  "My poor friends," she continued, "this means a cold
+luncheon for you, and a still colder reception for me from Mrs.
+Cadogan, but if I let Cantillon escape me now, I may never see him
+again--which is unthinkable!"
+
+I presume that white is the complimentary colour of a sweep.  In half
+an hour after the arrival of Mr. Cantillon the sitting-rooms were
+snowed over with sheets, covering alike floor and furniture, while he
+and his disciple moved from room to room on tiptoe, with ostentatious
+humility, leaving a round black spoor upon the snow.  My writing-table
+was inaccessible, so also was the piano, which could usually be trusted
+to keep Andrew quiet for an hour of the morning.  Perhaps it would be
+more accurate to say it kept him occupied.  Captain Larpent had not
+been many years in the service of his country, yet it was already told
+of him that "From Birr to Bareilly," undeterred by hardships, his
+intrepid piano had accompanied him, and that house-rents fell to zero
+within a half-mile radius of his vicinity.  Daily the walls of
+Shreelane shook to the thunder of his practising; nightly his duets
+with my wife roared like a torrent over my sleeping head.  Sometimes,
+also, he sang, chiefly in German (a language I do not understand), and
+with what seemed to me superfluous energy.  But this, I am told, means
+"temperament."
+
+Haunting as a waltz refrain the flavour of soot stole through the menu
+at dinner; it was whispered in the soup, it was muttered in the
+savoury, and in the coffee it abandoned subterfuge and shouted down all
+opposition.  Next morning, at breakfast, Philippa asked if the car
+wanted exercise, because it seemed to her a day marked out by
+Providence for calling on the Chicken Farmers.  We might start early,
+take sandwiches, show Andrew something of the country--the programme
+was impulsively sketched in, but none the less I divined that an
+indignant household had demanded a day of atonement in which to
+obliterate the memory of the sweep.
+
+It was, as well as I remember, in the preceding spring that the Chicken
+Farmers had come before the swallow dared, and had taken--in addition
+to the winds of March--a small farm about midway in the wilderness
+between us and the Derryclares.  They were two young women who had
+recently been commended to our special attention by Lady Derryclare;
+they were, she said, Pioneers, and were going to make their fortunes,
+and would incidentally set an example to the district.  Philippa had
+met them on the Derryclares' yacht.
+
+"One of them is very pretty," she explained to Andrew, "and the other
+is a doctor."
+
+"I wonder which of them does most damage?" said Andrew.  "I think I'll
+stay at home."
+
+None the less he came.
+
+It was not until the car was at the door that I found we were to be
+favoured with the society of my eldest son, Anthony, in consequence of
+the facts that (1) the day before had been his ninth birthday, (2) that
+he had not cried when he met the sweep in the passage, and (3) that for
+lack of the kitchen fire he had had no birthday cake.  Minx, also, was
+one of us, but as she came as a stowaway, this did not transpire till
+later, when explanations were superfluous.
+
+It was at the moment of departure that I perceived a donkey-cart,
+modestly screening itself behind the evergreens on the way to the yard,
+and one of Flurry Knox's men approached me with Mr. Knox's compliments,
+and would I lend him the loan of the long ladder?  Some two years ago,
+in a moment of weakness, I had provided myself with a ladder wherewith
+to attain to the eaveshoots of Shreelane, since when I had found myself
+in the undesired position of public benefactor.  How life without a
+long ladder had hitherto been possible for my neighbours I was at a
+loss to imagine, and as I was also at a loss for any valid excuse for
+refusing to lend it, the ladder enjoyed a butterfly existence of
+country-house visiting.  Its visits to Mr. Knox had been especially
+lengthy and debilitating.  It is, as Mrs. Cadogan is wont to say, the
+last straw that puts the hump on the camel.  The blood suddenly mounted
+to my brain, and with it came inspiration.
+
+"You can tell Mr. Knox that the eaveshoots of this house are leaking
+like sieves, and I want the ladder myself."
+
+In the glow of satisfaction kindled by the delivery of this message I
+started the caravan.  The western breeze fanned my brow agreeably, the
+car purred her satisfaction with our new and only stretch of
+steam-rolled road, and Anthony was still in the condition of Being Good
+(a condition, nevertheless, by no means to be relied on, and quite
+distinct from Goodness).
+
+We ran west, we ran north; we skirted grey and sounding bays of the
+Atlantic; we climbed high among heathery, stone-besprinkled moors; we
+lunched by the roadside in the lee of a rick of turf, and Anthony, by
+this time emerging from the condition of Being Good, broke the Thermos,
+and flashed his birthday electric torch in Minx's face until she very
+properly bit him, and Philippa slurred over the incident with impartial
+chocolate, and said it was time to start.
+
+The region in which the Chicken Farmers had established themselves
+suggested the nurture of snipe and sea-gulls rather than chickens.  It
+was an indeterminate patchwork of stony knobs of hill and pockets of
+bog, among which the road humped and sagged, accepting pessimistically
+the facts of nature.  Hardy, noisy hill-streams scurried beside it, or
+over it, as seemed good to them; finally a sharp turn, a high horizon
+of sea, and a steep down-hill grade, ending on the shore of a small,
+round lake.  There was a little pink box of a house on its farther
+side, with a few bunches of trees round it, and among them a pigmy
+village of prim wooden huts.
+
+"That's the place," said Philippa, who had been there with Lady
+Derryclare.  "And those are the last cry in hen-houses.  Now remember,
+both of you, one of them is a doctor, Scotch, and a theosophist, or
+something mysterious of that sort; and the pretty one was engaged to a
+gunner and it was broken off--why, I don't know--drink, I fancy, or
+mad--so you had better be careful----"
+
+"I shall be guarded in my condolences," I said, turning in at the
+little gate, with the sensation of being forcibly fed.
+
+"As far as one can gather," said Andrew, "there remains no topic in
+heaven or earth that----"
+
+"Music and poultry," said Philippa in a breath, as I drew up at the
+hall door.
+
+Andrew rang the bell, and a flock of white ducks hurried up from among
+the trees and gathered round him with loud cries of welcome.  There was
+no other reply to his summons, and at the second essay the bell-wire
+came out by the roots with generous completeness.
+
+"The ladies is gone to th' oxtion!" cried a voice from among the
+hen-coops, and the ducks lifted up their voices in ardent reply.
+
+"Where is the auction?" Philippa called, when a comparative silence had
+fallen.
+
+"In Harrington's, beyond at the Mines!" replied the oracle, on a
+well-sustained high G.
+
+"Put the cards on the hall table," said Philippa, "we might go back
+that way."
+
+Several things combine in the spell that an auction casts upon my wife,
+as upon many others of her sex; the gamble, the competition, the lure
+of the second-hand, the thrill of possible treasure-trove.  We
+proceeded along the coast road towards the mines, and I could hear
+Philippa expounding to her first-born the nature and functions of
+auctions, even as the maternal carnivore instructs her young in the art
+of slaughter.  The road with which we were now dealing ran, or, it
+would be more accurate to say, walked, across the stony laps of the
+hills.  The cliffs were on our right; the sea was still flustered after
+the storm, like a dog that has fought and is ready to fight again.  We
+toiled over the shoulder of a headland, and there caught sight of
+"Harrington's."
+
+On a green plateau, high above the sea, were a couple of iron sheds and
+a small squat tower; landward of them was a square and hideous house,
+of the type that springs up, as if inevitably, in the neighbourhood of
+mines, which are, in themselves, among the most hideous works of man.
+One of the sheds had but half a roof; a truck lay on its side in a pool
+of water; defeat was written starkly over all.
+
+"Copper, and precious little of it," I explained to Andrew; "and they
+got some gold too--just enough to go to their heads, and ruin them."
+
+"Did they put it in their mouths--where you have it, Father?" enquired
+Anthony, who was hanging on my words and on the back of my seat.
+
+"Suppose you shut yours," I replied, with the brutality that is the
+only effective defence against the frontal attacks of the young.
+
+We found the yard at Harrington's thronged with a shabby company of
+carts, cars, and traps of many varieties; donkey-carts had made their
+own of the road outside, even the small circle of gravel in front of
+the hall door was bordered by bicycles; apparently an auction was a
+fashionable function in the region of the Lug-na-Coppal copper-mines.
+Dingy backs bulged from the open door of the hall, and over their heads
+as we arrived floated the voice of the auctioneer, demanding in tragic
+incredulity if people thought his conscience would permit him to let an
+aneroid barometer go for half-a-crown.  Without a word Philippa
+inserted herself between the backs, followed by her son, and was lost
+to view.
+
+"Thank you, madam!" said the voice, with a new note of cheer in it.
+"Five shillings I am bid!  Any advance on five shillings?"
+
+"That's a good weather-glass!" hissed a farmer's daughter with a plumed
+hat, to a friend with a black shawl over her head.  "An' I coming into
+the house to-day I gave it a puck, and it knocked a lep out o' the
+needle.  It's in grand working order."
+
+"I'm told it was the last thing in the house poor Mr. Harrington left a
+hand on, the day he made away with himself, the Lord save us!" remarked
+a large matron, casually, to Andrew and me.
+
+"I thought the Coroner's Jury found that he fell down the shaft?" I
+returned, accepting the conversational opening in the spirit in which
+it was offered.
+
+The matron winked at me with a mixture of compassion and confederacy.
+
+"Ah, the poor fellow was insured, and the jury were decent men, they
+wouldn't wish to have anything said that 'd put the wife out of the
+money."
+
+"The right men in the right place, evidently," said Andrew, who rather
+fancies his dry humour.  "But apart from the climate and the
+architecture, was there any reason for suicide?"
+
+"I'm told he was a little annoyed," said an enormous old farmer,
+delicately.
+
+"It was the weather preyed on him," said the matron.  "There was a
+vessel was coming round to him with coal and all sorts, weather-bound
+she was, in Kinsale, and in the latther end she met a rock, and she
+went down in a lump, and his own brother that was in her was drownded."
+
+"There were grounds for annoyance, I admit," said Andrew.
+
+The big farmer, who had, perhaps, been one of the jury, remarked
+non-committally that he wouldn't say much for the weather we were
+getting now, and there was one of them planets was after the moon
+always.
+
+We moved on to the yard, in which prospective buyers were prowling
+among wheelbarrows, coils of rope, ladders, and the various rubbish
+proper to such scenes, and Andrew discoursed of the accessories that
+would be needed for the repair of my eaveshoots, with the
+large-mindedness of the Government official who has his own spurs and
+another man's horse.  He was in the act of assuring me that I should
+save half a man's wages by having a second long ladder, when some one
+in the house began to play on a piano, with knowledge and vigour.  The
+effect on Captain Larpent was as when a hound, outside a covert, hears
+the voice of a comrade within.  The room from which the music came was
+on the ground floor, the back door was open, and Andrew walked in.
+
+"That is one of those young ladies who have come here to make their
+fortunes with poultry," observed a melancholy-looking clergyman at my
+elbow, "Miss Longmuir, I expect; she is the musician.  Her friend, Dr.
+Catherine Fraser, is here also.  Wonderful young ladies--no wish for
+society.  I begged them to come and live near my church--I offered them
+a spare corner of the churchyard for their hen-coops--all of no avail."
+
+I said that they seemed hard to please.
+
+"Very, very," assented the clergyman; "yet I assure you there is
+nothing cynical about them.  They are merely recloozes."
+
+He sighed, on what seemed to be general grounds, and moved away.
+
+I followed Andrew into the house and found myself in the kitchen.  The
+unspeakable dreariness of an auction was upon it.  Pagodas of various
+crockeries stood high on the tables, and on benches round the walls
+sat, rook-like, an assembly of hooded countrywomen.  A man with a dingy
+pale face was standing in front of the cold fireplace, addressing the
+company.  On my arrival he removed his hat with stately grace, and with
+an effort I recognised Cantillon the sweep, in mufti--that is to say,
+minus some of his usual top-dressing of soot.
+
+"It's what I was saying, Major Yeates," he resumed.  "I'm sweeping
+those chimneys thirty years, and five managers I seen in this house,
+and there wasn't one o' them that got the price of their ticket to Cork
+out o' that mine.  This poor man was as well-liked as anyone in the
+world, but there was a covey of blagyards in it that'd rob St. Pether,
+let alone poor Mr. Harrington!"
+
+The company assented with a groan of general application, and the
+ensuing pause was filled by the piano in the next room, large and heavy
+chords, suggestive of the hand of Andrew.
+
+"God!  Mrs. Harrington was a fine woman!" croaked one of the rooks on
+the bench.
+
+"She was, and very stylish," answered another.  "Oh, surely she was a
+crown!"
+
+"And very plain," put in a third, taking up the encomium like a part in
+a fugue, "as plain as the grass on the hills!"
+
+I moved on, and met my wife in a crowd at the door of the dining-room,
+and in an atmosphere which I prefer not to characterise.
+
+"I've got the barometer!" she said breathlessly.  "No one bid for it,
+and I got it for five shillings!  A lovely old one.  It's been in the
+house for at least fifty years, handed on from one manager to another."
+
+"It doesn't seem to have brought them luck," I said.  "What have you
+done with Anthony?  Lost him, I hope!"
+
+"There have been moments when I could have spared him," Philippa
+admitted, "especially when it came to his bidding against me, from the
+heart of the crowd, for a brass tea-kettle, and running the price up to
+the skies before I discovered him.  Then I found him upstairs,
+auctioning a nauseous old tail of false hair, amidst the yells of
+country girls; and finally he tried to drop out of the staircase
+window--ten feet at least--with a stolen basket of tools round his
+neck.  I just saw his hands on the edge of the window-sill."
+
+"I think it's time to go home," I said grimly.
+
+"Darling, _not_ till I've bought the copper coal-scuttle.  Come and
+look at it!"
+
+I followed her, uttering the impotent growls of a husband.  As we
+approached the drawing-room the music broke forth again, this time in
+power.  Three broad countrywomen, in black hooded cloaks and brown kid
+gloves, were seated on a sofa; two deeply-engrossed backs at the piano
+accounted for the music.  There is no denying the fact that a piano
+duet has some inescapable association with the schoolroom, no matter
+how dashing the execution, how superior the performers.
+
+"Poor old 'Semiramide'!" whispered Philippa; "I played that overture
+when I was twelve!"  Over her shoulder I had a view of Andrew's sleek
+black poll and brown neck, and an impression of fluffy hair, and a
+slight and shapely back in a Norfolk jacket.
+
+"He seems to have done very well in the time," I said.  "That's the
+pretty one, isn't it?"
+
+I here became aware that the hall was filling with people, and that Mr.
+Armstrong, the auctioneer, with his attendant swarm of buyers, was at
+my elbow.
+
+"That's a sweet instrument," he said dispassionately, "and, I may say,
+magnificently played.  Come, ladies and gentlemen, we'll not interrupt
+the concert.  It might be as good for me to take the yard next, before
+the rain comes."
+
+He led away his swarm, like a queen bee; "Semiramide" stormed on; some
+people strayed into the room and began to examine the furniture.  The
+afternoon had grown overcast and threatening, and I noticed that a tall
+man in dark clothes and a yachting cap had stationed himself near the
+treble's right hand.  He was standing between her and the light, rather
+rudely, it seemed to me, but the players did not appear to notice.
+
+"That was rather a free and easy fellow," I said to Philippa, as we
+were borne along to the back door by the tide of auction.
+
+"Who?  Do you mean Mr. Armstrong?" said Philippa.  "I'm rather fond of
+him----"
+
+"No, the tall chap in the yachting cap."
+
+"I didn't notice him--" began Philippa, but at this moment we were shot
+into the yard by pressure from behind.  Mr. Armstrong took his stand on
+a packing-case, the people hived in round him, and I saw my wife no
+more.
+
+Coils of fencing wire and sheets of corrugated iron were proffered, and
+left the audience cold; a faint interest was roused when the
+auctioneer's clerk held up one of a party of zinc pails for inspection.
+
+"You'd count the stars through that one!" said a woman beside me.
+
+"You can buy it for a telescope, ma'am!" said Mr. Armstrong swiftly.
+
+"Well, well, hasn't he a very fine delivery!" said my neighbour,
+regarding Mr. Armstrong as if he were a landscape.
+
+"Hannah," said the woman on my other hand, in a deep and reproachful
+contralto, speaking as if I did not exist, "did ye let the kitchen
+chairs go from you?"
+
+"There wasn't one o' them but had a leg astray," apologised
+Hannah--"they got great hardship.  When Harrington 'd have a drop taken
+he'd throw them here and there."
+
+"Ladies!  Ladies!" reproved Mr. Armstrong.  "Is this an oxtion or is it
+a conversassiony?  John! show that ladder."
+
+"A big lot of use a forty-foot ladder'd be to the people round this
+place!" said a superior young farmer in a new suit of clothes; "there
+isn't a house here, unless it's my father's, would have any occasion
+for it."
+
+Hannah dug me hard in the ribs with her elbow and put out her tongue.
+
+"Five shillings I am bid for a forty-foot ladder!" said Mr. Armstrong
+to the Heavens; "I'd get a better price at a jumble sale!"
+
+"Look at the poker they have in it by the way of a rung!" continued the
+young farmer.  "I wouldn't be bothered buying things at oxtions; if it
+was only gettin' marr'ed you were you'd like a new woman!"
+
+"Seven and six!"
+
+To my own astonishment I heard my voice saying this.
+
+"Seven and six I am bid," said the auctioneer, seizing me with his eye.
+"Ten shillings may I say?  Thank you, sir----"
+
+The clergyman had entered the lists against me.
+
+I advanced against him by half-crowns; the audience looked on as at a
+battle of giants.  At twenty-five shillings I knew that he was
+weakening; at thirty shillings the ladder was mine.
+
+I backed out of the crowd with the victor's laurels on my brow, and, as
+I did so, a speck of rain hit me in the eye.  The sea was looking cold
+and angry, and the horizon to windward was as thick as a hedge.  It was
+obviously time to go, and I proceeded in the direction of the car.
+
+As I left the yard a remarkable little animal, which for a single wild
+instant I took for a fox or a badger, came running up the road.  It was
+reddish brown, with white cheeks and a white throat; it advanced
+hesitatingly and circled round me with agitated and apologetic whimpers.
+
+"Minx!" I said incredulously.
+
+The fox or badger flung itself on its side and waved a forepaw at me.
+
+"It's hunting rabbits below on the cliffs she was," said a boy in a
+white flannel jacket, who was sitting on the wall.
+
+"Oh, there you are," said Philippa's voice behind me; "I wanted to
+remind you to remember the aneroid.  It's on the dining-room table.
+I'm feeling rather unhappy about that child," she went on, "I can't
+find him anywhere."
+
+"_I'll_ go in and find him," I said, with a father's ferocity.
+
+"I hope he's there," said Philippa uncomfortably.  "Good gracious!  Is
+that Minx?"
+
+I left the boy to explain, and made for the house, getting through the
+crowd in the doorway by the use of tongue and elbows, and making my way
+upstairs, strode hastily through the dark and repellent bedrooms of
+"Harrington's."  Anthony was not there.
+
+In the dining-room I heard Andrew's voice.  I went in and found him
+sitting at the dinner-table with two ladies, one of whom was holding
+his hand and examining it attentively.
+
+She had pale eyelashes, and pale golden hair, very firmly and
+repressively arranged; she was big and fresh and countrified looking,
+and her eyes were water-green.  She looked like an Icelander or a Finn,
+but I recognised her as the second Chicken Farmer, Dr. Fraser.
+
+"I was looking for Anthony," I said, withholding with difficulty an
+apology for intrusion.  "We've got to get away, Andrew----"
+
+"I was having my fortune told," said Andrew, looking foolish.
+
+"I saw your little boy going across the field there, about half an hour
+ago," said Dr. Fraser, looking up at me with eyes of immediate
+understanding.  "The white terrier was with him."
+
+"Towards the cliffs?" I said, feeling glad that Philippa was not there.
+
+"No, to the right--towards the tower."  She went to the window.  "There
+was some one with him," she added quickly.  "There he is now--that man
+in a yachting cap, by the tower----"
+
+"I don't see anyone," I said, refixing my eye-glass.
+
+Miss Fraser continued to stare out of the window.  "You're
+short-sighted," she said, without looking at me.  "Perhaps if the
+window were open----"
+
+Before I could help her she had opened it, and the west wind rushed in,
+with big drops in it.
+
+"I must be blind," I said, "I can see no one."
+
+"Nor can I--now," she said, drawing back from the window.
+
+She sat down at the table as if her knees had given way, and her strong
+white hand fell slackly on Philippa's purchase, the old aneroid
+barometer, and rested there.  The other girl looked at her anxiously.
+
+"Hold up, Cathie!" she said, as one speaks to a horse when it stumbles.
+
+Her friend's eyes were fixed, and empty of expression, and the fresh
+pervading pink of her face had paled.
+
+"Perhaps we had better go and look for that kid," said Andrew, getting
+up, and I knew that he too was aware of something uncomfortable in the
+atmosphere.  Before we could get out of the room, Dr. "Cathie" spoke.
+
+"I see tram-lines," she said gropingly, "and water--I wonder if he's
+asleep----"
+
+She sighed.  Andrew and I, standing aghast, saw her colour begin to
+return.
+
+Her friend's eye indicated to us the door.  We closed it behind us, and
+shoved our way through the hall.
+
+"I say!" said Andrew, as we got outside, "I thought she was going to
+chuck a fit, or have hysterics, or something.  Didn't you?"
+
+I did not answer.  Cantillon, the sweep, was hurrying towards me with
+tidings in his face.
+
+"Mrs. Yeates is after going to the cliff looking for the young
+gentleman--but sure what I was saying----"
+
+I did not wait to hear what Cantillon's observations had been, because
+I had caught sight of Philippa, away in a field near the edge of the
+cliffs.  She was running, and the boy with the white flannel jacket was
+in front of her.  It seemed ridiculous to hurry, when I knew that
+Anthony had been accompanied by a large man in a yachting cap (in
+itself a guarantee of competency).
+
+None the less, I ran, with the wind and the heavy raindrops in my face,
+across country, not round by the road, and ran the faster for seeing my
+wife and her companion sinking out of sight over the edge of the cliff,
+as by an oblique path.  My way took me past the tower; there was a
+little plateau there, with a drooping wire fence round it, and I had a
+glimpse of the square black mouth of the disused shaft.
+
+"Near the tower," the girl had said; but she had also said there was a
+man with him.
+
+I ran on, but fear had sprung out of the shaft and came with me.
+
+A hard-trodden path led from the tower to the cliff; it fell steeper
+and steeper, till, at a hairpin turn, it became rocky steps, slanting
+in sharp-cut zigzags down the face of the cliff.  On the right hand the
+rocks leaned out above my head, yellow and grey and dripping, and
+tufted with sea pinks; on the left there was nothing except the wind.
+A couple of hundred feet below the sea growled and bellowed, plunging
+among broken rocks.  I did not give room to the thought of Anthony's
+light body, tossed about there.
+
+At a corner far below I had a glimpse of Philippa and the boy in the
+white jacket; he was leading her down--holding her hand--my poor
+Philippa, whose nightmare is height, who has _vertige_ on a
+step-ladder.  She must have had a sure word that Anthony had gone down
+this dizzy path before her.  A mass of rock rose up between us, and
+they were gone, and in that gusty and treacherous wind it was
+impossible to make better speed.
+
+The damnable iteration of the steps continued till my knees shook and
+my brain was half numb.  They ceased at last at the mouth of a tunnel,
+half-way down the vertical face of the cliff; there was a platform
+outside it, over the edge of which two rusty rails projected into space
+above a narrow cove, where yellow foam, far below, churned and blew
+upwards in heavy flakes.  Philippa and her guide had vanished.  I felt
+for my match-box, and plunged into the dark and dripping tunnel.
+
+I pushed ahead, at such speed as is possible for a six-foot man in a
+five-foot passage, splashing in the stream that gurgled between the
+tram-rails, and stumbling over the sleepers.  Soon the last touches of
+daylight glinted in the water, they died, and it was pitch dark.  I
+struck a match, sheltering it with my cap from the drips of the roof,
+and shouted, and stood still, listening.  There was no sound, except
+the muffled roar of the sea outside; the match kindled broad sparkles
+of copper ore in the rock, but other response there was none.
+
+Match by match I got ahead, shouting at intervals, stooping, groping,
+clutching at the greasy baulks of timber that supported the roof and
+sides, till a cold draught blew out my match.  My next revealed a
+cross-gallery, with a broken truck blocking one entrance.  There
+remained two ways to choose between.  It was certain that the
+tram-rails must lead to the shaft, but which way had Philippa gone?
+And Anthony--I stood in maddening blackness; some darkness is a
+negative thing, this seemed an active, malevolent pressure.  I counted
+my matches, and shouted, and still my voice came back to me, baffled,
+and without a hope in it.  There were not half a dozen matches left.
+
+A faint, paddling sound became audible above the drippings from the
+roof; I struck another of my matches, and something low and brown came
+panting into the circle of light.  It was Minx, coming to me along the
+gallery of the tram-rails.  She paused just short of the cross-ways,
+staring as though I were a stranger, and again a circling wind blew out
+my match.  A fresh light showed her, still motionless; her back was up,
+not in the ordinary ridge, but in patches here and there; she was
+looking at something behind me; she made her mouth as round as a
+shilling, held up her white throat, and howled, thinly and carefully,
+as if she were keening.  I cannot deny that I stiffened as I stood, and
+that second being that inhabits us, the being that is awake when we are
+asleep (and is always afraid), took charge for a moment; the other
+partner, who is, I try to think, my real self, pulled himself together
+with a certain amount of bad language, thrust Minx aside, and went
+ahead along the gallery of the tram-lines.
+
+It needed only a dozen steps, and what Minx had or had not seen became
+a negligible matter.  A white light, that turned the flame of my match
+to orange, began to irradiate the tunnel like moonrise, defining
+theatrically the profiles of rock, and the sagging props and beams.  It
+came from an electric lamp, Anthony's electric lamp, standing on a heap
+of shale.  The boy in the flannel jacket was holding a lighted
+candle-end in his fingers, and bending low over Philippa, who was
+kneeling between the tram-lines in the muddy water, holding Anthony in
+her arms.  He was motionless and limp, and I felt that sickening drop
+of the heart that comes when the thing that seems too bad to think of
+becomes in an instant the thing that is.
+
+"Tram-lines and water--" said a level voice in my brain.  "I wonder if
+he is asleep----"
+
+I wondered too.
+
+Philippa looked up, with eyes that accepted me without comment.
+
+"Only stunned, I think," she said hoarsely.  "He opened his eyes an
+instant ago."
+
+"The timber fell on him," said the country boy.  "Look where he have
+the old prop knocked.  'Twas little but he was dead."
+
+Anthony stirred uneasily.
+
+"Oh, mother, you're holding me too tight!" he said fractiously.
+
+From somewhere ahead vague noises came, rumblings, scrapings, hangings
+like falling stones--
+
+"It must be they're putting a ladder down in the shaft," said the boy.
+
+
+Anthony had broken his collar-bone.  So Dr. Fraser said; she tied him
+up with her knitted scarf by the light of the electric torch; I carried
+him up the ladder, and have an ineffaceable memory of the lavender
+glare of daylight that met us, and of the welcome that was in the
+everyday rain and the wet grass.  In the relief of the upper air I even
+bore with serenity the didactics of Andrew, who assured me that he had
+seen from the first that the shaft was the centre of the position,
+though he had never been in the slightest degree uneasy, because Dr.
+Fraser had seen some one with Anthony.
+
+Dr. Fraser said nothing; no more did I.
+
+"See now," said Cantillon the sweep, who, in common with the rest of
+the auction, was standing round the car to view our departure, "it
+pinched me like death when they told me the Major had that laddher
+bought!"
+
+Being at the time sufficiently occupied in preparing to get away, I did
+not enquire why Cantillon should have taken the matter so much to heart.
+
+"But after all," he proceeded, having secured the attention of his
+audience by an effective opening, "wasn't it the mercy of God them
+chaps Mr. Knox has at the kennels had it lent to the Mahonys, and them
+that's here took it from the Mahonys in a hurry the time Mr. Harrington
+died!  And through all it was the Major's ladder."
+
+Andrew had the ill-breeding to laugh.
+
+"Sure it'd be no blame for a gentleman not to know the like of it,"
+said Cantillon with severity.  "Faith, I mightn't know it meself only
+for the old poker I stuck in it one time at Mr. Knox's when a rung
+broke under me----"
+
+It is a valuable property of the motor-car that it can, at a moment's
+notice, fill an inconvenient interval with loud noises.  I set the
+engine going and jumped into the car.
+
+Something, covered by a rug, cracked and squashed under my foot.  It
+was the aneroid.
+
+When we reached a point in the road where it skirts the cliff I stopped
+the car, and flung the aneroid, like a quoit, over the edge, through
+the wind and the rain, into oblivion.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE MAROAN PONY
+
+It had taken ten minutes to work the car over the bridge at Poundlick,
+so intricate was the crowd of people and carts, so blind and deaf to
+any concerns save their own; a crowd that offered sometimes the
+resistance of the feather bed, sometimes that of the dead wall, an
+intractable mass, competent to reduce the traffic of Piccadilly to
+chaos, and the august Piccadilly police to the point of rushing to the
+nearest lunatic asylum, and saying, "Let us in!  We are mad!"
+
+The town of Poundlick is built at so accommodating a tilt that it is
+possible to stand on the bridge at its foot, and observe the life of
+its single street displayed like a poster on the hillside; even to
+compare the degrees of custom enjoyed by its public-houses, and to
+estimate the number of cur dogs to the square yard of pavement.  I
+speak of an ordinary day.  But this hot twentieth of September was far
+from being ordinary.
+
+The Poundlick Races are, I believe, an ancient and annual function,
+but, being fifteen miles from anywhere, I had hitherto been content to
+gauge their attractions by their aftermath of cases in the Petty
+Sessions Court next following the fixture.  There is, however, no
+creature more the sport of circumstances than a married man with a
+recent motor; my attendance, and that of the car, at the Poundlick
+Races had been arranged to the last sandwich before I had time to
+collect objections (and this method, after all, saves some wear and
+tear).
+
+The races are held on the banks of the Arrigadheel River, within hail
+of the town, and are reached--as everything in Ireland is reached--by a
+short cut.  We--that is to say, my wife, her cousin, Captain Andrew
+Larpent, R.E., and I--were gathered into the jovial crowd that
+straggled, and hustled, and discoursed over the marshy meadows of the
+river, and ploughed through the brown mud in the gaps without a check
+in pace or conversation.  The Committee had indeed "knocked" walls, and
+breached banks, but had not further interfered with the course of
+nature, and we filed at length on to the course across a tributary of
+the river, paying a penny each for the facilities offered by a narrow
+and bounding plank and the muddy elbow of a young man who stood in
+mid-stream; an amenity accepted with suitable yells by the ladies (of
+whom at least ninety per cent. remarked "O God!" in transit).
+
+The fact that there are but four sound and level fields within a
+ten-mile radius of Poundlick had simplified the labours of the
+Committee in the selection of a course.  Rocky hills rose steeply on
+two sides of the favoured spot, the Arrigadheel laid down the law as to
+its boundaries, and within these limitations an oval course had been
+laid out by the simple expedient of breaking gaps in the banks.  The
+single jump-race on the programme was arranged for by filling the gaps
+with bundles of furze, and there was also a water-jump, more or less
+forced upon the Committee by the intervention of a ditch pertaining to
+one of the fences.  A section of the ditch had been widened and dammed,
+and the shallow trough of pea-soup that resulted had been raised from
+the rank of a puddle by a thin decoration of cut furze-bushes.
+
+The races had not begun, but many horses were galloping about and over
+the course, whether engaged in unofficial competitions or in adding a
+final bloom to their training, I am unable to say.  We wandered
+deviously among groups of country people, anchored in conversation, or
+moving, still in conversation, as irresistibly as a bog-slide.  Whether
+we barged into them, or they into us, was a matter of as complete
+indifference to them as it would have been to a drove of their own bony
+cattle.
+
+"These are the sort of people I love," said Philippa, her eyes ranging
+over the tented field and its throngs, and its little red and green
+flags flapping in the sunshine.  "Real Primitives, like a chorus in
+_Acis and Galatea_!"
+
+She straightened her hat with a gasp, as a couple of weighty female
+primitives went through us and passed on.  (In all circumstances and
+fashions, my wife wears a large hat, and thereby adds enormously to the
+difficulties of life.)  Among the stalls of apples and biscuits, and
+adjacent to the drink tent, a roulette table occurred, at which the
+public were invited to stake on various items of the arms of the United
+Kingdom.  The public had accepted the invitation in considerable
+numbers, and I did not fail to point out to Philippa the sophisticated
+ease with which Acis flung his penny upon "Harp," while Galatea,
+planking twopence upon the Prince of Wales' plumes, declared that the
+last races she was at she got the price of her ticket on "Feather."
+
+We passed on, awaking elusive hopes in the bosoms of two neglected
+bookmakers, who had at intervals bellowed listlessly to the elements,
+and now eagerly offered me Rambling Katty at two to one.
+
+"Boys, hurry!  There's a man dead, north!" shrieked a boy, leaping from
+the top of a bank.  "Come north till we see him!"
+
+A rush of boys went over us; the roulette table was deserted in a
+flash, and its proprietor and the bookmakers exchanged glances
+expressive of the despicable frivolity of the rustics of Poundlick.
+
+"We ought to try to find Dr. Fraser," said Philippa, hurrying in the
+wake of the stampede.
+
+"I did not know that the Chicken Farmers were to be among the
+attractions," I said to Andrew, realising, not for the first time, that
+I am but an infant crying in the night where matters of the higher
+diplomacy are toward.
+
+Andrew made no reply, as is the simple method of some men when they do
+not propose to give themselves away, and we proceeded in the direction
+of the catastrophe.
+
+The dead man was even less dead than I had expected.  He was leaning
+against a fence, explaining to Dr. Catherine Fraser that he felt all
+the noise of all the wars of all the worlds within in his head.
+
+Dr. Fraser, who was holding his wrist, while her friend, Miss Longmuir,
+kept the small boys at bay, replied that she would like a more precise
+description.  The sufferer, whose colour was returning, varied the
+metaphor, and said that the sound was for all the world like the
+quacking of ducks.
+
+"You'd better go home and keep quiet," said Dr. Fraser, accepting the
+symptom with professional gravity.
+
+I asked my next door neighbour how the accident had occurred.
+
+"Danny Lyons here was practising this young mare of Herlihy's for Lyney
+Garrett, that's to ride her in the first race," said my neighbour, a
+serious man with bushy black whiskers, like an old-fashioned French
+waiter, "and sure she's as loose as a hare, and when she saw the flag
+before her on the fence, she went into the sky, and Danny dhruv in the
+spur to keep the balance, and with that then the sterrup broke."
+
+"It's little blagyarding she'd have if it was Lyney was riding her!"
+said some one else.
+
+"Ah, Lyney's a tough dog," said my neighbour; "in the Ring of Ireland
+there isn't a nicer rider."
+
+[Illustration: "Lyney's a tough dog!"]
+
+"There might be men as good as him in Poundlick!" said an ugly little
+black-muzzled fellow, suddenly and offensively, "and horses too!  As
+good as any _he'll_ throw his leg over!"
+
+Dr. Fraser's patient stood up abruptly.
+
+"Oh, oh, oh!" said the man with the bushy whiskers, placing himself in
+front of the invalid.  "Let you be said by the lady, Danny, and go
+home!  Have behaviour now, Peter Lynch!"
+
+The matter hung for a moment; a bell began to ring in the middle of the
+course, and the onlookers flung the situation from them like a squeezed
+lemon, and swept _en masse_ towards the summons, bearing with them the
+invalid.
+
+"Off the stage I have never seen people clear out so fast," remarked
+Andrew.  "Now that we've seen Dr. Fraser's Lightning Cure, I suppose we
+may as well go too."
+
+His eyes, by a singular coincidence, met those of Miss Longmuir, which
+were very pretty eyes, dark and soft.
+
+"I must go and hunt up our pony," she said, with a very businesslike
+air; "we've entered her for the third race, you know."
+
+She put back her hair as it blew across her forehead, and the gold in
+it glinted in the sun.
+
+"How sporting of you!" we heard Andrew say, as they walked away
+together.
+
+My wife and Dr. Fraser and I turned as one man, and went in the
+opposite direction.
+
+We steered for an island of furze and grey boulders that had been flung
+into the valley like a vedette from the fortified hill-side, and was
+placed, considerately, at the apex of the oval course.  Half a dozen
+men were already grouped upon the boulders, like cormorants.  We
+clambered to a higher _étage_, and there spread forth ourselves and our
+belongings upon the warm slabs.  The sun was hot, yet not too hot, the
+smell of trodden turf was pleasant in the air, the river sparkled and
+gurgled beside us; the chimneys of Poundlick sent up languid spires of
+blue smoke; its yellow and pink and white houses became poetic in the
+September haze.  The first delicate pangs of hunger were stealing upon
+us, and I felt reasonably certain that nothing necessary to our welfare
+had been forgotten.  I lit a cigarette and pulled my cap over my eyes,
+and listened to a lark, spiring, like the smoke, into the blue, while
+my wife clattered in the luncheon basket.  It was a moment of entire
+well-being, overshadowed only by the prospect of having to take an
+interest in the racing.
+
+I said as much to Dr. Fraser, who was dismembering a cold chicken with
+almost awful surgical dexterity.
+
+"You must wake up for our race," she said.  "I'll call you in time."
+
+"Must I?  I hope you're going to ride."
+
+"Heaven forfend!" replied Dr. Fraser.  "Nothing more spirited than a
+weight-carrying bicycle!  I'm not in the least horsey.  Meg was dying
+to ride, but as we bought the pony from the great Lyney, and he had won
+any number of races on her, he was distinctly indicated."
+
+"Quite right too," I said, with dowager-like propriety.  "And I should
+wish it to be clearly understood that if, at the last moment, your
+friend Mr. Lyney should be too drunk to ride, I will not take his
+place."
+
+"He doesn't drink," said Dr. Fraser, who has an unsympathetic way of
+keeping to the point.  "He's been a great friend of mine ever since I
+mended a broken finger for him."
+
+There was a stir among the cormorants on the lower tier of boulders, a
+shot was fired at the far end of the course, every one began to shout,
+and an irregularly shaped mass was detached from the crowd, and
+resolved itself into a group of seven horses, pounding towards us at a
+lumbering canter.  One of the riders had a green jacket, the others
+were in shirt sleeves, with coloured scarves over their shoulders; all
+were bareheaded.  As they neared the first jump, I found myself on my
+feet on my boulder, with two unknown men hanging on to me to steady
+themselves.
+
+"That's no throuble to them!" shouted one of my _attachés_, as each
+horse in turn galloped over or through the barrier of furze in the gap.
+
+"Which is Lyney Garrett?" I asked.
+
+"That's him on the chestnut mare--the jock that have the dhress on
+him."  He pointed to the wearer of the green jacket.
+
+"Ah ha!  Lyney's the boy!  Look at him now, how he'll stoop and leave
+the horse to go for herself!  He'll easy the horse, and he'll easy
+himself!"
+
+"That Rambling Katty he's riding's a nice loose mare--she has a good
+fly in her," said another.
+
+"Lyney's built for it.  If there's any sort of a spring in a horse at
+all, he'll make him do it."
+
+"He'd make a donkey plough!" flung in another enthusiast.
+
+As they neared the flags at the turn of the oval--and an uncommonly
+sharp turn it was--the pace improved, each man trying to get the inside
+station; I could already see, written on the countenance of a large
+young grey horse, his determination to pursue an undeviating course of
+his own.
+
+"Now, Lyney!  Spare him in the angle!" shouted my neighbour, hanging on
+to my sleeve and rocking perilously.
+
+Lyney, a square-shouldered young man, pale and long-jawed, bored
+determinedly on to the first flag, hit it with his right knee, wrenched
+Rambling Katty round the second flag, and got away for the water-jump
+three lengths ahead of anyone else.
+
+"Look at that for ye--how he goes round the corner on one leg!" roared
+his supporter.  "He'd not stop for the Lord Leftenant!"
+
+The remaining riders fought their way round the flags, with strange
+tangents and interlacing curves; all, that is to say, save the grey
+horse, who held on unswervingly and made straight for the river.  The
+spectators, seated on the low bank at its edge, left their seats with
+singular unanimity.  The majority fled, a little boy turned a
+somersault backwards into the water, but three or four hardier spirits
+tore off their coats, swung them like flails in front of the grey, and
+threw their caps in his face, with a wealth of objurgation that I have
+rarely heard equalled.
+
+"The speed was in him and he couldn't turn," explained one of my
+neighbours, at the top of his voice, as the grey, yielding to public
+opinion, returned to the course and resumed the race.
+
+"That horse is no good," said a dapper young priest, who had joined our
+crowd on the rock.  "Look at his great flat feet!  You'd bake a cake on
+each of them!"
+
+"Well, that's the case indeed, Father," replied a grizzled old farmer,
+"but he's a fine cool horse, and a great farming horse for ever.  Be
+gance!  He'd plough the rocks!"
+
+"Well, he'll get a nice view of the race, anyway," said the young
+priest, "he has it all before him."
+
+"They don't seem to be getting any delay with the water-jump," said
+some one else regretfully.
+
+"Ah, what's in it but the full of a few tin cans!" said my adherent.
+
+"Well, for all, it knocked a good lep out o' Rambling Katty: she went
+mountains over it!"
+
+"Look south!  Look south!  They're coming on again, and only five o'
+them in it----"
+
+The cheering was hotter this time, and it was entirely characteristic
+that it was the riders who were shouted for and not the horses.
+
+"They'll win now this turn--there's three o' them very thick, that's a
+nice tidy race," said the old farmer.
+
+"Good boy, Kenny!  Go on, Kenny!" bellowed some one on a lower ledge.
+
+"Who's second, coming up to the flag now?" panted Philippa, who was
+hanging on to the collar of my coat and trying to see over my shoulder.
+
+"That's Jimmy Kenny," responded the man below, turning a black-muzzled
+face up towards us, his light eyes gleaming between their black lashes
+in the sunshine, like aquamarines.  I recognised Peter Lynch, whom we
+had met earlier in the day.
+
+"It's young Kenny out of the shop," explained the old farmer to me; "he
+rides very nate."
+
+No one was found to endorse his opinion.  The horses came on, sweating
+and blowing, the riders, by this time very red in the face, already
+taking to their whips.  By some intricate process of jostling, young
+Kenny got the inside place at the first flag.
+
+"Now is he nate!  What was I saying!" exulted the old farmer.
+
+"Lyney!  Lyney!" roared the faithful gallery, as the leaders hustled
+round the second flag and went away up the course.
+
+"Up, Kenny!" replied the raucous tenor of Peter Lynch in solitary
+defiance.
+
+Last of all, the grey horse, who would plough the rocks, came on
+indomitably, and made, as before, a bee-line for the river.  Here,
+however, he was confronted by a demonstration hurriedly arranged by his
+friends, who advanced upon him waving tall furze-bushes, with which
+they beat him in the face.  The grey horse changed his mind with such
+celerity that he burst his girths; some one caught him by the head,
+while his rider hung precariously upon his neck; some one else dragged
+off the saddle, replanted his jockey upon his broad bare back, and
+speeded him on his way by bringing the saddle down upon his
+hind-quarters with an all-embracing thump.
+
+"It's only the age he wants," said a partisan.  "If they'd keep him up
+to the practice, he'd be a sweeper yet!"
+
+Tumult at the end of the course, and a pistol-shot, here announced that
+the race was over.
+
+"Lyney have it!" shouted some men, standing on the fence by the
+water-jump.
+
+"What happened Kenny?" bawled Peter Lynch.
+
+"He was passing the flag and he got clung in the pole, and the next man
+knocked him down out of the pole!" shouted back the Field Telegraph.
+
+"Oh pity!" said the old farmer.
+
+"He didn't get fair play!" vociferated Peter Lynch, glowering up at the
+adherents of Lyney with a very green light in his eye.
+
+The young priest made a slight and repressive gesture with his hand.
+"That'll do now, Peter," he said, and turned to the old farmer.  "Well,
+Rambling Katty's a hardy bit of stuff," he went on, brushing the
+rock-lichen from his black coat.
+
+"She is that, Father," responded my late adherent, who, to my
+considerable relief, had now ceased to adhere.  "And nothing in her but
+a fistful of bran!"
+
+"She's the dryest horse that came in," said the young priest,
+descending actively from the rock.
+
+With the knowledge that the Committee would allow an hour at least for
+the effects of a race to pass off before launching another, we climbed
+to the summit of the island, and began upon the luncheon basket; and,
+as vultures drop from the blue empyrean, so did Andrew and Miss
+Longmuir arrive from nowhere and settle upon the sandwiches.
+
+"Oh, I can't eat our own game, can I?" said the latter, with a slight
+shudder, as I placed the chicken before her.  "No--really--not even for
+your sake!"  She regarded me very pleasingly, but I notice that it is
+only since my hair began to turn grey over my ears that these things
+are openly said to me.  "I had to feed four dozen of the brutes before
+we started this morning, and I shall have to do it all over again when
+we get home!"
+
+"I don't know how you stand it, I should let 'em starve," said Andrew,
+his eyes travelling from her white forehead to her brown hands.  "_I_
+don't consider it is work for ladies."
+
+"You can come and help the ladies if you like," said Miss Longmuir,
+glancing at him as she drove her white teeth into a sandwich.
+
+"Do you mean that?" said Andrew in a low voice.
+
+"She's blown him to pieces before he's left the covert," I said to
+myself, and immediately withdrew into blameless conversation with my
+wife and Dr. Fraser.
+
+We had gone pretty well down through the luncheon basket, and had
+arrived at a second and even more balmy--being well-fed--period of
+peace, before it occurred to Miss Longmuir to look at her watch, and to
+spoil the best cigarette of the day with agitations concerning the
+non-appearance of her pony.  I suggested that she and Captain Larpent
+should go in search of it, and for a brief interval the disturbing
+element was eliminated.  It returned, with added agitation, in a
+quarter of an hour.
+
+"Cathie!  I can't find Nancy anywhere!  We've been all round the
+course," cried Miss Longmuir from below.  "And John Sullivan is nowhere
+to be found either, and I can't get near Lyney, he's riding in the
+Trotting Race."
+
+"You'll find the pony is somewhere about all right," I said, with the
+optimism of combined indolence and indifference.
+
+"That seems probable," said Andrew, "but the point is, she's somewhere
+where we're not."
+
+"The point is, she ought to be here," said Miss Longmuir, with a very
+bright colour in her cheeks as she looked up at us.
+
+"Heavens!  They're very angry!" I murmured to Dr. Fraser.
+
+"Well, what do you want us to do?" enquired Dr. Fraser lethargically.
+
+"You might take some faint shadow of interest in the fact that Nancy is
+lost," replied Miss Longmuir.
+
+"I think we'd better organise a search-party," said Philippa (who does
+not smoke).
+
+We rose stiffly, descended from our sun-warmed boulders, and took up
+the White Man's Burden.
+
+A sweeping movement was inaugurated, whose objects were to find the
+pony or her attendant, John Sullivan, or Lyney.
+
+"Should you know the pony if you saw her?" I said confidentially to Dr.
+Fraser, as she and I set forth together.
+
+"We've not had it very long," she replied dubiously.  "Luckily it's an
+easy colour.  John Sullivan calls it maroan--a sort of mixture of roan
+and maroon."
+
+We advanced from field to field, driving like twin darning-needles
+through the groups of people, but neither John Sullivan nor the maroan
+pony transpired.
+
+"Come on, come on!  The Stepping Match is starting!" shouted some one.
+
+Dr. Fraser and I were caught in the tightening mesh of the crowd, as in
+the intricacies of a trammel net; an irregular thumping of hoofs, and a
+row of bare and bobbing heads, passing above the heads of the crowd,
+indicated that the Stepping Match was under way.  Lyney's dour face and
+green jacket were in the lead, and, as before, had he been Diana of the
+Ephesians, he could not have been more passionately called upon.  As it
+was obviously useless for us to do so at this juncture, we climbed on
+to a bank near the winning post, and watched the race.  Lyney was
+riding a long-backed yellow animal with a face as cross as his own, and
+a step as fast as the tick of a watch.
+
+"Anny other man than Lyney wouldn't carry that old pony round," said
+one man.
+
+"She has a score o' years surely, but she's as wicked as a bee," said
+another.
+
+"Lyney's very knacky; he couldn't be bate," said the first man.
+
+"Well, well, look at Jimmy Kenny and his father, and the two o' them
+riding!" went on the commentator.  "Faith, I'd give the father the
+sway.  Jimmy's riding uneven.  When the nag is rising, he's falling."
+
+"Sure he has his two elbows into his ears!  Go on, Lyney boy!"
+
+The horses pounded past, splashing through the shallow flood of the
+water-jump, and trampling over such furze-bushes as had withstood the
+vicissitudes of the steeplechase.  They passed from our view, and Dr.
+Fraser and I agreed that we should be justified in staying where we
+were till the finish.  Three times they passed us, enveloped in a
+travelling roar of encouragements, and with each passing the supporters
+of Lyney and Kenny bayed and howled more emulously.  The competitors,
+now, to all practical intent, reduced to the Kennys, _père et fils_,
+and Lyney, again disappeared on their last round, and the volleys of
+incitement became a dropping fire of criticism.
+
+"Kenny's mare is the one, the others is too crippled."
+
+"She'll not bate Lyney!  Divil blast the bate she have in her! she's
+too dropped and too narra!"
+
+"What horse is first?"
+
+"I d'know; only one, I think."
+
+"Look at young Kenny coming up on the father now!"
+
+"Ah, there's more in the owld fella, never fear him!"
+
+"Come on, Lyney!  Come on, Kenny!  Lyney!  Lyney!"
+
+Lyney won.  The bee-like wickedness of the yellow mare apparently
+served her as well as youth, and despite the fact that she was but
+little over fourteen hands and was carrying twelve stone, she finished
+a dozen lengths in front.  The interest of the race was at once
+transferred to the struggle for second place between the Kennys.
+
+"Come on, Tom!  Come on, Jimmy!  Begor' the father have it!" yelled the
+crowd, as Kenny _père_, flourishing his whip over his grey head,
+finished half a length in front of his son.
+
+"Them two tight wheels at the corner, 'twas there he squeezed the
+advantage on the son."
+
+"No, but the father had a drop taken, 'twas that that gave him the
+heart."
+
+Dr. Fraser and I got off our fence and steered for Lyney.
+
+He was in the act of throwing the reins on the pony's neck and himself
+off her back as we arrived.
+
+"Here!" he said to the owner, "take your old skin!"--he tossed his whip
+on to the ground--"and your old whip too!"
+
+The owner took the "old skin" by her drooping and dripping head, and
+picked up the whip, in reverential submission, and the ring of admirers
+evidently accepted this mood of the hero as entirely befitting his
+dignity.
+
+Dr. Fraser advanced through them with the effortless impressiveness of
+a big woman, and made her enquiries about the pony.  Lyney dropped the
+hero manner.
+
+"I don't at all doubt but John Sullivan's gone up to Lynch's for her,
+Doctor; you needn't be uneasy at all," he said, with a respect that
+must have greatly enhanced our position in the eyes of the crowd.  "I
+told him he shouldn't bring her too soon for fear she'd sour on us.  We
+have an hour yet."
+
+Soothed by this assurance we moved on, and even, in this moment of
+unexpected leisure, dallied with the roulette table.  I had, in fact,
+lost ninepence, when the remainder of the search-party bore down upon
+us at speed.
+
+"The pony is _not_ here!" said Miss Longmuir, regarding our outspread
+coppers with an eye of burning indignation, "and Sullivan's brother
+doesn't know where he is--says he went up to the town two hours ago.
+I'm going up to look for him, but of course if you'd rather stay and
+play roulette--"  Her voice shook.  I need hardly say that we went.
+
+On our arrival at the town of Poundlick we found it to be exclusively
+inhabited by grandmothers.  Lynch's public-house was garrisoned by a
+very competent member of the force, who emerged from the kitchen with
+an infant in her arms, and another attached to her clothing.  She knew
+nothing of the pony, she knew nothing of John Sullivan.  There was
+certainly a young lad that came in, and he having drink taken, and
+wherever he got it, it wasn't in this house, and what did he do but to
+commence jumping the counter, you'd think he'd jump the house.  She
+paused, and I murmured to Dr. Fraser that she was like a Holbein, and
+Dr. Fraser replied that she did not believe one word she said, which
+was rather my own idea, only more so.  It appeared that her son Peter
+had, an hour ago, expelled the young lad from the house (lest its fair
+fame should be sullied), and as for Peter, the dear knew where he was,
+she didn't see him since.
+
+Miss Longmuir and Andrew here left the shop, very purposefully; we
+pursued, and saw them open the gate of Lynch's yard and stride in.  The
+yard was a small one, littered with cases of bottles, and congested by
+the outside cars and carts of race-goers; such level spaces as it
+possessed had been dug out of the side of the hill, and slatternly
+stables and outhouses were perched on the different levels.  Through a
+low-browed doorway might be seen the horses of race-goers, standing
+"ready dight," like the steeds of Branksome Hall, with heads hanging,
+in resigned depression, before empty ranks and mangers.  But of the
+maroan pony there was no sign.
+
+Fierce as terriers on a rat-hunt, Miss Longmuir and Andrew dashed in
+and out of the dark sheds and outhouses, till there remained unexplored
+but one hovel, whose open door revealed only semi-darkness, edged with
+fern-litter.  None the less, the leading terrier determined to make
+good the ground.  A sharp yelp told of a find, and Miss Longmuir
+emerged, holding aloft a new check horse-sheet, with the initials
+"M.L." large upon it.
+
+"They must have taken her down to the race-course, after all--" I began.
+
+"Thoughtless of them to take her without her saddle or bridle," said
+Andrew bitingly.  "Here they are behind the door!"
+
+The silence that followed this discovery was broken by Philippa.
+
+"I hear some one snoring!" she said in a conspirator's whisper.  "Do
+come away.  I'm sure it's a drunken man."
+
+"Quite so," said Andrew, who had been pursuing his researches.  "Allow
+me to introduce Mr. John Sullivan."
+
+In the dark corner behind the door lay a stout youth, comfortably
+extended, with his flushed face half hidden in the dry and tawny
+bracken, and his open mouth framing long and quiet snores.  He was
+obviously at peace with all the world.
+
+Some heartless assaults on the part of Captain Larpent had no
+appreciable result, so inveterate was the peace, so potent the means by
+which it had been invoked.  The ladies had retired during the
+interview, and, as we rejoined them in the yard, we all became aware of
+muffled and thunderous sounds near at hand; they were suggestive of a
+ponderous and chaotic clog-dance, and proceeded from an outhouse, built
+against the bank that formed the upper side of the yard, with its gable
+askew to the other buildings.
+
+"'Lots of things is coor'us,' as Anthony said when I told him about
+Jonah and the Whale," remarked Philippa, who, throughout, had not taken
+the affair as seriously as it deserved.  "I suppose the party that John
+Sullivan was at is going on up there."
+
+Miss Longmuir darted round the gable of the house, a wild and summoning
+cry followed, the call of the terrier who has run his rat to ground.
+
+We found her at the foot of a low flight of irregular stone steps (in
+telling the story I have formed the habit of saying that there were ten
+of them) that led to a doorway in a loft.  In the doorway, with a
+cabbage leaf in her mouth, was the maroan pony, looking down at us with
+an expression of mild surprise.
+
+We all said unanimously, and with equal futility, "How--on--earth----?"
+
+After which Andrew, who dislikes miracles, arranged that she had, of
+course, got into the loft from the back, where the ground was high.
+Unfortunately the theory did not work, an inspection of the loft
+revealing nothing but four walls, a large store of dried bracken, and a
+donkey-panier filled with cabbages.
+
+"These mountainy ponies climb like monkeys," said Philippa, with her
+inevitable effort to shelter the discomfited, as Andrew returned with
+the ruins of his theory, "she must have walked up the steps!"
+
+Miss Longmuir, snatching out her watch, said she didn't care how the
+pony got there, the point was to get her down as quickly as possible.
+"If people would only do something and not talk!" she added, under her
+breath.
+
+"If she walked up she can walk down," said Andrew firmly.
+
+He mounted the steps and took the pony by the halter.  The pony
+immediately backed thunderously out of sight, taking Andrew with her.
+Miss Longmuir flew up the steps to his assistance, and unseen sarabands
+pummelled the floor of the loft.
+
+"Go up and help them, you great lazy thing!" said Philippa to me.
+
+"There's no room for any one else," I protested.
+
+Here the combatants reappeared in the doorway, gradually, with
+endearments on one side, and suspicious snortings on the other.  The
+steps were broad and not too intimidating; the pony advanced almost to
+the sill, repented in haste, and in her retreat flung Andrew against
+the panier of cabbages.  A donkey's panier is made to resist shocks; in
+this case it apparently gave more than it took; Andrew said nothing,
+but he dragged the basket over the sill and hurled it down the steps
+with considerable emotion.  I joined the party in the loft, and
+Philippa collected the cabbages, and laid them in rows upon the steps
+as if it were a harvest festival, in the hope of luring the pony to the
+descent.  The lure was rejected with indignation, and I proceeded to
+offer a few plain truths.  That the floor would come down before the
+mare did.  That it would take six men, and planks, and cartloads of
+straw, to get her out.  Finally, that her race was due to start in
+twenty minutes.
+
+"We're done," said Miss Longmuir tragically, addressing Philippa and
+Dr. Fraser from the top of the steps, as if they were a stage mob.
+"These brutes have beaten us!  Don't you remember that Lyney's father
+said, 'Let ye keep out from them lads in Poundlick'?  And after all our
+trouble, and the training, and everything--"  She turned abruptly away
+from the door.
+
+Dr. Fraser stood still, with her hand to her forehead, as though she
+were trying to remember something.  Then she too came up into the loft.
+The pony had now backed into the pile of bracken; Andrew, whose back
+teeth were evidently set tight, was tugging at her halter, and she was
+responding by throwing her nose in the air and showing the whites of
+her eyes.
+
+"Meg," said Dr. Fraser, at the doorway, "I've remembered something that
+I was once told--"  She peered into the darkness of the loft.  "May I
+try?" she said, advancing quietly to the pony's head.
+
+"By all means," said Andrew, as chillingly as was possible for a man
+who was very red in the face and was draped with cobwebs.
+
+Looking back now to the affair, I cannot remember that Dr. Fraser did
+anything in the least remarkable.  She took hold of the halter with one
+hand and with the other patted the pony's neck, high up, near the ears.
+She also spoke to it, the sort of things anyone might say.  For the
+life of me I could not see that she did more than anyone else had done,
+but Nancy lowered her head and put her ears forward.
+
+Dr. Fraser gave the halter a gentle pull, and said, "Come on, old
+girl!" and the pony started forward with a little run.
+
+At the doorway she stopped.  We held our breaths.  Dr. Fraser patted
+her again and placidly descended the first step; the maroan pony placed
+a trembling foot upon the threshold, steadied herself, poked her nose
+forward, and dropped her forefeet on to the second step.
+
+"She'll come down on top of her!" said Andrew, starting forward.
+
+"Don't touch her!" exclaimed Miss Longmuir, grasping his arm.
+
+With the tense caution of an old dog, the pony let herself down from
+step to step, planting her little hoofs cunningly on the rough-set
+stones, bracing herself with the skill learned on the rocky staircases
+of her native hills.  Dr. Fraser kept a step in advance of her.  Thus,
+with slow clattering, and in deep gravity, they joined Philippa in the
+yard.
+
+Five people cannot advantageously collaborate in putting a saddle and
+bridle on a pony, but we tried, and in the grim hustle that resulted no
+one asked questions or made comments.  Amongst us the thing was done,
+and there were still seven minutes in hand when Andrew shot out of the
+yard on her back.  Hard on her heels followed Philippa and Miss
+Longmuir, with scarcely inferior velocity.  I returned to the remaining
+member of the party and found that she had seated herself on the steps.
+
+She said she was tired, and she looked it.
+
+"I daresay getting that beast down the steps was rather a strain?" I
+said, spreading the pony's rug for her to sit on.
+
+"Oh, that was nothing.  Please don't wait for me."
+
+I said in my best ironic manner that doctors were of course impervious
+to fatigue, and indeed superior to all human ills.
+
+She laughed.  "I admit that I was rather nervous that the thing
+wouldn't work, or would break down half-way."
+
+"What thing?" I demanded.  "The pony?"
+
+"No.  The secret.  It _is_ a secret, you know.  My grandfather gave
+Rarey thirty pounds for it.  I've never had much to say to horses, but
+I have started a jibbing hansom horse in Oxford Street with it."  She
+laughed again, apologetically.
+
+"You needn't believe it unless you like.  I must say I was afraid it
+mightn't include a flight of steps!"  She paused and put back her
+abundant fair hair.  "How hot it was up in that loft!  I wonder if you
+could get me a glass of water?"
+
+I told her that I was old enough to believe anything, but added that
+after what she had told me I would get a second glass of water, with
+sal volatile in it, for myself.
+
+The Holbein grandmother was standing at the back door of the house,
+with the baby still on her arm.  She and the baby fetched the glass of
+water.  She said wasn't the pony a Fright for ever after the way he
+came down them steps, but why wouldn't the lady take him out through
+the other door into the field above?
+
+I made no reply, but while Dr. Fraser was drinking the water, I went up
+into the loft, and cleared away the bracken that had been piled in
+front of the "door into the field above."  I opened the door, and
+walked out into the field, and viewed the small hoof-prints that led to
+the door of the loft.
+
+I returned to Dr. Fraser, and very gently broke the news to her.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Of course Lyney and the maroan pony won the race.  Had this not been a
+foregone conclusion it is possible that John Sullivan might have scored
+less heavily in the matter of free drinks.
+
+As I was conducting my exhausted but triumphant party off the course,
+the Poundlick Sergeant of Police met me and asked me if I would sign a
+few summonses for him, as he was after taking some parties into custody
+for fighting.
+
+"Drunk, I suppose?"
+
+The Sergeant admitted it, and said the dispute had arisen between the
+Kennys and the Lynches on the one side, and the partisans of Lyney
+Garrett on the other, out of "circumstances connected with the last
+race."  The Sergeant's eye rested for an instant, with what may be
+described as a respectful twinkle, upon Miss Longmuir.
+
+"It was mostly heavy offers and small blows, Major," he concluded.
+
+"Look here, Sergeant," I said oracularly, "take them all to the
+water-jump.  Build up the furze in front of it.  Make them jump it.
+Anyone that gets over it may be considered sober.  Anyone that falls in
+will be sober enough when he gets out."
+
+I have not, in my judicial career, delivered a judgment that gave more
+satisfaction to the public.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+MAJOR APOLLO RIGGS
+
+PART I
+
+The leave of Captain Andrew Larpent, R.E., was expiring, dying hard,
+"in rings of strenuous flight," (and my motor) on the road between
+Shreelane and Licknavar, which is the home of the Chicken Farmers.
+Philippa, who regards a flirtation with an enthusiasm that is as
+disinterested as it is inexplicable, assured me that the state of
+affairs was perfectly unmistakable.  She further said that the male
+determination to deny and ignore these things was partly sympathetic
+secretiveness, partly the affectation of despising gossip, and mainly
+stupidity.  She took a long breath after all this, and, seeing Andrew
+approaching along the garden path in apparently romantic meditation,
+enjoined me to be nice to the poor thing, and departed.
+
+The sun was bright, with the shallow brightness of early October, and
+the Virginian creeper made a conflagration on the weather-slated end of
+the house.  The poor thing deposited himself beside me on the garden
+seat.  I noticed that his eye rested upon a white chicken with a
+brilliant scarlet comb; it was one of several, purchased from the
+Chicken Farmers.  I would not for worlds have admitted it to Philippa,
+but there was undoubtedly sentiment in the glance.
+
+"I hear they're having beastly weather at the Curragh," he said,
+leaning back and looking gloomily up into the melting blue sky.
+"Stunning that red stuff looks on the house!"  He surveyed it, and
+sighed; then, suddenly, sentiment faded from his glance.  "D'you know,
+old boy, that chimney up there is well out of the perpendicular.  It'll
+be down about your ears some day."
+
+I replied that it had maintained that angle for the seven years of my
+tenancy.
+
+"It won't do it much longer," returned my guest.  "Look at that crack
+in the plaster!"
+
+"Which crack?" I said coldly.  (Mr. Flurry Knox is my landlord, and it
+is my misfortune to have a repairing lease.)
+
+"Take your choice," said Andrew, scanning the chimneys with the alert
+and pitiful eye of the Royal Engineer.  "My money's on the northern
+one, under the jackdaw."
+
+"Oh, confound you and the jackdaws!" I said pettishly.  "The chimney
+draws all right."
+
+But the matter did not end there.  Before luncheon, Andrew and I had
+made a tour of the roof, and he had demonstrated unanswerably, and with
+appalling examples from barracks that he had repaired in Central India,
+and built in Wei-hai-Wei, that nothing but habit and family feeling
+induced any one of the chimney stacks to stand up.
+
+At luncheon he told Philippa that he hoped she would insure the
+children before the next westerly gale.  Philippa replied by asking if
+he, or anyone else, had ever heard of a chimney falling, unless it had
+been struck by lightning, in which case it wouldn't matter if it were
+straight or crooked; and though this was manifestly worthless as an
+argument, neither Andrew nor I could remember an instance in support of
+our case.  That the case had now become mine as well as Andrew's was
+the logical result of illogical opposition, and at Philippa's door I
+deposit the responsibility for a winter of as varied discomforts as it
+has been our lot to endure.
+
+The matter matured rapidly.  In the mellow moment that comes with
+coffee and cigarettes, I began, almost pleasurably, to lay out the
+campaign.
+
+"I can't see any point in wasting money on a contractor," said Andrew
+airily.  "Any of your local masons could do it if I explained the job
+to him.  A fortnight ought to see it through."
+
+It was at this point that I should have sat heavily upon Andrew.  I was
+not without experience of the local mason and his fortnights; what
+could Andrew know of such?  I had a brief and warning vision of Captain
+Larpent, seated at an office table adorned with sheets of perfect
+ground-plans and elevations, issuing instructions to a tensely
+intelligent Sapper Sergeant.  I saw the Sergeant, supreme in scientific
+skill (and invariably sober), passing on the orders to a scarcely less
+skilled company of prompt subordinates--but my "worser angel"
+obliterated it.  And that very afternoon, on our way to Aussolas, we
+chanced to meet upon the road the local mason himself, William
+Shanahan, better known to fame as "Walkin' Aisy."  He was progressing
+at a rate of speed that accorded with his sub-title, and, as I
+approached him, a line of half-forgotten verse came back:
+
+  "Entreat her not, her eyes are full of dreams."
+
+Nevertheless, I stopped the car.
+
+[Illustration: "Walkin' Aisy."]
+
+In answer to enquiries, he mused, with his apostolic countenance bent
+upon the ground; after a period of profound meditation, he asked me why
+wouldn't I get one of the big fellas out from the town?  I have never
+known Walkin' Aisy to accept a job without suggesting that some one
+else could do it better than he (in which he was probably quite right).
+This may have been humility, due to the fact that his father had been
+that despised thing, "a dry-wall builder"; it may have been from
+coquetry, but I am inclined to think it was due to a mixture of
+other-worldliness and sloth.
+
+On pressure he said that he had still a small pieceen of work to
+finish, but he might be able to come down to-morrow to travel the roof
+and see what would be wanting to us, and on Monday week, with the help
+of God, he would come in it.  His blue eyes wavered towards the
+horizon.  The interview closed.
+
+"'Fair and young were they when in hope they began that long journey,'"
+cooed Philippa, as we moved away.  The quotation did not, as I well
+knew, refer to our visit to the Knoxes.
+
+At Aussolas I aired my project to my landlord.  Flurry is not a person
+to whom it is agreeable to air a project.
+
+"Rebuild the chimneys, is it?  Oh, with all my heart.  Is there
+anything the matter with them?"
+
+Andrew explained the imminence of our peril, and Flurry listened to him
+with his inscrutable eye on me.
+
+"Well, it'll be some fun for you during the winter, Major, but be
+careful when you're cutting the ivy!"
+
+I was betrayed into asking why.
+
+"Because there's only it and the weather-slating keeping the walls
+standing."
+
+"If I may presume to contradict one so much younger than myself," said
+old Mrs. Knox, "Shreelane is as well built a house as there is in the
+county."  Her voice was, as ever, reminiscent of a bygone century and
+society; it was also keen-edged, as became a weapon of many wars,
+ancient and modern.  She turned to me.  "In the storm of '39 I remember
+that my father said that if Shreelane fell not a house in Ireland would
+stand.  Every one in the house spent that night in the kitchen."
+
+"May be that was nothing new to them," suggested Flurry.
+
+Mrs. Knox regarded her grandson steadfastly and continued her story.
+It has already been noted that when he and she were of the same company
+they considered no other antagonist worthy of their steel.
+
+"It was my great-grandfather who built Shreelane in honour of his
+marriage," she went on.  "He married a Riggs of Castle Riggs, a cousin
+of the celebrated Major Apollo--and thereby hangs a tale!"  She blinked
+her eyes like an old rat, and looked round at each of us in turn.  I
+felt as if I were being regarded through a telescope, from the
+standpoint of a distant century.
+
+"They knew how to build in those days," she began again.  "The basement
+story of Shreelane is all vaulted."
+
+"I daresay the kitchen would make a nice vault," said Flurry.
+
+His grandmother looked hard at him, and was silent, which seemed to me
+a rather remarkable occurrence.
+
+On the following day, Andrew and Walkin' Aisy "travelled the roof," and
+I accompanied them--that is to say, I sat on the warm lead, with my
+back against the sunny side of a chimney, and smoked torpidly, while
+Andrew preached, firmly and distinctly, from the top of a ladder.
+Walkin' Aisy stood at the foot of the ladder, submissive, with folded
+hands, and upturned bearded face, looking like an elderly saint in the
+lower corner of a stained-glass window.  At the conclusion of the
+lecture he said that surely the chimneys might fall any minute, but,
+for all, they might stand a hundred years; a criticism almost
+stupefying in its width of outlook.
+
+The following day Captain Larpent departed to the Curragh, and, as is
+often the way of human beings with regard to their guests, we partly
+breathed more freely, and partly regretted him.  On the whole it was
+restful.
+
+A fortnight passed, and I had almost forgotten about the chimneys; I
+was in the act of making an early start for an absence of a couple of
+days at the farther side of my district, when I encountered Walkin'
+Aisy at the hall door.
+
+"I'm here since six o'clock this morning, but I had no one to tend me,"
+he began.
+
+I was familiar with this plaint, and proffered him the yard boy.
+
+"The young fella's too wake," replied Walkin' Aisy, in his slow and
+dreamy voice, "and they takes him from me."  His mild eyes rested upon
+me in saddened reverie.  "And there should be morthar mixed," he
+resumed slowly, "and there's not a pick of gravel in the yard."
+
+I said, as I pulled on my gloves, that he could have Johnny Brien from
+the garden to minister to him, and that there was no hurry about the
+mortar.
+
+"Well, it's what I was saying to the gardener," returned Walkin' Aisy
+very slowly, "I have no business coming here at all till those chimneys
+is taken down.  The sahmint that's on them is very strong.  It's what
+the gardener said, that quarry-men would be wanting."
+
+"Why the devil didn't you say this at first?" I demanded, not without
+heat.  "You and Captain Larpent told me that the old cement had no more
+hold than the sugar on a cake."
+
+"Well, the Captain knows best," replied Walkin' Aisy gently, "we should
+do what he says."
+
+"Well, get the chimneys down; I don't care who does it."
+
+I drove away, and from the turn of the drive saw Walkin' Aisy, in
+motionless trance, looking after the car as if it were a chariot of
+fire.
+
+The well-known routine followed; the long and airless day in the
+Court-house, the roar of battle of the rival solicitors, the wearisome
+iteration of drunks and trespasses, the intricacies of family feuds;
+the stodgy and solitary dinner at the hotel, followed by the evening in
+the arid smoking-room, the stale politics of its habitués, the stagnant
+pessimism of the proprietor, the same thing over again next day and the
+day after.
+
+It was not until the afternoon of the third day that I found myself
+serenely gliding homeward, with the wind behind me, and before me the
+prospect of that idleness that, like the only thirst worth having, has
+been earned.  I was in the straight for the hall door, when I saw my
+wife dart from the house, gesticulating, and waving her handkerchief as
+if to check my approach.  She was followed, at no great interval, by an
+avalanche of rubble and bricks from the roof, that fell like a portent
+from heaven, and joined itself to a considerable heap by the steps.
+
+"You never know when it's coming!" she cried breathlessly.  "I've been
+watching for you.  It's impossible to make them hear from below, and I
+can't find any of the men--they're all on the roof."
+
+The restoration had begun, but that fact might not have occurred to a
+stranger.  Next day, and for many days--six weeks, to be exact--the
+house shook as from the blows of a battering-ram, in response to the
+efforts of the quarrymen to remove from the chimneys the cement that
+had no more hold on them than the sugar on a cake, and at frequent and
+uncertain intervals various debris rumbled down the roof and fell
+heavily below.  There were days when it fell in front of the house,
+there were days when it fell in the flower garden; where it fell, there
+it lay, because there was no one to take it away; all were absorbed in
+tending Walkin' Aisy, and the murmurs of their inexhaustible
+conversation came to us down the chimneys like the hoarse cooing of
+wood pigeons.  There were also days when by reason of storms and rain
+nothing was done, and black and evil floods descended into the rooms
+down the ruins of the chimneys, and through the slates, broken by the
+feet of the quarrymen.  At Christmas the kitchen chimney alone remained
+in action, and we ate our Christmas dinner in fur coats and a fireless
+dining-room.  Philippa refrained from any allusion to the quotation
+from Longfellow that she had made after that first interview with
+Walkin' Aisy.  She even denied herself the gratification of adding its
+context:
+
+"Faded and old were they when in disappointment it ended," but I knew
+that she was thinking it.
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+It was somewhere towards the end of March that one chimney stack
+re-entered the list of combatants, trim in new cement, and crowned with
+tall and hideous chimney-pots.  They all smoked, a thing that had never
+occurred before, but Walkin' Aisy said that the chimneys were cold, and
+that they wouldn't do it when they'd come to themselves; and (this was
+a little later on) that any chimney would smoke in an east wind.  It
+was true that a period of east wind and drought had set in.  The pump
+in the yard went dry; carts had to be sent half a mile for water, and
+it was reported to me that the masons had as much water put astray,
+mixing mortar and all sorts, as would drown a herring.
+
+Other unpleasant things occurred.  The housemaid gave half-an-hour's
+warning, and married one of the quarry men, and Mrs. Cadogan then
+revealed that it wasn't once nor twice during the winter that she had
+given that particular quarryman the full of the poker, to put him out
+from under her feet when she'd be dishing up the dinner.  Shreelane was
+twice drawn blank by Flurry Knox's hounds, and their master said that
+as long as I had every idle blackguard in the country tending Walkin'
+Aisy, and making short cuts through the covert, how would I have foxes
+there?  I ignored the conundrum, and hoped that the quarryman's yellow
+dog would remain where I had last seen him, in the ashpit, till Flurry
+had left the premises.
+
+It was some little time after this that Captain Larpent advanced upon
+us on a week's leave from the Curragh; he wrote to say that I evidently
+wanted a Clerk of the Works, and that he would see if he couldn't get a
+move on Shanahan.  I was away when he arrived, and on my return
+Philippa met me in the hall.
+
+"Meg Longmuir is here!" she said, not without a touch of defiance.
+"Doctor Catherine had to go to Scotland, so I asked Meg here for a few
+days.  She'll play duets with Andrew.  She's up on the roof with him
+now."
+
+"Better have a string band up there at once," I said, "and open it as a
+public recreation ground."
+
+"And the Flurry Knoxes and Bernard Shute are coming to dinner,"
+continued my wife, ignoring this _jeu d'esprit_; "the smoking-room
+chimney is all right, and we can have the oil stove and some music in
+the drawing-room."
+
+With this agreeable prospect in store, we sat down to dinner.  We were
+too many for general conversation, and the table was round, which is
+unfavourable for _tête-à-têtes_.  Yet it was not round enough to
+frustrate Miss Meg Longmuir's peculiar gift for duets, and I was
+presently aware that she was unwarrantably devoting herself to Bernard
+Shute, leaving Captain Larpent derelict, and that the latter was, after
+the manner of derelicts, becoming a danger to navigation, and was
+laying down laws and arguing about them acridly with Mr. Knox.  I
+realised too late that there should have been champagne.  Whisky and
+soda is all very well, but it will not warm wet blankets.
+
+Meg Longmuir, however, was doing remarkably well without either; she
+wore something intricate that was either green or blue or both, and
+glittered.  I recognised it as the panoply of war, and knew that the
+tomahawk was concealed in its folds.  So also was Andrew's scalp; I
+don't know why I felt some pleasure in remembering that it had a bald
+patch on it.
+
+After the ladies had gone, Bernard, to whose head Miss Longmuir had
+mounted as effectively as if she had been the missing champagne,
+rejoined the lesser world of men by asking Flurry why he had shut up
+the season so early, and suggested a by-day, if only for the sake of
+giving the horses something to do.
+
+Flurry put the end of his cigarette into his finger-glass, and lit
+another at the flaming tongue of my tame Chinese dragon.
+
+"I didn't know you had one that would carry a lady?" he said.
+
+"Oh rot!" said Bernard helplessly.
+
+"I haven't one that will carry myself," went on Flurry.  "There's five
+lame legs among three of them this minute.  Anyway the hounds are in
+sulphur."
+
+The discussion progressed with the prolixity proper to such themes; I
+think it was Andrew who suggested the paper-chase.  He had, he said,
+ridden in paper-chases in Egypt, and he gave us details of the stark
+mud walls and fathomless water-courses that were common-places of these
+events.  We were left with the impression that none of us had ever seen
+obstacles so intimidating, and, more than that, if we had seen them we
+should have gone home in tears.
+
+"I think we'd better make a hare of _you_," said Flurry, fixing
+expressionless eyes upon Captain Larpent.  "It mightn't be hard."
+
+The double edge of this suggestion was lost upon Andrew, who accepted
+it as a tribute, but said he was afraid he didn't know the country well
+enough.
+
+"That's your Egyptian darkness," said Flurry with unexpected erudition.
+
+Andrew glanced sideways and suspiciously at him over the bridge of his
+sunburnt nose, and said rather defiantly that if he could get hold of a
+decent horse he wouldn't mind having a try.
+
+"I suppose you ride about 11.6?" asked Flurry, after a moment or two of
+silence.  His manner had softened; I thought I knew what was coming.
+"I've a little horse that I was thinking of parting..." he began.
+
+A yell, sharp and sudden as a flash of lightning, was uttered outside
+the door, followed by a sliding crash of crockery, and more yells.  We
+plunged into the hall, and saw Julia, the elderly parlourmaid,
+struggling on the floor amid ruins of coffee cups and their adjuncts.
+
+"The rat!  He went in under me foot!" she shrieked.  "He's in under me
+this minute!"
+
+Here the rat emerged from the ruins.  Simultaneously the drawing-room
+door burst open, and the streaming shrieks of Minx and her son and
+daughter were added to those of the still prostrate Julia.
+
+The chase swept down the passage to the kitchen stairs, the pack
+augmented by Bob, the red setter, and closely followed by the dinner
+party.  A rat is a poor performer on a staircase, and, at the door
+leading into the turf-house, the dogs seemed to be on top of him.  The
+bolt-hole under the door, that his own teeth had prepared, gave him an
+instant of advantage; Flurry had the door open in a second, someone
+snatched the passage lamp from the wall, but it was obviously six to
+four on the rat.
+
+The turf-house was a large space at the very root of the house, vaulted
+and mysterious, bearing Shreelane on its back like the tortoise that
+supports the world.  Barrels draped with cobwebs stood along one wall,
+but the rat was not behind them, and Minx and her family drove like
+hawks into a corner, in which, beneath a chaotic heap of broken
+furniture and household debris, the rat had gone to ground.  We
+followed, treading softly in the turf-mould of unnumbered winters.  We
+tore out the furniture, which yielded itself in fragments; the delirium
+of the terriers mounting with each crash, and being, if possible,
+enhanced by the well-meant but intolerable efforts of the red setter to
+assist them.  Finally we worked down to an old door, lying on its face
+on something that raised it a few inches from the ground.
+
+"Now!  Mind yourselves!" said Flurry, heaving up the door and flinging
+it back against the wall.
+
+The rat bolted gallantly, and darted into an old box, of singular
+shape, that lay, half open, among the debris, and there, in a storm of
+tattered paper, met his fate.  Minx jumped out of the box very
+deliberately, with the rat across her jaws, and a scarlet bite in her
+white muzzle.  With frozen calm, and a menacing eye directed at the red
+setter, she laid it on the turf mould, and stiffly withdrew.  Her son
+and daughter advanced in turn, smelt it respectfully and retired.
+There was no swagger; all complied with the ritual of fox-terrier form
+laid down for such occasions.
+
+I was then for the first time aware that the ladies, in all the glitter
+and glory of their evening dresses, had each mounted herself upon a
+barrel; in the theatrical gloom of the vaulted turf-house, they
+suggested the resurrection of Ali Baba's Forty Thieves.
+
+"Look where he had his nest in among the old letters!" said Flurry to
+Philippa, as she descended from her barrel to felicitate Minx and to
+condole with the rat.  "That box came out of the rumble of an old
+coach, the Lord knows when!"
+
+"There's some sort of a ring in the floor here," said Andrew, who was
+rooting with a rusty crowbar in the turf-mould where the door had lain.
+"Bring the light, someone----"
+
+The lamp revealed a large iron ring which was fixed in a flat stone; we
+scraped away the turf-mould and found that the stone was fastened down
+with an iron bar, passing through a staple at either end, and padlocked.
+
+"As long as I'm in this place," said Flurry, "I never saw this outfit
+before."
+
+"There's a seal over the keyhole," said Andrew, turning over the
+padlock.
+
+"That means it was not intended it should be opened," said Meg Longmuir
+quickly.
+
+I looked round, and, bad as the light was, I thought her face looked
+pale.
+
+Andrew did not answer her.  He poised the crowbar scientifically, and
+drove it at the padlock.  It broke at the second blow, releasing the
+bar.
+
+"No trouble about that!" he said, addressing himself to the gallery,
+and not looking at Miss Longmuir.  "Now, then, shall we have the flag
+up?"
+
+There were only two dissentients; one was Flurry, who put his hands in
+his pockets, and said he wasn't going to destroy his best evening
+pants; the other was Miss Longmuir, who said that to break an old seal
+like that was to break luck.  She also looked at Andrew in a way that
+should have gone far to redress the injuries inflicted during dinner.
+Apparently it did not suffice.  Captain Larpent firmly inserted the end
+of the bar under the edge of the flag.  Bernard Shute took hold of the
+ring.
+
+"All together!" said Andrew.
+
+There was a moment of effort, the flag came up abruptly, and, as
+abruptly, Bernard sat down in the turf-mould with the flag between his
+legs.  The crowbar slipped forward, and vanished with a hollow-sounding
+splash down a black chasm; Andrew, thrown off his balance, also slipped
+forward, and would have followed it, head first, had not Flurry and I
+caught him.
+
+The chasm was a well, nearly full; the water twinkled at us,
+impenetrably black; it made me think of the ink in the hollowed palm of
+a native who had told my fortune, up at Peshawur.
+
+"That was about as near as makes no difference!" said Bernard.  "You've
+cut your cheek, Larpent."
+
+"Have I?" said Andrew vaguely, putting up a rather shaky hand to his
+face.  "I think my head took the edge of the well."
+
+We covered the hole with the old door, and Andrew was taken away to
+have his wound attended to.  It was not a severe wound, but the process
+was lengthy, and involved the collaboration of all the ladies.  It
+seemed to the three neglected males, waiting for a fourth to play
+bridge, that this mobilisation of ministering angels was somewhat
+overdone.
+
+Andrew came down to breakfast next morning with a headache, and said he
+had slept badly.  Had he discovered the source of the Nile in the
+turf-house the night before, my wife and Miss Longmuir could not have
+been more adulatory and sympathetic, nor could the projects, based upon
+the discovery, have been more ambitious.  I went forth to my work and
+to my labour without so much as a dog to wave me farewell; all were in
+the turf-house, surrounded by visionary force-pumps, bath-rooms, and
+even by miraged fountains in the garden.
+
+When I drove the car into the yard on my return that afternoon, I was
+confronted by a long chestnut face with a white blaze, looking at me
+out of the spare loose-box--the face, in fact, of "the little horse" of
+whom Flurry had spoken to Andrew.  There was also, added to the more
+familiar heaps of mortar, gravel, and stones, a considerable deposit of
+black and evil-smelling sludge.  It seemed, as was not uncommonly the
+case, that a good many things had been happening during my absence.
+The stone floor of the hall was stencilled with an intricate pattern of
+black paw-marks, and was further decorated with scraps of torn paper; a
+cold stench pervaded the smoking-room (which was situated above the
+turf-house); far away, a sound as of a gramophone in the next world
+indicated that Captain Andrew's _affaire de coeur_ was finding an
+outlet in song.
+
+I followed the sounds to the drawing-room, and found Andrew and Miss
+Longmuir at the piano, in a harmony obviously world-forgetting, though
+not likely to be by the world forgot.  Philippa was sitting by the oil
+stove, and was, I hope, deriving some satisfaction from inhaling its
+fumes, its effect upon the temperature being negligible.
+
+Andrew's song was a Hungarian ditty, truculent and amorous, and very
+loud; under cover of it my wife told me that he, assisted by Walkin'
+Aisy and the quarrymen, and attended by Miss Longmuir, had baled out
+the newly discovered well, and that the quarrymen had exacted whisky to
+sustain them during the later stages of the process, and that the
+sludge would be ideal for the roses.  They believed the well was
+filling again beautifully, but they had to leave it because Flurry came
+over with the horse for Andrew for the paper-chase, and Andrew and Meg
+went out schooling.
+
+"What paper-chase?" I interpolated coldly.
+
+"Oh, they've got one up for Monday," said Philippa airily.  "The
+children have been tearing up paper all day.  I found--rather with
+horror--that Flurry had given them those old letters out of the
+turf-house to tear up--I said you and I would ride, of course"--she
+looked at me with apprehension veiled by defiance, and I said it was
+thoughtful of her.--"But I want to tell you about old Mrs. Knox," she
+said, hurrying on.  "She told Flurry that the well had never been used
+since the time of the Famine, when they got up a soup-kitchen here, and
+the day after they opened the well she said the servants flew in a body
+out of the house, like wild geese!"
+
+"I don't wonder, if it smelt as it does now," I said.  "Was that why
+they flew?"
+
+"Flurry said he didn't know what lifted them.  But Flurry never says he
+doesn't know unless he _does_ know and doesn't want to tell!"
+
+The following day was Saturday, and for the first time for many weeks a
+Sabbath stillness prevailed on the roof.  Walkin' Aisy was absent; no
+explanation was forthcoming, and I diagnosed a funeral in the
+neighbourhood.  It was on Sunday afternoon that I was roused from my
+usual meditation--consequent upon Sunday roast beef--by the
+intelligence that Mrs. William Shanahan wanted to speak to me.  Mrs.
+Shanahan was a fair freckled woman, with a loud voice and a red face
+and the reputation of ruling Walkin' Aisy with a rod of iron.  It
+appeared that Walkin' Aisy was confined to his bed; that he had had a
+reel in his head after getting home on Friday, and that whatever work
+it was that young gentleman gave him to do, he wasn't the better of it.
+
+"And he was as wake in himself and as troubled in his mind as that he
+couldn't walk to Mass.  I told him he should mind the chickens while
+I'd be out, and when I came in the dog had three of me chickens dead on
+the floor, and where was himself, only back in the room, and he
+kneeling there with the two hands up, sayin' his prayers!  'What ails
+ye?' says I, 'ye old gommoch, that ye'd let the dog kill me chickens?'
+'Sure, I was sayin' me prayers,' says he; 'That the Lord mightn't hear
+your prayers!' says I.  God forgive me, I had to say it!"
+
+I recalled her to the question of the chimneys, pointing out that the
+gable chimney was half down, and could not be left as it was.
+
+To this Mrs. Walkin' Aisy replied at great length that William's father
+had given him an advice not to go in it, and that the father was dark
+these scores of years, and it was what he blamed for it was the work he
+done in Shreelane House in the time of the Famine.  It was after that
+the sight went bandy with him.
+
+She declined to offer any opinion as to when Walkin' Aisy would return
+to work, and withdrew, leaving me to consider my position under the
+Employers' Liability Act in the event of her husband's demise, and to
+wish, not for the first time, that Andrew (now strolling at his ease
+with Miss Longmuir, reviewing a course for the paper-chase), had been
+at Jericho, or any other resort of the superfluous, before he
+interfered with the tranquil progress of the chimneys towards
+dissolution.
+
+There were strange lapses at dinner,--delays, omissions, disasters, and
+Julia the parlourmaid had a trembling hand and a general suggestion of
+nerve-storm.  After dinner it was reported to Philippa that Anthony was
+not well, and after a prolonged absence she returned with the
+information that he had had a nightmare, and that there was a rumour in
+the house that all the servants were going to give warning the
+following morning.  Their reason for this was obscure, but was somehow
+connected with Mrs. Walkin' Aisy's visit, and the fact that the
+swing-door leading to the turf-house had opened and shut twice, of its
+own volition.  We did not mention these matters to our guests, and
+retired to rest in perturbation.  I admit that at some time during the
+night, which was a still one, I heard the turf-house door groan on its
+hinges, and slam.  I went downstairs and found nothing; it was
+certainly unusual, however, that Bob, the red setter, had abandoned his
+lair in the smoking-room, and was spending the night on the mat outside
+my dressing-room door.
+
+Next morning Philippa, considering that a thrust was better than a
+parry, held a court of enquiry in the lower regions, and, according to
+her own report, spoke seriously on the grave responsibility incurred by
+those who frightened other people about nonsense.  Julia's version of
+the proceedings, I heard at a later date.  She said that "the Misthress
+spoke to us lovely, and the Priest couldn't speak better than her.  She
+told us that the divils in hell wasn't worse than us."
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+It has been said of Ireland that the inevitable never happens, and that
+the impossible invariably occurs.  When on Monday morning I learned
+that Flurry was to be one of the hares, and beheld him mounted on his
+best horse, as covered with bags as a postman on Christmas Day, I
+recalled the epigram.  Another confirmation of the law of the
+unexpected was the fact that Meg Longmuir, on the "maroan" pony, was
+his fellow hare, very smart, much elated, and quite unaware that she
+had been substituted for Sally Knox at the last moment, in order that
+she might be as a millstone hung round the neck of Flurry.  That this
+arrangement was not what Captain Larpent had desired was sufficiently
+apparent to the naked eye: why Flurry submitted to it was less obvious.
+
+About a dozen riders had been whipped up to take part in this
+preposterous affair, and were standing about on the grass in front of
+Shreelane, cutting up the turf as much as the hardness of the ground
+would permit, and making as much noise as a pack of hounds at feeding
+time.  The April sun glared hot, the better part of a north-easterly
+gale was blowing, the horses had over-eaten themselves with the bread
+of idleness, and were fat and frisky.
+
+"Is he any good?" said Flurry to me in a low voice, with his eye on
+Andrew, who was sitting, shrouded in gloom and remoteness, on the
+chestnut horse.
+
+"Ask Miss Longmuir," I said.  "She was schooling with him on Saturday."
+
+"I'll have plenty to do minding her, without asking her questions that
+she couldn't answer," returned Flurry.  He resumed his survey of
+Andrew.  "I wonder will he be able to hold that horse in a snaffle?  He
+catches hold an odd time."
+
+"Stand by!" said Doctor Hickey, his watch in his hand.  "Fifteen
+seconds more before the hares start!"
+
+"Well, if Larpent goes as big as he talks, he'll do," said Flurry,
+gathering up his reins.
+
+The ten minutes of grace ebbed slowly away, and preposterous though I
+still held the affair to be, I do not deny that I was aware of an
+inward simmering of impatience.
+
+"I'll have the face worn off my watch looking at it if you don't let us
+start soon!" said Miss Larkie McRory to Hickey.
+
+She was mounted on a long-legged animal that had been summarised by
+Flurry as "the latter end of a car-horse," and was certainly in need of
+all the time it could get.
+
+"Don't excite yourself now, or I'll be having to order you a cooling
+draught!" returned the Doctor, but I perceived that he, in common with
+everyone else, was edging his horse towards the point of departure.
+
+"Go!"
+
+In the riot of the break-away, I was able to think of nothing but of
+keeping Daniel from bucking me over his head, but during the hustle at
+the avenue gates I observed Andrew riding off Bernard, and getting to
+the front with pale and ferocious determination.  The "scent" took us
+along the road; we followed it over a stony bank and across two fields,
+at steeplechase pace, and then it ceased.  By this time any lingering
+sense of absurdity had ceased also.  We cast ourselves feverishly, like
+hounds; we galloped great circles; someone found the paper again, and
+yelled like a maniac.  We all yelled in response, a variety of yells,
+from "Tally Ho" to "Cooee," as, like Bedlam let loose, we rushed to the
+discoverer.  We were up on high land now, and the wind was whirling in
+our ears, snatching our voices away to infinity, and blowing up the
+temperatures of horses and riders like a bellows.  It had caught away
+the torn paper and flung it to leeward, into furze brakes, against the
+sides of the banks, and checks were many, and the horses, convinced
+that the hounds were somewhere ahead, pulled double.  In the bare
+fields, with their scanty April grass, everything showed up; we were
+deceived by white stones, by daisies, by dandelion puff-balls, by
+goose-feathers; most of all we were deceived by country-people, whom, I
+have no doubt, Flurry had instructed to mislead us.
+
+We had had a long check, consequent on a false trail, when, three
+fields away, Andrew held up his hat.
+
+"Look at him now, running mute!" giggled Sally Knox in my ear, as we
+battered down a road.  "He's too cross to shout.  He's frantic because
+he's not the hare, and Meg Longmuir was sent with Flurry!  And poor
+Flurry, who's going such a nice safe line!"
+
+"I suppose we may thank Miss Longmuir for the safe line?" I responded
+with some difficulty, because Daniel was enjoying himself on the road,
+according to the idiotic manner of horses.
+
+"No!  You may thank the chestnut horse!" ejaculated Flurry Knox's wife,
+as she hoisted out of the road over a loose wall.
+
+Remembering that Andrew was intended to buy the chestnut horse, the
+deduction was a simple one.  It was also quite clear that,
+disappointing as it might be, and contrary to the most cherished
+convention, Andrew was going as big as he talked, and even bigger.
+
+"'Them that's in love is like no one'!" I quoted to Mrs. Flurry, as
+Captain Larpent, taking the shortest way to a drift of paper on a
+hillside, charged a tall, furze-tufted fence, and got over with a
+scramble.  We followed, less heroically, by a gap, and ascended the
+hill, with the torn paper scurrying in front of us in the gusty wind.
+We had now been going for thirty-five minutes, and were all, horses and
+riders, something blown; Miss Larkie's car-horse could have been heard
+down-wind for half a mile, and I would have backed Daniel to out-roar
+any lion in the den.
+
+Nothing but the checks held us together.  Doctor Hickey, and Irving,
+the District Inspector, were taking the matter seriously, and were
+riding hard to catch Andrew, for the honour of the country.  Bernard
+Shute and two or three other heavy-weights were afoot, dragging their
+dripping horses over a bank with an up-hill take off; Miss McRory and
+the car-horse were making an extremely gradual progress in the rear,
+and Philippa had pulled back to give her leads, with an unselfishness
+that was not only futile, but was also a reproach to me and my
+fellow-men.
+
+We had been going in a big ring, and from the top of the hill we could
+again see Shreelane, below us among its trees.  It was there also that
+we caught the first sight of the hares, now heading for home and
+safety.  The wind had strengthened to half a gale, and the wild and
+composite yell with which the hounds viewed their quarry was blown back
+into their throats.  The maroan pony had fulfilled her mission as a
+handicap; twice we saw Flurry dismount and pull down a gap; once, at a
+bank, he got behind her and whipped her over like a peg-top.  Another
+field took them to the high road.  A puff of white paper fluttered out,
+and Miss Longmuir looked back and flourished a defiant whip; they
+turned, and galloped in a cloud of dust along the road for Shreelane.
+
+It was not a nice hill to get down in a hurry, and I should think the
+chestnut horse dreams of it now, somewhere in the level English
+Midlands, after he has over-eaten himself on fat English oats.  For my
+part, I remembered a humble but useful path, that links a little group
+of cottages with the rest of the world.
+
+The paper lay thick on the road in the shelter of the fences; everyone
+began to ride for a finish, and after a quarter of a mile of pounding
+in the dust at the heel of the hunt, I considered that Daniel and I had
+satisfied the demands of honour, and ignobly turned in at the back way
+to the stable yard, permitting the chase to sweep on to the front gates
+without me.
+
+In the stable yard I found several objects of interest.  The hares were
+there, dismounted, very hot, and uncaptured; Mrs. Knox was there,
+seated in her phaeton; there was a cluster of servants at the back
+door; there were McRorys, leaning on bicycles; there was Cecilia Shute,
+in her motor, with unknown rank and fashion billowing in motor veils
+beside her.
+
+All were gazing at a mass of sooty bricks and shattered chimney-pots
+that lay, scattered wide, in and about the black dredgings of the
+turf-house well.
+
+"That's the gable chimney," said Flurry coolly; "it got tired of
+waiting for Walkin' Aisy.  We heard the roar of it as we came in the
+front gate!"  He turned his mail-bag upside down so that its ultimate
+dregs were blown far and wide.  "How did the chestnut horse go
+with----?"
+
+As if in reply, hoofs clattered outside the yard, and the white nose of
+the chestnut shot into the opening of the yard gate.  He plunged past
+me, with Andrew lying back and tugging at the snaffle.  The Shreelane
+yard was fairly spacious, but I began to think that the thing wasn't as
+funny as it looked.  The horse swerved at Mrs. Knox's phaeton, swerved
+again as Flurry turned him from his stable door with a flourish of the
+mail-bag.  Andrew wrenched his head straight for the open back gate,
+and might have got him out without disaster, had not the widespread
+ruin of the chimney intervened.  The chestnut once more tried to
+swerve, his legs went from under him, and he fell, striking fire from
+the cobble stones of the yard.  Andrew stuck to him to the last
+instant, but was shot clear, and was flung, head first, into the heap
+of stones and black mud.
+
+It seemed long, long hours between this catastrophe, and a sufficient
+subsidence of things in general, for me to be able, without inhumanity,
+to envisage a whisky and soda.  Old Mrs. Knox watched me with approval.
+
+"I'm tired of looking at young men drinking tea," she commented.  (It
+was Mrs. Knox's pleasing idiosyncrasy to look upon me as a young man.)
+"They were like a pack of curates at a school-feast!  Not that I was
+ever at a school-feast, thank God!" she added, with an abandoned
+chuckle.
+
+We were sitting in a corner of the dining-room, surrounded by empty
+cups and crumby plates; tides of tea and of talkers had ebbed and
+flowed, but Mrs. Knox had sat on--to hear my personal report of Andrew,
+she said.
+
+"Upon my honour, he escaped very well!  A dislocated shoulder is
+nothing, and the young lady is there to 'tend the wounded Deloraine!'"
+
+She paused, and put her head on one side, as if waiting for the
+prompter.  "How does it go?  'She thought some spirit of the sky had
+done the bold mosstrooper wrong!'"
+
+She paused again, and looked at me; the evening light shone on her
+spectacles, and made them impenetrable.
+
+"Now I'm going to give you a piece of advice; "'And I'll not take it!'
+says Major Yeates, R.M.!"
+
+I protested that I had said nothing of the kind.  She prodded me in the
+knee with a goblin finger.
+
+"_Close that well_!  Put on the flagstone, and seal it down again!"
+She fumbled in her shawls, and pulled out a thin old gold chain.
+"Here's the seal, the same one that my father sealed it with at the
+time of the Famine!"
+
+I said that I was ready to do anything that she told me, but it would
+be interesting to know why.
+
+Mrs. Knox detached the seal from her chain, to which it was knotted by
+something that I darkly suspected to be a bit of bootlace.  It was a
+cornelian seal, made in the grand manner; massively wrought, the gold
+smooth from age.
+
+"I daresay you never heard of Major Apollo Riggs?  He drove up to this
+house one fine day in a coach-and-four.  Next day the coach-and-four
+drove away, but Major Apollo Riggs was not in it!"
+
+"He found himself a success at Shreelane?" I suggested.
+
+"Not so much with his host as his hostess!" returned Mrs. Knox
+portentously.
+
+"A duel?" I asked.
+
+"He was never seen again, my dear!" replied Mrs. Knox.  (There are
+moments, in Ireland, when this term of affection is used not so much
+affectionately as confidentially.)
+
+At this point the door opened.  Mrs. Knox put the goblin finger on her
+lips, as Philippa, still in her habit, slid into the room.
+
+"The patient and Meg are extremely self-sufficing," she said, dropping
+into a chair.  "His face is turning all colours of the rainbow, and one
+eye has disappeared, but the other is full of expression and is fixed
+on Meg!"
+
+"There's not much colour about _you_," I said.  "You ought to have a
+whisky and soda."
+
+"Nonsense!" said Philippa, waving me away; "we've got most of the black
+stuff out of his hair; even his waistcoat pocket was full of it!  And
+bits of the torn paper had stuck to it, like confetti."
+
+"That suggests a wedding," I observed.
+
+"Quite," said Philippa.  "But the absurd thing was that one of the
+confetti--obviously a bit of those old letters that the children tore
+up--had the word 'Apollo' on it!  It was stuck on to him like a label."
+
+Mrs. Knox clasped her hands, and lay back in her chair.
+
+"I said it was, of course, a tribute to his beauty, but Meg was not at
+all amused.  She thought it was 'lèse majesté.'"
+
+"She'll get over that in time," I said, putting the seal in my pocket.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+WHEN I FIRST MET DR. HICKEY
+
+There was a wonderful chandelier in the hotel dining-room.  Fine bronze
+it was made of, with mermaids, and Tritons, and dolphins flourishing
+their tails up towards the dingy ceiling-paper, and beaked galleys, on
+whose prows sat six small lamps, with white china receptacles for
+paraffin, and smoky brown chimneys.  Gone were the brave days when each
+prow had borne a galaxy of tall wax candles; the chandelier might
+consider itself lucky in that it had even the paraffin lamps to justify
+its existence, and that it still hung from a ceiling, instead of
+sharing the last resting-place of its twin brother, in the bed of the
+tidal river under the hotel windows.
+
+James, the hotel waiter, knew the family history of the chandelier, as
+he knew that of most people and things in the county.  I commented upon
+it to a young gentleman with a pointed beard, who sat next to me at
+dinner, and said that it looked to me like Renaissance.  The young
+gentleman suggested, alternatively, that it looked more like bronze.  I
+did not dispute the point, but I think he found the subject precarious,
+as he turned to the young lady on his left, and I heard him embark upon
+a new theme.
+
+[Illustration: James.]
+
+"I was half dead with the toothache all day," he observed.
+
+The young lady replied sympathetically that toothache was a fright.
+
+"Well, indeed, that's true," said James, smoothly entering the
+conversation from behind my chair.  "I got my own share of it.  Sure
+there was one time I used to be roaring like a Banshee all night with
+it."
+
+"Were you so?" said the gentleman, with a wink at me.  "That must have
+been a long time ago, James."
+
+"Well, indeed, it is too, Doctor," replied James meditatively, "going
+on forty years, I daresay.  I went to Dublin, and I went to a great
+dentist that was in it that time, and he pulled all the teeth I had,
+and he gave me a new set entirely."
+
+"Oh, my!" said the young lady, "that must have been very expensive."
+
+"It was so," said James, not without pride.  "Twenty pounds I gave him."
+
+"That was awful," said the young lady, feelingly; "it was well to be
+you that had it to spend."
+
+"Well, it wasn't all out so bad," said James; "sure I only wore them a
+few times--I wouldn't be bothered with them, and a doctor that was a
+friend of mine gave me ten pounds for them."
+
+"I suppose they were a fit for a patient of his?" said the doctor.
+
+"They were a bad fit for me, anyway," returned James, glancing over his
+shoulder at the clattering operations of his two female subordinates,
+with the eye of the sergeant-major--the eye that always contains a
+grievance.  "I was a footman with the old Lord Garretmore that time.
+Sure that was where the chandelier came from.  A grand house it was,
+too--big slobs of marble on the tables, and gold legs under them, and
+ye'd bog to the knees in the carpets.  Well, it was the first night
+after me getting the teeth, there was a gentleman stayed for dinner,
+and he was to go away by the night train.  Forty horses were in the
+stables, and there wasn't one but was out at grass, and I had to go out
+beating the bushes for an old mare that was round the house always,
+herself and her foal, to put her under the side car.  'Prua!  Prua!'
+says I, calling the mare in the dark, and with that the teeth lepped
+out of my mouth, with respects to you!"
+
+"Oh, fie!" said the mother of the young lady.
+
+"What did you do then, James?" inquired the Doctor.
+
+"I took the white tie off me, and I tied it to the bush that was next
+me, for a token, and 'twas that way I got them again the next morning,
+thanks be to God."
+
+Having concluded his story, James started on a perfunctory tour of the
+table with the wine card.  He stopped to pull the turf fire together,
+and, with a furtive eye at the glass over the chimney-piece, he
+rearranged the long lock of hair that draped his bald pate.  It was
+dyed, of that peculiar shade of chestnut that disdains subterfuge, and
+the fact and its suggestions were distressing where an old servant was
+concerned; so also was the manner in which he hobbled on his heels.
+
+"His walk's full of corns," said the young doctor, eyeing him not
+without sympathy.  "He's a great old character.  I believe they keep
+him here to talk to the tourists."
+
+It is a melancholy fact that in Ireland, in these later days,
+"characters" have become aware of their position, and palpably live up
+to their reputation.  But James was in a class of his own.
+
+I said didactically, even combatively, that "characters" were free and
+easy, but that James was easy without being free.
+
+"I'll bet he's not easy in his feet, anyhow!" said the Doctor brutally.
+"Have you any more soup there, James?"
+
+The mother of the young lady, who had hitherto preserved a silence,
+broken only by the audible assimilation of her soup, here laid down her
+spoon and said in cryptic disparagement:
+
+"Tin!"
+
+"Well, I'd say it was the best we had yet," said the Doctor.  "I'd
+undertake to pull a puppy through distemper with it."
+
+"That's the soup she has always for th'assizes," said James.  "Grand
+soup it is, and I declare to ye, she makes it out of egg shells and
+every old rubbish!"
+
+The young lady's mother emitted a short laugh, but her empty soup-plate
+told heavily against her.
+
+The meal wore slowly on.  A sea fish, of a genus unknown to me, and
+amazingly endowed with bones, was consumed in distracted silence.
+
+"I hear you have a fish shop opened in Ballinagar, Mrs. M'Evoy,"
+remarked the Doctor, taking his last fish bone out of action with
+professional adroitness, and addressing the mother of the young lady,
+"That's very up-to-date.  There wasn't one I met from Ballinagar but
+was bragging of it."
+
+"It was the Hoolahanes that had it," said Mrs. M'Evoy.  "It's closed."
+
+"Oh dear, why so?" said the Doctor.  "Why did they do that, I wonder?"
+
+"They said that morning, noon, and night people were bothering them for
+fish," returned Mrs. M'Evoy, to whom this triumph of the artistic
+temperament presented no exceptional feature.
+
+"Unless it might be on a fast day, I'd never ask to taste a bit of
+fish," remarked James, giving a helping hand to the conversation.
+"There was a man I knew from this place got his death in Liverpool from
+a bit of fish.  It stuck to the upper gum.  'Bill,' says he to the one
+that was with him, 'so help me God,' says he, 'I'm dyin',' says he; and
+sure that's how he met his death!  It was in some grand hotel he was,
+and he was too shy to give the puff to send out the bit."
+
+"I'd like to send that to the 'B.M.J.'," said the Doctor gravely.
+"Maybe you could give me the man's name, James?"
+
+"There was them that could swear to it," said James, depositing a
+syphon on the table in a determined manner, "but they were before your
+day, Doctor Hickey."
+
+"How young he is!" said Miss M'Evoy archly.  "Don't be flattering him,
+James."
+
+"Indeed I'll not flatter him," returned James, "there's plenty doing
+that."
+
+It was at about this point that a dish containing three roast ducks was
+placed in front of me.  Circumstances had decreed that I sat at the end
+of the table; it was my task to deal with the ducks, and during the
+breathless and steamy struggle that ensued, I passed out of the
+conversation, which, indeed, had resolved itself into a more personal
+affair between Dr. Hickey and Miss M'Evoy.
+
+It was somewhere in the reposeful period that came with the cheese,
+that Dr. Hickey ordered a bottle of port, of which he very handsomely
+invited the ladies and me to partake.  He leaned back in his chair.
+
+"Was this in the cellar the time of the flood?" he said, putting down
+his glass.  "I don't mean Noah's flood, James; you mightn't remember
+that; but the time the river came up in the town here."
+
+"If it was Noah's flood itself," said James, instantly accepting
+combat, "it couldn't get into our cellars.  But, faith, it was up in
+this room you're sitting in, and I had to get up on the table from it,
+and it ruz to the table, and I had to hang out of the chandelier, and a
+boat came into the room then and took me out.  Sure that was the time
+that the porpoise came up the river, with the dint of the flood, and
+she was in it for a week, in front of the hotel."
+
+"In compliment to the visitors, I suppose?" said the Doctor.  "And what
+happened her, James?"
+
+"She was in it till a whale came up the river," replied James, with the
+simplicity of Holy Writ, "and b'Jove he banished her!"
+
+"It's a wonder you'd let him treat a lady that way, James," said Dr.
+Hickey.
+
+It was still twilight when we left the dining-room, and strayed to the
+open hall door, and out into the September evening.  In the east a
+rose-pink moon was rising in lavender haze, and a faint wind blew from
+it; the subtle east wind of September, warmed by its journey across the
+cornfields, turf-scented by the bogs.  There was a narrow garden
+between the hotel and the river, a place where were new and
+already-neglected flower-beds, and paths heavy with coarse river
+gravel, and grass that had been cut, not too recently, with a scythe.
+A thatched summer-house completed the spasmodic effort of the hotel to
+rise to smartness.  The West of Ireland cannot be smart, nor should any
+right-minded person desire that it should be so.
+
+Dr. Hickey and I sat and smoked on the parapet wall above the river,
+while the slated and whitewashed town darkened into mystery.  Little
+lights came slowly out, and behind the town the grey shape of Dreelish
+mountain lowered in uncompromising abruptness, a brooding presence,
+felt rather than seen.  In the summer-house James was lighting a
+Chinese lantern, of a somewhat crumpled and rheumatic outline.
+
+"Well, now, that's a great notion!" said Dr. Hickey, with the lethargic
+and pessimistic humour of his type.  "That'll be in the
+prospectus--'Hotel grounds illuminated every night.'  I wonder did they
+buy that at the Jumble Sale after the Fancy Fair in the Town Hall?"
+
+We sat there, and the moon and the round red Chinese lantern looked at
+each other across the evening, and had a certain resemblance, and I
+reflected on the fact that an Irishman is always the critic in the
+stalls, and is also, in spirit, behind the scenes.
+
+"Look at James now," said the Doctor.  "He's inviting the ladies out to
+have coffee in the summer-house.  That's very fashionable.  I suppose
+we should go there too."
+
+We sat with Mrs. and Miss M'Evoy in the summer-house, and drank
+something that was unearthly black in the red light, and was singularly
+unsuggestive of coffee.  The seats were what is known as "rustic," and
+had aggressive knobs in unexpected places; the floor held the
+invincible dampness of the West, yet the situation was not
+disagreeable.  At the other side of the river men were sitting on a
+wall, and talking, quietly, inexhaustibly; now and then a shout of
+laughter broke from one of them, like a flame from a smouldering fire.
+
+"These lads are waiting to go back on the night mail," said the Doctor;
+"you wouldn't think they're up since maybe three this morning to come
+in to the fair."
+
+Here a railway whistle made a thin bar of sound somewhere out under the
+low moon, that had now lifted herself clear of the haze.  A voice
+called from the hill-side:
+
+"Hora-thu!  Tommeen!  Let yee be coming on!"
+
+The men tumbled on to the road, and hurried, heavy-footed, in the
+direction of the station.
+
+"Sure, they've half an hour yet, the creatures," said Mrs. M'Evoy.
+
+"They have, and maybe an hour before they have the pigs shunted," said
+James, re-entering with a plate of biscuits, adorned with pink and
+white sugar.
+
+"Ah! what signifies half an hour here or there on this line!" said Dr.
+Hickey.  "I'm told there was a lady travelling on it last week, and she
+had a canary in a cage, and the canary got loose and flew out of the
+window, and by George, the lady pulled the communication cord, and
+stopped the train!"
+
+"Well, now, she showed her sense," said Mrs. M'Evoy, with an utterance
+slightly muffled in pink biscuit.
+
+"She and the guard went then trying to catch the canary," continued Dr.
+Hickey, "and he'd sit till they'd get near him, and then he'd fly on
+another piece.  Everyone that was in the train was hanging out of it,
+and betting on it, from one carriage to another, and some would back
+the lady and some would back the bird, and everyone telling them what
+to do."
+
+"It's a pity _you_ weren't in it," said Miss M'Evoy, "they'd have been
+all right then."
+
+"It was that bare bit of bog near Bohirmeen," pursued Dr. Hickey,
+without a stagger, "not a tree in it.  'If he have a fly left in him at
+all,' says a chap out of a Third Smoker, 'ye'll get him in Mike
+Doogan's bush.'  That was the only bush in the country."
+
+"'Twas true for him," said James.
+
+"Well, they got him in the bush," proceeded Dr. Hickey, "singing away
+for himself; but they had some trouble crossing the drains.  I'm told
+the guard said the lady lepped like a horse!"
+
+"You had it right, all to the singing," commented Mrs. M'Evoy,
+advancing as it were to the footlights.  "I have the little bird
+upstairs this minute, and she never sang a note yet!"
+
+Mrs. M'Evoy here permitted herself to subside into fat and deep-seated
+chuckles, and Miss M'Evoy, James, and I gave way suitably to our
+feelings.
+
+"Well, now, I thought it was a nice idea, the canary to be singing,"
+said Dr. Hickey, emerging from the situation as from a football
+scrimmage, in which he had retained possession of the ball.  "The next
+time I tell the story, I'll leave that out, and I can say that the lady
+that lepped like a horse was Mrs. M'Evoy.  They'll believe me then."
+
+"Why wouldn't you say the canary was an eagle?" said Miss M'Evoy.
+"There used to be plenty eagles in these mountains back here."
+
+"Well, indeed, I might too," said Dr. Hickey.  "I remember it was
+somewhere in these parts that an uncle of mine was staying one time,
+and a man came to the hotel with an eagle to sell to the tourists.  My
+uncle was like Mrs. M'Evoy here, he was very fond of birds; and the man
+said the eagle'd be a lovely pet.  Whatever way it was, he bought it."
+He paused to light a cigarette, and James pretended to collect the
+coffee cups.
+
+"He gave the eagle to the Boots to mind for him," resumed the Doctor,
+"and the Boots put it into an empty bedroom.  It wasn't more than seven
+o'clock next morning when my uncle was wakened up, and the waiter came
+in.  'There's a man in the kitchen, your honour,' says he, 'and he has
+a great fighting aigle, and he says he'll fight your honour's aigle in
+the passage.'  They had a grand fight between the two o' them in the
+spare room, and in the end my uncle's eagle went up the chimney, and
+the man's eagle went out through the glass in the window.  My uncle had
+a nice bill to pay for all that was broken in the room, and in the end
+he gave the eagle to the Zoo."
+
+"Faith, he did not!" shouted James suddenly.  "He left him stuck in the
+chimbley!  And sure it was I that got him out, and meself that sold him
+to a gentleman that was going to Ameriky.  Sure, I was the waiter!"
+
+Dr. Hickey threw himself back in his rustic chair.
+
+"Holy smoke!  This is no place for me," he said; "every story I have is
+true in spite of me."
+
+Soon afterwards the ladies went to bed, and Dr. Hickey and I smoked on
+for a time.  He explained to me that he was here as "locum" for a
+friend of his; it wasn't much of a catch, but he was only just after
+passing for his Medical, and you'd nearly go as locum for a tinker's
+dog after you had three years' grinding in Dublin put in.  This was a
+God-forsaken sort of a hole, not a hound within fifty miles, nor anyone
+that would know a hound if they saw one, but the fishing was middling
+good.  From this point the conversation flowed smoothly into channels
+of sport, and the dual goals of Dr. Hickey's ambition were divulged to
+me.
+
+"There was a chap I was at school with--Knox his name was--that has a
+little pack of foxhounds down in the South, and he's as good as
+promised me I'm to whip in to him if I can get the Skebawn Dispensary
+that's vacant now, and I might have as good a chance of it as another."
+
+My own ambitions were also, at the moment, dual, being matrimonial,
+with a Resident Magistracy attached, but I did not feel it necessary to
+reveal them.  I mentioned that I was having a day's fishing here on my
+way to Donegal to shoot grouse, but did not add that Philippa, to whom
+I was newly engaged, was implicated in the grouse party, still less
+that it was my intention to meet her the next afternoon at Carrow Cross
+Junction, an hour away, and proceed with her to the home of her uncle,
+an hour or so further on.
+
+"You might have three hours, or maybe four, to wait at Carrow Cross,"
+said Dr. Hickey, as if tracking my thought; "why wouldn't you drive out
+to the Sports at Carrow Bay?  It's only four miles, and there's a
+Regatta there to-morrow, and when the tide goes out they have races on
+the sands.  I believe there's a trotting-match too, and an exhibition
+of crochet."
+
+It did not seem to me that I wanted to go to Carrow Bay, but it was not
+necessary to say so.
+
+Trucks at the station were banging into their neighbours, with much
+comment from the engine; I thought of Tommeen and his comrades, up
+since 3 A.M., and still waiting to get home, and it suggested the
+privileges of those who could go to bed.
+
+It was over a whisky and soda in the heavily reminiscent atmosphere of
+the smoking-room that Dr. Hickey told me he was going to take the
+ladies to the Sports, and mentioned that there would be a train at
+eleven, and a spare seat on the car from Carrow Cross.  It required no
+special effort to see the position that I was to occupy in relation to
+Mrs. M'Evoy; I followed the diplomatic method of my country; I looked
+sympathetic, and knew certainly that I should not be there.
+
+I leaned out of my window that night, to look at the river, with the
+moon on it, hustling over the shallows, and thought of the porpoise,
+who had been so unchivalrously banished by the whale.  I also wondered
+when the English post got in.  I was presently aware of a head
+projecting from a window just below, and a female voice said, as if in
+continuance of a conversation:
+
+"We should coax James for the cold duck to take with us."
+
+"That's a good idea," replied the rotund voice of Mrs. M'Evoy; "we'll
+get nothing out there that a Christian could eat, and there might be
+that gentleman too."  (That gentleman closed one eye.)  "Come in now,
+Ally!  There's an east wind coming in that would perish the crows."
+
+The guillotine slam of the sash followed.  The river warbled and washed
+through the stillness; its current was not colder, more clear, than
+"that gentleman's" resolve that he would not grace the luncheon party
+at Carrow Bay Sports.
+
+I breakfasted late and in solitude, ministered to by one of the female
+underlings of James; the voice of James himself, I heard distantly, in
+war and slaughtering, somewhere behind the scenes.  The letter that I
+wanted had not failed me, and I smoked a very honeyed cigarette over it
+in the garden afterwards.  A glimpse of Dr. Hickey at the hotel door in
+a palpably new tie, and of Mrs. and Miss M'Evoy in splendour in the
+hall, broke into my peace.  I quietly but unhesitatingly got over the
+wall of the garden, and withdrew by way of the river bank.
+
+When the 11 o'clock train had left I returned to the halcyon stillness
+of the hotel; my own train left at 1.30; it was a time favourable, and
+almost attractive, for letter writing.  As I wrote, I heard the voice
+of James demanding in thunder where was Festus O'Flaherty, and why
+hadn't he the chickens plucked.  A small female voice replied that the
+Doctor and the ladies had left their lunch after them, and that Festus
+had run up to the station to try would he overtake them with it, and
+the thrain was gone.
+
+"And if it was themselves they left after them," retorted James, still
+in thunder, "what was that to him?"
+
+To this conundrum no answer was attempted; I bestowed upon Mrs. M'Evoy
+some transient compassion, and she and her company departed, hull down,
+below the horizon of my thoughts.
+
+A few hours afterwards, I trod the solitudes of Carrow Cross Junction,
+and saw the train that had brought me there bend like a caterpillar
+round a spur of hill, and disappear.  When I looked round again the
+little bookstall was shuttered up, and the bookstall lady was vanishing
+down a flight of steps; the porter had entrenched himself in the goods
+store; the stationmaster was withdrawn from human ken with the
+completeness only achievable by his kind.  I was suspended in space for
+three hours, and the indifference of my fellow-creatures was
+unconcealed.  A long walk to nowhere and back again was the obvious
+resource of the destitute.
+
+The town of Carrow Cross lay in a hollow below the station, with the
+blue turf smoke stagnant above its muddle of slate and thatched roofs;
+I skirted it, and struck out into the country.  I did not find it
+attractive.  Potato fields in September are not looking their best;
+there were no trees, and loose, crooked walls overran the landscape.
+The peak of Dreelish mountain was visible, but the dingy green country
+rose high between me and it, like the cope on the neck of a priest.  I
+walked for an hour; I sat on a wall and read Philippa's letter again,
+and found, with a shock, that I had only one cigarette left.  A fatuous
+fear of missing the train turned me back in the direction of the
+station, slightly hungry, and profoundly bored.  I came into the town
+by a convent, and saw the nuns walking flowingly in twos, under
+chestnut trees; asceticism in its most pictorial aspect, with the
+orange leaves and the blue September haze, and the black robes and
+white headgear.  I wondered how they managed to go on walking neatly to
+nowhere and back again with such purpose, and if they felt as jaded as
+I, and as little enlivened by the environs of Carrow Cross.
+
+The town was an unprepossessing affair of two or three streets,
+whitewash and thatch squeezed between green and gold pubs, like old
+country-women among fashionable daughters.  Everything was closed; as I
+looked along the empty street an outside car drawn by a dun pony turned
+into it at high speed, the pony forging with a double click-clack.  As
+the car swung towards me some one flourished a stick, some one else a
+red parasol.
+
+"We got a bit tired waiting for the sports," Dr. Hickey said, as he
+assisted Mrs. M'Evoy to alight at a house labelled Lynch's Railway
+Hotel, in royal blue; "it seemed that the tide wasn't going out as fast
+as the Committee expected.  It might be another hour or more before the
+race-course would be above water, and we thought we might as well come
+on here and get something to eat at the Hotel."
+
+"It has the appearance of being closed," said Mrs. M'Evoy, in a voice
+thinned by famine.
+
+"That might be a fashion it has in the afternoon, when themselves does
+be at their dinner," said the car-driver.
+
+The front door was certainly closed, and there was neither knocker nor
+bell, nothing but a large well-thumbed keyhole.  Dr. Hickey hammered
+with his stick; nothing happened.
+
+"They're gone to the races so," said the car-driver.
+
+In the silence that followed it seemed that I could hear the flagging
+beat of Mrs. M'Evoy's heart.
+
+"Wait awhile," said Dr. Hickey; "the window isn't bolted!"
+
+The sill was no more than two feet from the ground, the sash yielded to
+pressure and went up; Dr. Hickey dived in, and we presently heard him
+assail the front door from inside.
+
+It was locked, and its key had apparently gone to the races.  I
+followed Dr. Hickey by way of the window, so did Miss M'Evoy; we pooled
+our forces, and drew her mamma after us through the opening of two foot
+by three, steadily, as the great god Pan drew the pith from the reed.
+
+We found ourselves in a small sitting-room, almost filled by a table;
+there was a mature smell of cabbage, but there was nothing else to
+suggest the presence of food.  We proceeded to the nether regions,
+which were like a chapter in a modern realistic novel, and found a
+sickly kitchen fire, the horrid remains of the Lynch family breakfast,
+an empty larder, and some of the home attire of the race-goers, lying,
+as the tree lies, where it fell.
+
+"There's a sort of a butcher in the town," said Dr. Hickey, when the
+search-parties had converged on each other, empty-handed, "maybe we
+could cook something----"
+
+"If it was even a bit of salt pork--" said Mrs. M'Evoy, seizing the
+poker and attacking the sleepy fire.
+
+"Let you get some water, and I'll wash the plates," said Miss M'Evoy to
+Dr. Hickey.
+
+I looked at my watch, saw that I had still an hour and a half to play
+with, and departed to look for the butcher.
+
+Neither by sign-board nor by shop front did the Carrow Cross butcher
+reveal himself.  I was finally investigating a side street, where the
+houses were one-storeyed, and thatched, and wholly unpromising, when a
+heavy running step, that might have been a horse's, thundered behind
+me, and a cumbrous pale woman, with the face of a fugitive, plunged
+past me, and burst in at a cottage door like a mighty blast of wind.  A
+little girl, in tears, thudded barefooted after her.  The big woman
+turned in the doorway, and shrieked to me.
+
+"Thim's madmen, from th' Asylum!  Come inside from them, for God's
+sake!"
+
+I looked behind me up the street, and saw a small, decorous party of
+men, flanked by a couple of stalwart keepers in uniform.  One of the
+men, a white-faced being in seedy black, headed them, playing an
+imaginary fiddle on his left arm, and smiling secretly to himself.
+Whether the lady had invited me to her house as a protector, or as a
+refugee, I did not know: she herself had vanished, but through the
+still open door I saw, miraculously, a fragment or two of meat, hanging
+in the interior.  I had apparently chanced upon the home of the Carrow
+Cross butcher.
+
+A greasy counter and a chopping-block put the matter beyond doubt; I
+beat upon an inner door: a wail of terror responded, and then a muffled
+voice:
+
+"Come in under the bed to me, Chrissie, before they'd ketch ye!"
+
+There was nothing for it but to take from a hook a grey and white
+fragment that looked like bacon, place half-a-crown on the counter, and
+depart swiftly.
+
+"I gave a few of the Asylum patients leave to go to the Sports," said
+Dr. Hickey, a little later, when we were seated between the large bare
+table and the wall of the little sitting-room, with slices of fried
+pork weltering on our plates.  "I saw the fellow waltzing down the
+street.  Ah! he's fairly harmless, and they've a couple o' keepers with
+them anyway."
+
+"The only pity was that you left the half-crown," said Mrs. M'Evoy; "a
+shilling was too much for it."
+
+Mrs. M'Evoy was considerably flushed, and had an effective black smear
+on her forehead, but her voice had recovered its timbre.  There was a
+tin of biscuits on the table, there was a war-worn brown teapot, and
+some bottles of porter; it was now four hours since I had eaten
+anything; in spite of the cold and clear resolve of the night before, I
+was feeding, grossly yet enjoyably, with Dr. Hickey and his friends.
+
+"This is a Temperance Hotel for the past year," remarked Dr. Hickey,
+delicately knocking off the head of a porter bottle with the
+sitting-room poker.  "That's why it was upstairs I found the porter.  I
+suppose they took the corkscrew to the Sports with them."
+
+"How did they lose the license at all?" said Mrs. M'Evoy; "I thought
+there wasn't a house in Carrow Cross but had one."
+
+"It was taken from them over some little mistake about selling
+potheen," replied Dr. Hickey, courteously applying the broken neck of
+the bottle to Mrs. M'Evoy's tumbler.  "The police came to search the
+house, and old Lynch, that was in bed upstairs, heard them, and threw a
+two-gallon jar of potheen out of the top back window, to break it.  The
+unlucky thing was that there was a goose in the yard, and it was on the
+goose it fell."
+
+"The creature!" said Miss M'Evoy, "was she killed?"
+
+"Killed to the bone, as they say," replied the Doctor; "but the trouble
+was, that on account of falling on the goose the jar wasn't broken, so
+the bobbies got the potheen."
+
+"Supposing they summons you now for the porter!" said Mrs. M'Evoy,
+facetiously, casting her eye through the open window into the bare
+sunshiny street.
+
+"They'll have summonses enough at Carrow Bay to keep them out of
+mischief," returned Dr. Hickey.  "It's a pity now, Major, you didn't
+patronise the Sports.  They might have put you on judging the cakes
+with Mrs. M'Evoy."
+
+"Why then, the one they put on with me was the man they had judging the
+vegetables," said Mrs. M'Evoy, after a comfortable pull at the
+contraband porter.  "'That's a fine weighty cake,' says me lad,
+weighing a sponge-cake on his hand.  'We'll give that one the prize.'"
+
+"I wish you brought it here with you," said her daughter, "as weighty
+as it was."
+
+"They put _me_ judging the row-boats," said Dr. Hickey, "but after the
+third race I had to give up, and put five stitches in one of the men
+that was in the mark-boat."
+
+I said that the mark-boat ought to have been a fairly safe place.
+
+"Safe!" said Dr. Hickey.  "It was the hottest corner in the course.  I
+thought they were sunk twice, but they might have been all right if
+they hadn't out-oars and joined in the race on the second round.  They
+got in first, as it happened, and it was in the course of the protest
+that I had to put in the stitches.  It was a good day's sport, as far
+as it went."
+
+"Ah, there's no life in a Regatta without a band," said Miss M'Evoy
+languidly, with her elbows on the table and her cup in her hand.  "Now
+Ringsend Regatta's sweet!"
+
+"I'm afraid Miss M'Evoy didn't enjoy herself to-day," said Dr. Hickey.
+"Of course she's used to so much attention in Dublin----"
+
+"It's kind of you to say that," said Miss M'Evoy; "I'm sure you're
+quite an authority on Dublin young ladies."
+
+"Is it me?" said Dr. Hickey; "I'd be afraid to say Boo to a goose.  But
+I've a brother that could tell you all about them.  He's not as shy as
+I am."
+
+"He must be a great help and comfort to you," returned Miss M'Evoy.
+
+"He's very romantic," said Dr. Hickey, "and poetical.  He was greatly
+struck with two young ladies he met at the Ringsend Regatta last month.
+He mistook their address, someway, and when he couldn't find them, what
+did he do but put a poem in the papers--the Agony Column, y'know----"
+
+"We'd like to hear that," said Mrs. M'Evoy, putting her knife into the
+salt with unhurried dexterity.
+
+"I forget it all, only the last verse," said Dr. Hickey, "it went this
+way:
+
+  'You are indeed a charming creature,
+  Perfect alike in form and feature,
+  I love you and none other.
+  Oh, Letitia--Here's your Mother!'"
+
+
+As Dr. Hickey, his eyes modestly on his plate, concluded the ode, I
+certainly intercepted a peculiar glance between the ladies.
+
+"I call that very impident," said Mrs. M'Evoy, winking at me.
+
+"It was worth paying a good deal to put that in print!" commented Miss
+M'Evoy unkindly.  "But that was a lovely Regatta," she continued, "and
+the music and the fireworks were grand, but the society's very mixed.
+Do you remember, M'ma, what happened to Mary and me that evening, the
+time we missed you in the dark?"
+
+"Indeed'n I do," said Mrs. M'Evoy, her eyes still communing with her
+daughter's, "and I remember telling you it was the last evening I'd let
+you out of my sight."
+
+"It was a gentleman that picked up my umbrella," began Miss M'Evoy
+artlessly.
+
+Dr. Hickey dropped his knife on the floor, and took some time to pick
+it up.
+
+"And he passed the remark to me that it was a nice evening," went on
+Miss M'Evoy.  "'It is,' said I.  Now, M'ma, why wouldn't I give him a
+civil answer?"
+
+"That's according to taste," said Mrs. M'Evoy.
+
+"Well indeed I didn't fancy his looks at all.  It was pitch dark only
+for the fireworks, but I thought he had a nasty kind of a foreign look,
+and a little pointed beard on him too.  If you saw the roll of his eye
+when the green fire fell out of the rockets you'd think of
+Mephistopheles----"
+
+"There's no doubt Mephistopheles was one of Shakespeare's grandest
+creations," said Dr. Hickey hurriedly.  His eyes besought my aid.  It
+struck me that this literary digression was an attempt to change the
+conversation.
+
+Miss M'Evoy resumed her narrative.
+
+"'That's a pretty flower you have in your button-hole,' said he.  'It
+is,' said I."
+
+"You didn't tell him a great deal he didn't know," said her mother.
+
+"'Maybe you might give it to me?' said he.  'Maybe I might not!' said
+I.  'And where do you live?' said he.  'Percy Place,' says Mary, before
+you could wink.  Anyone would have to believe her.  'Upon my soul,'
+said he, 'I'll have the pleasure of calling upon you.  Might I ask what
+your name is?'  'O'Rooney,' says Mary, 'and this is my cousin, Miss
+Letitia Gollagher.'  Well, when Mary said 'Gollagher,' I _burst!_"
+
+Miss M'Evoy here put down her cup, and to some slight extent repeated
+the operation.
+
+"I suppose the foreign gentleman told you his own name then?" said Dr.
+Hickey, whose complexion had warmed up remarkably.
+
+"He did not," said Miss M'Evoy; "but perhaps that was because he wasn't
+asked, and it was then M'ma came up.  I can tell you he didn't wait to
+be introduced!"
+
+"I have a sister-in-law living in Percy Place," said Mrs. M'Evoy,
+passing her handkerchief over her brow, and addressing no one in
+particular, "and it was some day last month she was telling me of a
+young man that was knocking at all the doors down the street, and she
+thought he was a Collector of some sort.  He came to her house too, and
+he told the girl he was looking for some ladies of the name of
+Gollagher or O'Rooney."
+
+She paused, and regarded Dr. Hickey.
+
+"I wonder did he find them?" asked Dr. Hickey, who was obviously being
+forced on to the ropes.
+
+"I thought you might be able to tell us that!" said Mrs. M'Evoy,
+delivering her knock-out blow with the suddenness that belongs to the
+highest walks of the art.
+
+Miss M'Evoy, with equal suddenness, uttered a long and strident yell,
+and lay back in her place, grasping my arm as she did so, in what I am
+convinced was wholly unconscious sympathy.  She and I were side by
+side, facing the window, and through the window, which, as I have
+mentioned, was wide open, I was aware of a new element in the situation.
+
+It was a figure in blue in the street outside; a soft and familiar
+blue, and it bore a parasol of the same colour.  The figure was at a
+standstill; and very blue, the burning blue of tropical heavens, were
+the eyes that met mine beneath the canopy of the parasol.  Even before
+my own had time to blink I foreknew that never, in time or in eternity,
+should I be able to make Philippa accept thoroughly my explanation.
+
+
+Philippa's explanation was extremely brief, and was addressed rather to
+the empty street of Carrow Cross than to me, as I crawled by her side.
+There had been, she said, half an hour to wait, and as I was not at the
+station--the blue eyes met mine for a steely moment--she had gone for a
+little walk.  She had met some horrid drunken men, and turned into
+another street to avoid them, and then----
+
+A brimming silence followed.  We turned up the road that led to the
+station.
+
+"There are those men again!" exclaimed Philippa, coming a little nearer
+to me.
+
+In front of us, deviously ascending the long slope, was the Asylum
+party; the keepers, exceedingly drunk, being assisted to the station by
+the Lunatics.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE BOSOM OF THE McRORYS
+
+Since the day when fate had shipwrecked us at the end of the Temple
+Braney shrubbery, and flung us, dripping, into the bosoms of the
+McRorys, we had been the victims of an indissoluble friendship with the
+family.  This fulfilled itself in many ways.
+
+Gratitude, what is known as Common Gratitude (which is merely a hollow
+compliance with the voice of conscience), impelled us to lunch Mr. and
+Mrs. McRory, heavily and elaborately (but without any one to meet
+them); to invite the whole family to a lawn-tennis party (and the whole
+family came); and, at other people's tennis parties, to fawn upon them
+(when it was no longer possible to elude them).  It was a despicable
+position, and had I at all foreseen, when the picnic sank at Temple
+Braney pier, that the result would have been dinner-parties, I should
+unhesitatingly have left Philippa to drown.
+
+The intimacies imposed by Common Gratitude had, under the healing hand
+of time, become less acute, and might, indeed, have ceased to affect
+us, had not fate again intervened, and cemented the family friendship
+in the most public way possible.  There befell a Harvest Festival in
+Skebawn Church, with a Bishop, and an Anthem, and a special collection.
+To it the McRorys, forsaking their own place of worship, came in power,
+and my wife, very superfluously, indicated to Mrs. McRory a seat in our
+pew.  The pew is a front one, and Mrs. McRory became at once a
+figure-head to the rest of the congregation--a buxom figure-head,
+upholstered tightly in royal blue satin, that paled the ineffectual
+fires of the pulpit dahlias, and shouted in a terrible major chord with
+the sunflowers in the east window.  She creaked mysteriously and
+rhythmically with every breath; a large gold butterfly, poised on an
+invisible spring, quivered and glittered above her bonnet.  It was
+while waiting for the service to begin that Philippa was inspired to
+whisper to Mrs McRory some information, quite immaterial, connected
+with the hymns.  The next moment I perceived that Mrs. McRory's
+butterfly had fixed its antennæ into some adjunct of my wife's hat that
+was at once diaphanous and sinewy, with the result that the heads of
+the two ladies were locked together.  A silent struggle ensued; the
+butterfly's grappling-irons held, so also did the hat-trimming, and
+Philippa and Mrs. McRory remained brow to brow in what seemed to be a
+prolonged embrace.  At this point Philippa showed signs of collapse;
+she said that Mrs. McRory's nose, glowing like a ruby within two inches
+of her own, made her hysterical.  I affected unconsciousness, while my
+soul thirsted for an axe with which to decapitate one or both of the
+combatants, and subsequently to run amok among the congregation, now,
+as the poet says, "abashlessly abandoned to delight."  The butterfly's
+vitals slowly uncoiled, and were drawn out into a single yet
+indomitable strand of gold wire; the Bishop was imminent, when a female
+McRory in the pew behind (known to the Fancy as "Larkie") intervened
+with what were, I believe, a pair of manicure scissors, and the
+incident closed.
+
+It was clear that our blood-brotherhood with the McRorys was
+foreordained and predestined.  We evaded two invitations to dinner, but
+a third was inescapable, even though an alarming intimacy was
+foreshadowed by the request that we should come "in a very quiet way."
+
+"Do they expect us to creep in in tennis shoes?" I demanded.
+
+"I think it only means a black tie," said Philippa, with the idea that
+she was soothing me.
+
+"If I have to go to a McRory Free-and-Easy, I shall not act as such," I
+returned, slamming myself into my dressing-room, and dragging forth
+ceremonial attire.
+
+As, with a docility that I was far from feeling, I followed my wife
+into the drawing-room at Temple Braney, and surveyed the semicircle of
+McRorys and unknown notabilities (summarised as "Friends from Dublin")
+that silently awaited us, I felt that neither freedom nor ease would be
+my lot.  But few things in life are quite as bad as one expects them to
+be--always excepting sea-sickness.  In its dreary circuit of the room,
+my eye met that of my old friend Miss Bobby Bennett, of the Curranhilty
+Hunt, niece of its Master, and consultant and referee in all its
+affairs.  My friendship with Miss Bennett was of an ideal nature; when
+we met, which was seldom, we were delighted to see one another; in the
+intervals we forgot one another with, I felt sure, an equal
+completeness.  Her social orbit was incalculable; she resembled a fox
+of whom I heard an earth-stopper say that you "couldn't tell any
+certain place where he wouldn't puck out."  Whether it was at
+Punchestown, or at a Skebawn Parish tea, or judging cakes and crochet
+at an Agricultural Show, wherever she appeared it was with the same air
+of being on top of the situation and of extracting the utmost from it.
+
+To me befell the onerous task of taking the Lady of the House in to
+dinner, but upon my other hand sat Miss Bennett (squired by a Friend
+from Dublin of apparently negligible quality), and before I had
+recovered from the soup--a hell-broth of liquid mustard that called
+itself mulligatawny--I found that to concentrate upon her was no more
+than was expected of me by both ladies.  Mrs. McRory's energies were
+indeed fully engrossed by the marshalling of a drove of heated females,
+who hurried stertorously and spasmodically round the table, driven as
+leaves before the wind by fierce signals from their trainer.  Opposite
+to me sat that daughter of the house whose manicure scissors had
+terminated the painful episode of the butterfly.  I had always
+maintained that she was the prettiest of the McRorys, and it was
+evident that Irving, the new District Inspector of R.I.C., who sat
+beside her, shared my opinion.  He was a serious, lanky young man, and
+at such moments as he found himself deprived of Miss McRory's exclusive
+attention, he accepted no alternative, and devoted himself austerely to
+his food.
+
+Miss Bennett's intention was, I presently discovered, to hunt with
+Flurry Knox's hounds on the following day: she had brought over a
+horse, and it became clear to me that her secondary intention was to
+return without it.
+
+"Larkie McRory's going to take up hunting," she said in her low swift
+voice.  "The new D.I. hunts, you know."
+
+Miss Bennett's astute grey eyes rested upon the young lady in question,
+and returned to me laden with inference.
+
+"He's got a horse from a farmer for her to ride to-morrow--goodness
+knows what sort of a brute it is!--I hope she won't break her neck.
+She's the best of the lot.  If the old man had sense he'd buy my mare
+for her--he's full of money--and I'd let her go cheap, too, as I have a
+young one coming on."
+
+It is worthy of mention that I have never known Miss Bennett's stable
+composed of anything save old ones to go cheap and young ones coming
+on.  I asked her what she would give me if I didn't tell Mr. McRory
+that her mare was touched in the wind.
+
+"I'll give you in charge for defamation of character," replied Miss
+Bennett, with speed comparable only to the dart of an ant-eater's
+tongue.  "Anything else you'd like to know?  But look at Larkie now, I
+ask of you!  Quick!"
+
+I did as desired, and was fortunate enough to see Miss McRory in the
+act of putting a spoonful of salt in Mr. Irving's champagne, what time
+he was engaged in repulsing one of Mrs. McRory's band of flaming
+ministers, who, with head averted in consultation with a collaborator,
+was continuously offering him melted butter, regardless of the fact
+that he had, at the moment, nothing in front of him but the tablecloth.
+
+"There's Miss Larkie's Dublin manners for you," said Miss Bennett, and
+passed on to other themes.
+
+I should say theme, because, speaking broadly, Miss Bennett had but
+one, and all roads sooner or later led to it.  During the slow progress
+of the meal I was brought up to date in the inner gossip of the
+Curranhilty country.  I learned that Mrs. Albert Dougherty had taken to
+riding astride because she thought it was smart, and it was nothing but
+the grab she got of the noseband that saved her from coming off every
+time she came down a drop.  I asked for that Mr. Tomsy Flood whose
+career had twice, at vital points, been intersected by me.
+
+"Ah, poor Tomsy!  He took to this, y'know," Miss Bennett slightly
+jerked her little finger, "and he wouldn't ride a donkey over a sod of
+turf.  They sent him out to South Africa, to an ostrich farm, and when
+the people found he couldn't ride they put him to bed with a setting of
+ostrich eggs to keep them warm, and he did that grand, till some one
+gave him a bottle of whisky, and he got rather lively and broke all the
+eggs.  They say it's a lay-preacher he's going to be now!"
+
+Across a dish of potatoes, thrust at me for the fourth time, I told
+Miss Bennett that it was all her fault, and that she had been very
+unkind to Tomsy Flood.  Miss Bennett gave me a look that showed me what
+she still could do if she liked, and replied that she supposed I was
+sorry that she hadn't gone to South Africa with him.
+
+"I suppose we'll all be going there soon," she went on.  "Uncle says if
+Home Rule comes there won't be a fox or a Protestant left in Ireland in
+ten years' time; and he said, what's more, that if _he_ had to choose
+it mightn't be the Protestants he'd keep!  But that was because the
+Dissenting Minister's wife sent in a claim of five pounds to the Fowl
+Fund, and said she'd put down poison if she didn't get it."
+
+Not thus did Philippa and old McRory, at their end of the table, fleet
+the time away.  Old McRory, as far as I could judge, spoke not at all,
+but played tunes with his fingers on the tablecloth, or preoccupied
+himself with what seemed to be an endeavour to plait his beard into a
+point.  On my wife's other hand was an unknown gentleman, with rosy
+cheeks, a raven moustache, and a bald head, who was kind enough to
+solace her isolation with facetious stories, garnished with free and
+varied gestures with his knife, suggestive of sword-practice, all
+concluding alike in convulsive tenor laughter.  I was aware, not
+unpleasantly, that Philippa was bearing the brunt of the McRory
+bean-feast.
+
+When at length my wife's release was earned, and the ladies had rustled
+from the room in her wake, with all the conscious majesty of the Mantle
+Department, I attempted some conversation with my host, but found that
+it was more considerate to leave him to devour unmolested the
+crystallised fruits and chocolates that were not, I felt quite sure,
+provided by Mrs. McRory for the Master of the House.  I retired upon
+the D.I., my opinion of whom had risen since I saw him swallow his
+salted champagne without a change of countenance.  That he addressed me
+as "Sir" was painful, but at about my age these shocks have to be
+expected, and are in the same category as lumbago, and what my dentist
+delicately alludes to as "dentures."
+
+The young District Inspector of Irish Constabulary has wisdom beyond
+his years: we talked profoundly of the state of the country until the
+small voice of old McRory interrupted us.
+
+"Major," it said, "if you have enough drink taken we might join the
+ladies."
+
+Most of the other gallants had already preceded us, and as I crossed
+the hall I heard the measured pounding of a waltz on the piano: it
+created an impulse, almost as uncontrollable as that of Spurius Lartius
+and Herminius, to dart back to the dining-room.
+
+"That's the way with them every night," said old McRory
+dispassionately.  "They mightn't go to bed now at all."
+
+Old McRory had a shadowy and imperceptible quality that is not unusual
+in small fathers of large families; it always struck me that he
+understood very thoroughly the privileges of the neglected, and pursued
+an unnoticed, peaceful, and observant path of his own in the
+background.  I watched him creep away in his furtive, stupefied manner,
+like a partly-chloroformed ferret.  "'Oh, well is thee, thou art
+asleep!'--or soon will be," I said to myself, as I turned my back on
+him and faced the music.
+
+I was immediately gratified by the spectacle of Philippa, clasped to
+the heart of the gentleman who had been kind to her at dinner, and
+moving with him in slow and crab-like sidlings round the carpet.  Her
+eyes met mine with passionate appeal; they reminded me of those of her
+own fox-terrier, Minx, when compelled to waltz with my younger son.
+
+The furniture and the elder ladies had been piled up in corners, and
+the dancing element had been reinforced by a gang of lesser McRorys and
+their congeners, beings who had not been deemed worthy of a place at
+the high table.  Immured behind the upright piano sat Mrs. McRory,
+thumping out the time-honoured "Blue Danube" with the plodding rhythm
+of the omnibus horse.  I furtively looked at my watch; we had dined at
+7.30, and it was now but a quarter to ten o'clock.  Not for half an
+hour could we in decency withdraw, and, finding myself at the moment
+beside Miss Larkie McRory, it seemed to me that I could do no less than
+invite her to take the carpet with me.
+
+I am aware that my dancing is that of ten years ago, which places it in
+the same scrap-heap class as a battleship of that date, but Miss McRory
+told me that she preferred it, and that it exactly suited her step.  It
+would be as easy to describe the way of a bird in the air as to define
+Miss McRory's step; scrap-heap or no, it made me feel that I walked the
+carpet like a thing of life.  We were occasionally wrecked upon reefs
+of huddled furniture, and we sustained a collision or two of first-rate
+magnitude: after these episodes my partner imperceptibly steered me to
+a corner, in which I leaned heavily against whatever was most stable,
+and tried to ignore the fact that the floor was rocking and the walls
+were waving, and that it was at least two years since I had exceeded in
+this way.
+
+It was in one of these intervals that Miss McRory told me that she was
+going hunting next day, and that he--her long hazel-grey eyes indicated
+Mr. Irving, now slowly and showily moving a partner about the room--had
+got a horse for her to ride, and she had never hunted before.  She
+hoped to goodness she wouldn't fall off, and (here she dealt me the
+fraction of a glance) she hoped I'd pick her up now and again.  I said
+that the two wishes were incompatible, to which she replied that she
+didn't know what incompatible meant; and I told her to ask Mr. Irving
+whether he had found that salt and champagne were compatible.
+
+"I thought you only wore that old eyeglass for show," replied Miss
+McRory softly, and again looked up at me from under her upcurled Irish
+eyelashes; "it was out of spite he drank it!  A girl did that to my
+brother Curly at a dance, and he poured it down her back."
+
+"I think Mr. Irving treated you better than you deserved," I replied
+paternally, adventuring once more into the tide of dancers.
+
+When, some five minutes afterwards, I resigned my partner to Irving
+D.I., I felt that honour had been satisfied, and that it was now
+possible to leave the revel.  But in this I found that I had reckoned,
+not so much without my host, as without my fellow-guest.  Philippa, to
+my just indignation, had blossomed into the success of the evening.
+Having disposed of the kind-hearted gentleman (with the pink cheeks and
+the black moustache), she was immediately claimed by Mr. De Lacey
+McRory, the eldest son of the house, and with him exhibited a
+proficiency in the latest variant of the waltz that she had hitherto
+concealed from me.  The music, like the unseen orchestra of a
+merry-go-round, was practically continuous.  Scuffles took place at
+intervals behind the upright piano, during which music-books fell
+heavily upon the keys, and one gathered that a change of artist was
+taking place, but the fundamental banging of the bass was maintained,
+and the dancing ceased not.  The efforts of the musicians were
+presently reinforced by a young lady in blue, who supplied a shrill and
+gibbering _obligato_ upon a beribboned mandoline, and even, at some
+passionate moments, added her voice to the _ensemble_.
+
+"Will this go on much longer?" I asked of Miss Bennett, with whom I had
+withdrawn to the asylum of a bow window.
+
+"D'ye mean Miss Cooney O'Rattigan and her mandoline?" replied Miss
+Bennett.  "I can tell you it was twice worse this afternoon when she
+was singing Italian to it.  I never stayed here before, and please
+goodness I never will again; the wardrobe in my room is crammed with
+Mrs. McRory's summer clothes, and the chest of drawers is full of
+apples!  Ah, but after all," went on Miss Bennett largely, "what can
+you expect from a cob but a kick?  Didn't Tomsy Flood find a collection
+of empty soda-water bottles in his bed the time he stayed here for the
+wedding, when you found him stitched up in the feather bed!"
+
+[Illustration: Miss Cooney O'Rattigan.]
+
+I said that the soda-water bottles had probably prepared him for the
+ostrich eggs, and Miss Bennett asked me if it were true that I had once
+found a nest of young mice in the foot of my bed at Aussolas, because
+that was the story she had heard.  I was able to assure her that, on
+the contrary, it had been kittens, and passing from these pleasing
+reminiscences I asked her to come forth and smoke a cigarette in the
+hall with me, as a preliminary to a farther advance in the direction of
+the motor.  I have a sincere regard for Miss Bennett, but her dancing
+is a serious matter, with a Cromwellian quality in it, suggestive of
+jack boots and the march of great events.
+
+The cigarettes were consolatory, and the two basket-chairs by the fire
+in the back-hall were sufficiently comfortable; but the prospect of
+home burned like a beacon before me.  The clock struck eleven.
+
+"They're only beginning now!" said Miss Bennett, interpreting without
+resentment my glance at it.  "Last night it was near one o'clock in the
+morning when they had high tea, and then they took to singing songs,
+and playing 'Are you there, Mike?' and cock-fighting."
+
+I rose hastily, and began to search for my overcoat and cap, prepared
+to plunge into the frosty night, when Miss Bennett offered to show me a
+short way through the house to the stableyard, where I had left the car.
+
+"I slipped out that way after dinner," she said, picking up a fur-lined
+cloak and wrapping it about her.  "I wanted to make sure the mare had a
+second rug on her this cold night."
+
+I followed Miss Bennett through a wheezy swing-door; a flagged passage
+stretched like a tunnel before us, lighted by a solitary candle planted
+in its own grease in a window.  A long battle-line of bicycles occupied
+one side of the passage; there were doors, padlocked and cobwebbed, on
+the other.  A ragged baize door at the end of the tunnel opened into
+darkness that smelt of rat-holes, and was patched by a square or two of
+moonlight.
+
+"This is a sort of a lobby," said Miss Bennett.  "Mind!  There's a
+mangle there--and there are oars on the floor somewhere----"
+
+As she spoke I was aware of a distant humming noise, like bees in a
+chimney.
+
+"That sounds uncommonly like a motor," I said.
+
+"That's only the boiler," replied Miss Bennett; "we're at the back of
+the kitchen here."
+
+She advanced with confidence, and flung open a door.  A most startling
+vista was revealed, of a lighted room with several beds in it.
+Children's faces, swelled and scarlet, loomed at us from the pillows,
+and an old woman, with bare feet and a shawl over her head, stood
+transfixed, with a kettle in one hand and a tumbler in the other.
+
+Miss Bennett swiftly closed the door upon the vision.
+
+"My gracious heavens!" she whispered, "what on earth children are
+those?  I'm sure it's mumps they have, whoever they are.  And how
+secret the McRorys kept it!--and did you see it was punch the old woman
+was giving them?"
+
+"We might have asked her the way to the yard," I said, inwardly
+resolving to tell Philippa it was scarlatina; "and she might have given
+us a light."
+
+"It was this door I should have tried," said my guide, opening another
+with considerable circumspection.
+
+Sounds of hilarity immediately travelled to us along a passage; I
+followed Miss Bennett, feeling much as if I were being led by a
+detective into Chinatown, San Francisco.  A square of light in the wall
+indicated one of those inner windows that are supposed to give light
+mutually to room and passage, and are, as a matter of fact, an
+architect's confession of defeat.  Farther on a door was open, and
+screams of laughter and singing proceeded from it.  I admit, without
+hesitation, that we looked in at the window, and thus obtained a full
+and sufficient view of the _vie intime_ of the Temple Braney kitchen.
+A fat female, obviously the cook, was seated in the midst of a
+remarkably lively crowd of fellow-retainers and camp-followers,
+thumping with massive knuckles on a frying-pan, as though it were a
+banjo, and squalling to it something in an unknown tongue.
+
+"She's taking off Miss Cooney O'Rattigan!" hissed Miss Bennett, in
+ecstasy.  "She's singing Italian, by way of!  And look at those two
+brats of boys, Vincent and Harold, that should have been in their beds
+two hours ago!"
+
+Masters Vincent and Harold McRory were having the time of their lives.
+One of them, seated on the table, was shovelling tipsy-cake into his
+ample mouth with a kitchen spoon; the other was smoking a cigarette,
+and capering to the squalls of the cook.
+
+As noiselessly as two bats Miss Bennett and I flitted past the open
+door, but a silence fell with a unanimity that would have done credit
+to any orchestra.
+
+"They saw us," said Miss Bennett, scudding on, "but we'll not tell on
+them--the creatures!"
+
+An icy draught apprised us of an open door, and through it we escaped
+at length from the nightmare purlieus of the house into the yard, an
+immense quadrangle, where moonlight and black shadows opposed one
+another in a silence that was as severe as they.  Temple Braney House
+and its yard dated from what may be called the Stone Age in Ireland,
+about the middle of the eighteenth century, when money was plenty and
+labour cheap, and the Barons of Temple Braney, now existent only in
+guidebooks, built, as they lived, on the generous scale.
+
+We crossed the yard to the coach-house in which I had left my motor:
+its tall arched doorway was like the mouth of a cave, and I struck a
+match.  It illuminated a mowing-machine, a motor-bicycle, and a flying
+cat.  But not my car.  The first moment of bewilderment was closed by
+the burning of my fingers by the match.
+
+"Are you sure it was here you left it?" said Miss Bennett, with a
+fatuity of which I had not believed her capable.
+
+The presence of a lady was no doubt a salutary restraint, but as I went
+forth into the yard again, I felt as though the things I had to leave
+unsaid would break out all over me like prickly heat.
+
+"It's the medical student one," said Miss Bennett with certainty, "the
+one that owns the motor-bike."
+
+The yard and the moonlight did not receive this statement with a more
+profound silence than I.
+
+"I'm sure he won't do it any harm," she went on, making the elementary
+mistake of applying superficial salves to a wound whose depths she was
+incapable of estimating.  "He's very good about machinery--maybe it's
+only round to the front door he took it."
+
+As Miss Bennett offered these consolations I saw two small figures
+creep from the shadows of the house.  Their white collars shone in the
+moonlight, and, recognising them as the youngest members of the
+inveterate clan of McRory, I hailed them in a roar that revealed very
+effectively the extent of my indignation.  It did not surprise me that
+the pair, in response to this, darted out of the yard gate with the
+speed of a pair of minnows in a stream.
+
+I pursued, not with any hope of overtaking them, but because they were
+the only clue available, and in my wake, over the frosty ground, in her
+satin shoes, followed that sound sportswoman, Miss Bennett.
+
+The route from the stable-yard to the front of Temple Braney House is a
+long and circuitous one, that skirts a plantation of evergreens.  At
+the first bend the moonlight displayed the track of a tyre in the
+grass; at the next bend, where the edge was higher, a similar economy
+of curve had been effected, and that the incident had been of a fairly
+momentous nature was suggested by the circumstance that the tail lamp
+was lying in the middle of the drive.  It was as I picked it up that I
+heard a familiar humming in the vicinity of the hall door.
+
+"He didn't go so far, after all," said Miss Bennett, somewhat blown,
+but holding her own, in spite of the satin shoes.
+
+I turned the last corner at a high rate of speed, and saw the dignified
+Georgian façade of the house, pale and placid in the moonlight; through
+the open hall door a shaft of yellow light fell on the ground.  The car
+was nowhere to be seen, yet somewhere, close at hand, the engine
+throbbed and drummed to me,--a _cri de coeur_, as I felt it, calling to
+me through the accursed jingle of the piano that proceeded from the
+open door.
+
+"Where the devil----?" I began.
+
+Even as I spoke I descried the car.  It was engaged, apparently, in
+forcing its way into the shrubbery that screened one end of the house.
+The bonnet was buried in a holly bush, the engine was working, slowly
+but industriously.  The lamps were not lighted, and there was no one in
+it.
+
+"Those two imps made good use of their legs, never fear them!" puffed
+Miss Bennett; "the 'cuteness of them--cutting away to warn the brother!"
+
+"What's this confounded thing?" I said fiercely, snatching at something
+that was caught in the handle of the brake.
+
+Miss Bennett snatched it in her turn, and held it up in the moonlight,
+while I stilled the fever of the engine.
+
+"Dublin for ever!" she exclaimed.  "What is it but the streamers of
+Miss Cooney's mandoline!  There's the spoils of war for you!  And it's
+all the spoils you'll get--the whole pack of them's hid in the house by
+now!"
+
+From an unlighted window over the hall door a voice added itself to the
+conversation.
+
+"God help the house that holds them!" it said, addressing the universe.
+
+The window was closed.
+
+"That's old McRory!" said Miss Bennett in a horrified whisper.
+
+Again I thought of Chinatown, sleepless, incalculable, with its
+infinite capacity for sheltering the criminal.
+
+
+"--But, darling," said Philippa, some quarter of an hour later, as we
+proceeded down the avenue in the vaulted darkness of the beech-trees
+(and I at once realised that she had undertaken the case for the
+defence), "you've no reason to suppose that they took the car any
+farther than the hall door."
+
+"It is the last time that it will be taken to _that_ hall door," I
+replied, going dead slow, with my head over the side of the car,
+listening to unfamiliar sounds in its interior--sounds that did not
+suggest health.  "I should like to know how many of your young friends
+went on the trip----"
+
+"My dear boy," said Philippa pityingly, "I ask you if it is likely that
+there would have been more than two, when one of them was the lady with
+the mandoline!  And," she proceeded with cat-like sweetness, "I did not
+perceive that you took a party with you when you retired to the hall
+with your old friend Miss Bennett, and left me to cope single-handed
+with the mob for about an hour!"
+
+"Whether there were two or twenty-two of them in the car," I said,
+treating this red herring with suitable contempt, "I've done with your
+McRorys."
+
+I was, very appropriately, in the act of passing through the Temple
+Braney entrance gates as I made this pronouncement, and it was the
+climax of many outrages that the steering-gear, shaken by heaven knows
+what impacts and brutalities, should suddenly have played me false.
+The car swerved in her course--fortunately a slow one--and laid her
+bonnet impulsively against the Temple Braney gate pillar, as against a
+loved one's shoulder.
+
+As we regained our composure, two tall forms appeared in the light of
+the head lamps, and one of them held up his hand.  I recognised a
+police patrol.
+
+"That's the car right enough," said one of them.  He advanced to my
+side.  "I want your name, please.  I summons you for furious driving on
+the high road, without lights, a while ago, and refusing to stop when
+called on to do so.  Go round and take the number, M'Caffery."
+
+
+When, a few days later, the story flowed over and ran about the
+country, some things that were both new and interesting came to my ears.
+
+Flurry Knox said that Bobby Bennett had sold me her old mare by
+moonlight in the Temple Braney yard, and it was a great credit to old
+McRory's champagne.
+
+Mrs. Knox, of Aussolas, was told that I had taken Mrs. McRory for a run
+in the car at one o'clock in the morning, and on hearing it said "De
+gustibus non est disputandum."
+
+Some one, unknown, repeated this to Mrs. McRory, and told her that it
+meant "You cannot touch pitch without being disgusted."
+
+Mrs. Cadogan, my cook, reported to Philippa that the boy who drove the
+bread-cart said that it was what the people on the roads were saying
+that the Major was to be fined ten pounds; to which Mrs. Cadogan had
+replied that it was a pity the Major ever stood in Temple Braney, but
+she supposed that was laid out for him by the Lord.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+PUT DOWN ONE AND CARRY TWO
+
+The promise of that still and moonlit December night, wherein we had
+bean-feasted with the McRorys, was shamelessly broken.
+
+The weather next morning was a welter of wind and mist, with rain flung
+in at intervals.  The golden fox on the stable weathercock was not at
+peace for a moment, facing all the southern points of the compass as if
+they were hounds that held it at bay.  For my part, I do not know why
+people go out hunting on such days, unless it be for the reason that
+many people go to church, to set an example to others.
+
+Philippa said she went because she had done her hair for riding before
+she could see out of the window--a fiction beneath the notice of any
+intelligent husband.  I went because I had told my new groom, Wilson
+(an English disciplinarian), that I was going, and I was therefore
+caught in the cogs of the inexorable wheel of stable routine.  I also
+went because I nourished a faint hope that I might be able to place
+before the general public, and especially before Flurry Knox, an
+authentic first version of the McRory episode.  Moreover, I had a
+headache; but this I was not going to mention, knowing that the sun
+never sets upon the jests consecrated to after-dinner headaches.
+
+As we rode away from Shreelane, and felt the thick small rain in our
+faces, and saw the spray blown off the puddles by the wind, and heard
+the sea-gulls, five miles inland, squealing in the mist overhead, I
+said that it was preposterous to think of hunting at Lonen Hill in such
+weather, and that I was going home.  Philippa said that we might as
+well go on to the meet, to exercise the horses, and that we could then
+come straight home.  (I have a sister who has said that I am a lath
+painted to look like iron, and that Philippa is iron painted to look
+like a lath.)
+
+The meet was in shelter, the generous shelter of Lonen Hill, which
+interposed itself between us and the weather.  There is just space for
+the road, between the shore of Lough Lonen and the southern face of the
+hill, that runs precipitously up into the sky for some six hundred
+feet, dark with fir-trees, and heather, and furze, fortified with
+rock--a place renowned as a fastness for foxes and woodcock (whose
+fancies as to desirable winter residences generally coincide).  One
+would have thought that only a pack of monkeys could deal with such a
+covert, but hounds went through it, and so did beaters--or said they
+did.
+
+We found the hounds waiting in an old quarry under the side of the
+hill, and, a little farther on, a very small and select company of
+waterproofs was huddled under the branches of a fir-tree that hung over
+the road.  As we neared them I recognised Miss Bennett's firm and
+capable back: she was riding the black mare that she had come over to
+"pass on" to old McRory.  It was Philippa who pointed out that she was
+accompanied by Miss Larkie McRory, seated on a stout and shaggy animal,
+whose grey hindquarters were draped by the folds of its rider's
+voluminous black macintosh, in a manner that recalled the historic
+statue of the Iron Duke.  Farther on, Mrs. Flurry and her mother, the
+redoubtable Lady Knox, were getting out of a motor and getting
+themselves on to their horses.
+
+"There's room under the umbrella for Mrs. Yeates!" called out Miss
+Bennett hospitably, "but the Major must find one for himself, and a
+very big one, too!"
+
+"We could make room for him here," said Miss Larkie McRory, "if he
+liked to come."
+
+I maintained, I hope, an imperturbable demeanour, and passed on.
+
+"Who is that?" said Lady Knox, approaching me, on her large and
+competent iron grey.
+
+I informed her, briefly, and without prejudice.
+
+"Oh, one of that crew," said Lady Knox, without further comment.
+
+Lady Knox is not noted for receptive sympathy, yet this simple
+statement indicated so pleasingly our oneness of soul in the matter of
+the McRorys, that I was on the verge of flinging overboard the
+gentlemanlike scruples proper to a guest, and giving her the full
+details of last night's revel.  At this moment, however, her son-in-law
+came forth from the quarry with his hounds, and his coadjutors, Dr.
+Hickey and Michael, and moved past us.
+
+"Yeates!" he called out, "I'd be obliged to you if you'd take that
+point up on the hill, on the down-wind side, where he often breaks."
+He looked at me with a serious, friendly face.  "He won't break _down_,
+you know--it's only motors do that."
+
+This witticism, concocted, no doubt, in the seclusion of the quarry,
+called for no reply on my part--(or, to be accurate, no suitable reply
+presented itself).  There was an undoubted titter among the
+waterproofs; I moved away upon my mission at a dignified trot: a trot
+is seldom dignified, but Daniel has dignity enough for himself and his
+rider.
+
+Daniel stands sixteen hands two inches in his stockings, of which he
+wears one white one, the rest of his enormous body being of that
+unlovely bluish-dun colour to which a dark bay horse turns when
+clipped.  His best friend could not deny that he "made a noise"; his
+worst enemy was fain to admit that he was glad to hear it in front of
+him at a nasty place.  Some one said that he was like a Settled
+Religious Faith, and no lesser simile conveys the restful certainty
+imparted by him.  It was annoying, no doubt, to hear people say, after
+I had accomplished feats of considerable valour, that that horse
+couldn't make a mistake, and a baby could ride him; but these were mere
+chastenings, negligible to the possessor of a Settled Religious Faith.
+
+I trotted on through the rain, up a steep road seamed with
+watercourses, with Lonen Hill towering on my left, and a lesser hill on
+my right.  Looking back, I saw Flurry dismount, give his horse to a
+boy, and clamber on to the wall of the road: he dropped into the wood,
+and the hounds swarmed over after him, looking like midgets beside the
+tremendous citadel that they were to attack.  Hickey and Michael,
+equally dwarfed by the immensities of the position, were already
+betaking themselves through the mist to their allotted outposts in
+space.  Five-and-twenty couple of hounds would have been little enough
+for that great hill-side; Flurry had fifteen, and with them he began
+his tough struggle through the covert, a solitary spot of red among
+pine-stems, and heather, and rocks, cheering his fifteen couple with
+horn and voice, while he climbed up and up by devious ways, seemingly
+as marvellously endowed with wind as the day itself.  I cantered on
+till, at the point where the wood ended, it became my melancholy duty
+to leave the road and enter upon the assault of the hill.  I turned in
+at a gap beside the guardian thorn-bush of a holy well, on whose
+branches votive rags fluttered in the wind, and addressed Daniel to his
+task of carrying thirteen stone up an incline approximating to a rise
+of one in three.
+
+A path with the angles of a flash of lightning indicated the views of
+the local cow as to the best method of dealing with the situation.
+Daniel and I accepted this, as we had done more than once before, and
+we laboured upwards, parallel with the covert, while the wind, heavy
+with mist, came down to meet us, and shoved against us like a living
+thing.  We gained at length a shelf on the hill-side, and halting there
+in the shelter of a furzy hummock, I applied myself to my job.  From
+the shelf I commanded a long stretch of the boundary wall of the wood,
+including a certain gap which was always worthy of special attention,
+and for a quarter of an hour I bent a zealous and travelling gaze upon
+the wall, with the concentration of a professor of a Higher Thought
+Society.
+
+As is not unusual in such cases, nothing happened.  At rare intervals a
+hint of the cry of hounds was carried in the wind, evanescent as a
+whiff from a summer garden.  Once or twice it seemed to swing towards
+me, and at such moments the concentration of my eyeglass upon the gap
+was of such intensity that had the fox appeared I am confident that he
+would instantly have fallen into a hypnotic trance.  As time wore on I
+arrived at the stage of obsession, when the music of the hounds and the
+touches of the horn seemed to be in everything, the wind, the streams,
+the tree branches, and I could almost have sworn hounds were away and
+running hard, until some vagrant voice in the wood would dispel the
+mirage of sound.  This was followed by the reactionary period of
+pessimism, when I seemed to myself merely an imbecile, sitting in heavy
+rain, staring at a stone wall.  Half an hour, or more, passed.
+
+"I'm going out of this," I said to myself defiantly; "there's reason in
+the roasting of eggs."
+
+It seemed, however, my duty to go up rather than down, and I coerced
+Daniel into the bed of a stream, as offering the best going available.
+It led me into a cleft between the hill-side and the wall of the
+covert, which latter was, like a thing in a fairy tale, changing very
+gradually from a wall into a bank.  I ascended the cleft, and presently
+found that it, too, was changing its nature, and becoming a flight of
+stairs.  Daniel clattered slowly and carefully up them, basing his
+feet, like Sir Bedivere, on "juts of slippery crag that rang
+sharp-smitten with the dint of arméd heels."
+
+We had reached the top in safety when I heard a thin and wavering
+squeal behind me, and looking back saw Miss Larkie McRory ascending the
+rocky staircase on the grey cob, at a speed that had obviously, and
+legitimately, drawn forth the squeal.
+
+"Oh, gracious!  The brute!  I can't stop him!" she cried as she rushed
+upon me.
+
+The grey cob here bumped into Daniel's massive stern, rebounded, and
+subsided, for the excellent reason that no other course was open to it.
+Miss McRory's reins were clutched in a looped confusion, that summoned
+from some corner of my brain a memory of the Sultan's cipher on the
+Order of the Medjidie: her hat was hanging down her back, and there was
+a picturesqueness about her hair that promised disaster later on.  Her
+hazel eyes shone, and her complexion glowed like a rose in rain.
+
+"Mr. Irving's fit to be tied!" she continued.  "His horse jumped about
+like a mad thing when he saw those awful steps----!"
+
+Sounds of conflict and clattering came from below.  I splashed onwards
+in the trough between the hill and the fence, and had emerged into a
+comparatively open space with my closely attendant McRory, when the
+impassioned face of Mr. Irving's Meath mare shot into view at the top
+of the steps.  The water in the trough was apparently for her the limit
+of what should or could be endured.  She made a crooked spring at the
+hill-side, slipped, and, recognising the bank as the one civilised
+feature in a barbarous country, bounced sideways on to the top of it,
+pivoted there, and sat down backwards into a thicket of young ash and
+hazel trees.  A succession of short yells from Miss McRory acclaimed
+each phase of the incident; Mr. Irving's face, as he settled down
+amongst the branches, was as a book where men might read strange
+matters, not of an improving nature.
+
+It was probably the reception accorded to the bay mare by the branches
+and briars in which she had seated herself that caused her to return to
+the top of the bank in a kangaroo-bound, as active as it was
+unexpected.  Horses can do these things when they choose, but they
+seldom choose.  From the top of the bank she dropped into the trough,
+and joined us, with her nerves still in a state of acute indignation,
+and less of her rider in the saddle than is conventional, but a dinge
+in his pot-hat appeared to be the extent of the damage.  Miss McRory's
+eye travelled from it to me, but she abstained from comment.  It was
+the eye of a villain and a conspirator.  I had by no means forgotten
+the injuries inflicted on me by her brothers, nor did I forget that
+Flurry had said that there wasn't one of the family but was as clever
+as the devil and four times as unscrupulous.  Yet, taken in conjunction
+with the genuineness of her complexion, and with the fact that Irving
+was probably twenty years my junior, "I couldn't"--as the song
+says--"help smiling at McRory O'More" (behind the back of young Mr.
+Irving, D.I.).
+
+It transpired that Irving, from some point of vantage below, shared, it
+would appear, with Miss McRory, had seen the hounds running out of the
+top of the wood, and had elected to follow me.  He did not know where
+any one was, had not heard a sound of the horn, and gave it as his
+opinion that Flurry was dead, and that trying to hunt in this country
+was simply farcical.  He bellowed these things at me in his
+consequential voice as we struggled up the hill against the immense
+weight of wind, in all the fuss, anxiety, and uncertainty out of which
+the joys of hunting are born.  It was as we topped the ultimate ridge
+that, through the deafening declamations of the wind, I heard, faint as
+a bar of fairy music, distant harmonies as of hounds running.
+
+The wind blew a hole in the mist, and we had a bird's-eye view of a few
+pale-green fields far below: across one of them some pigmy forms were
+moving; they passed over a dark line that represented a fence, and
+proceeded into the heart of a cloud.
+
+"That's about the limit," shouted Irving, dragging at his mare's mouth,
+as she swerved from a hole in the track.  "It's only in this
+God-forsaken country that a fox'd go away in the teeth of a storm like
+this!"
+
+To justify to Mr. Irving the disregard of the Lonen Hill foxes for the
+laws of the game was not my affair.  It seemed to me that in piloting
+him and Miss McRory I was doing rather more than humanity had any right
+to expect.  I have descended Lonen Hill on various occasions, none of
+them agreeable, but never before with an avalanche travelling hard on
+my heels--a composite avalanche that slid, and rushed, and dropped its
+hind-legs over the edge at bad corners, and was throughout vocal with
+squeals, exclamations, inquiries as to facts of which Providence could
+alone be cognisant, and thunderous with objurgations.  The hill-side
+merged at length into upland pasture, strange little fields, composed
+partly of velvet patches, like putting-greens, predominantly of
+nightmare bunkers of rocks and furze.  We rushed downwards through
+these, at a pace much accelerated by the prevalence of cattle gaps; the
+bay mare, with her head in the air, zigzagging in bounds as
+incalculable as those of a grasshopper; the grey cob, taking sole
+charge of Miss McRory, tobogganing with her hind feet, propping with
+her fore, and tempering her enthusiasm with profound understanding of
+the matter.  Finally, a telegraph-post loomed through the fog upon us,
+and a gate discovered itself, through which we banged in a bunch on to
+the high road.  A cottage faced us, with a couple of women and an old
+man standing outside it.
+
+To them we put the usual question, with the usual vehemence (always
+suggestive of the King's Troopers in romance, hotly demanding
+information about a flying rebel).
+
+"I didn't see a fox this long while," replied the old man deliberately,
+"but there was a few jocks went west the road a while ago."
+
+The King's Troopers, not specially enlightened, turned their steeds and
+went in pursuit of the jocks.  A stone gap, flung in ruins among black
+hoof-marks, soon gave a more precise indication, and we left the road,
+with profound dubiety on my part as to where we were going and how we
+were going to get there.  The first fence decided the matter for
+Irving, D.I.  It was a bank on which slices of slatey stone had been
+laid, much as in Germany slabs of cold sausage are laid upon bread.
+The Meath mare looked at it but once, and fled from it at a tangent;
+the grey pony, without looking at it, followed her.  Daniel selected an
+interval between the slabs, and took me over without comment.  Filled
+by a radiant hope that I had shaken off both my companions, I was
+advancing in the line of the hoof-tracks, when once more I heard behind
+me on the wind cries as of a storm-driven sea-gull, and the grey cob
+came up under my stirrup, like a runaway steam pinnace laying itself
+beside a man-o'-war.  Miss McRory was still in the saddle, but minus
+reins and stirrup; the wind had again removed her hat, which was
+following her at full stretch of its string, like a kite.  Had it not
+been for her cries I should have said, judging by her face, that she
+was thoroughly enjoying herself.
+
+Having achieved Daniel's society the cob pulled up, and her rider, not
+without assistance from me, restored her hat, reins, and stirrup to
+their proper spheres.  I looked back, and saw Irving's mare, still on
+the farther side of the fence, her nose pointing to the sky, as if
+invoking the protection of heaven, and I knew that for better for worse
+Miss McRory was mine until we reached the high road.  No doubt the
+thing was to be: as one of our own poets has sung of Emer and
+Cuchulain, "all who read my name in Erin's story would find its loving
+letters linked with" those of McRory.  The paraphrase even
+rhymed--another finger-mark of Fate.  Yet it was hard that, out of all
+the possible, and doubtless eager, squires of the hunting-field I
+should have been chosen.
+
+The hoof-tracks bent through a long succession of open gaps to a
+farmyard, and there were swallowed in the mire of a lane.  I worked the
+lane out for every inch it was worth, with the misty rain pricking my
+face as it were with needles, and the intention to go home at the
+earliest possible opportunity perfecting itself in my heart.  But the
+lane, instead of conducting us to the high road, melted disastrously
+into a turf bog.  I pulled up, and the long steady booming of the sea
+upon the rocks made a deep undertone to the wind.  There was no voice
+of hound or horn, and I was on the point of returning to the farmhouse
+when the mist, in its stagey, purposeful way, again lifted, and laid
+bare the sky-line of a low hill on our left.  A riderless horse was
+limping very slowly along it, led by something that seemed no higher
+than a toadstool.  Obviously we were on the line of the hunt, and
+obviously, also, it was my duty to enquire into the matter of the
+horse.  I turned aside over a low bank, hotly followed by the grey cob,
+and the wail to which I was now becoming inured.  As Miss McRory
+arrived abruptly at my side, she cried that she would have been off
+that time only for the grab she got of his hair.  (By which I believe
+she meant the mare's mane.)
+
+Fortune favoured us with broken-down fences; we overtook the horse, and
+found it was Flurry Knox's brown mare, hobbling meekly in tow of a very
+small boy.  In one of her hind fetlocks there was a clean, sharp cut
+that might have been done with a knife.
+
+In answer to my questions the small boy pointed ahead.  I polished my
+eyeglass, and, with eyes narrowed against the wind, looked into the
+south-west, and there saw, unexpectedly, even awfully near, the
+Atlantic Ocean, dingy and angry, with a long line, as of battle-smoke,
+marking its assault upon the cliffs.  Between the cliffs and the hill
+on which we were standing a dark plateau, striped with pale grey walls,
+stretched away into the mist.
+
+"There's the huntsman for ye," squeaked the little boy, who looked
+about six years old.
+
+I descried at a distance of perhaps a quarter of a mile a figure in a
+red coat, on foot, in the act of surmounting one of the walls,
+accompanied by a hovering flock of country boys.
+
+"The dogs is out before him," pursued the little boy at the full pitch
+of his lungs.  "I seen the fox, too.  I'll go bail he has himself
+housed in the Coosheen Grohogue by now."
+
+"Gracious!" said Miss McRory.
+
+I said he probably had a simpler telegraphic address, and that, no
+matter where he was, it was now my duty to overtake Mr. Knox and offer
+him my horse; "and you," I added, "had better get this little boy to
+show you the way to the road."
+
+Miss McRory replied confidently that she'd sooner stay with me.
+
+I said, as well as I remember, that her preference was highly
+flattering, but that she might live to regret it.
+
+Miss McRory answered that she wished I wouldn't be spying at her
+through that old glass of mine; she knew well enough she was a show,
+and her hair was coming down, and she'd as soon trust herself to the
+cat as to that little urchin.
+
+As I made my way downwards over the knife-edged ridges of rock and
+along their intervening boggy furrows, I should myself have been
+grateful for the guidance of the cat.  Even the grey cob accepted the
+matter as serious, and kept the brake hard on, accomplishing the last
+horrid incident of the descent--a leap from the slant of the hill on to
+the summit of a heathery bank--without frivolity, even with anxiety.
+We had now arrived at the plateau above the cliffs--a place of brown,
+low-growing ling, complicated by boggy runnels, and heavily sprinkled
+with round stones.  The mist was blowing in thicker than ever, Flurry
+and his retinue were lost as though they had never been, and the near
+thunder of the breakers, combined with the wind, made an impenetrable
+din round me and Miss McRory.
+
+After perhaps a mile, in the course of which I got off several times to
+pull down loose walls for the benefit of my companion, I discovered the
+rudiments of a lane, which gradually developed into a narrow but
+indubitable road.  The rain had gone down the back of my neck and into
+my boots: I determined that if Flurry had to finish the run on
+all-fours, I would stick to the lane until it took me to a road.  What
+it took me to was, as might have been foreseen in any County Cork
+bohireen, a pole jammed across it from wall to wall and reinforced by
+furze-bushes--not a very high pole, but not one easy to remove.  I
+pulled up and looked dubiously from it to Miss McRory.
+
+"D'ye dare me?" she said.
+
+"I bet you sixpence you take a toss if you do," I replied firmly,
+preparing to dismount.
+
+"Done with you!" said Miss McRory, suddenly smiting the grey cob with a
+venomous little cutting whip (one that probably dated from the sixties,
+and had for a handle an ivory greyhound's head with a plaited silver
+collar round its neck).
+
+I have seldom seen a pole better and more liberally dealt with, as far
+as the grey cob's share of the transaction went, and seldom, indeed,
+have I seen a rider sail more freely from a saddle than Miss McRory
+sailed.  She alighted on her hands and knees, and the cob, with the
+sting of the whip still enlivening her movements, galloped on up the
+lane and was lost in the mist.
+
+"Well, you won your sixpence," said Miss McRory dauntlessly, as I
+joined her.  "I suppose you're delighted."
+
+I assured her with entire sincerity that I was very much the reverse,
+and proceeded at high speed in pursuit of the cob.  The result of this
+excursion--a fairly prolonged one--was the discovery that the lane led
+into a road, and that it was impossible to decide in which direction
+the fugitive had gone.  I returned in profound gloom to my young lady,
+and found her rubbing herself down with a bunch of heather.
+
+"So you couldn't ketch her!" she called out as I approached.  "What'll
+we do now?"  She was evidently highly amused.  "I'll tell the Peeler it
+was your fault.  You dared me!"
+
+My reply need not be recorded: I only know it was by no means up to the
+standard to which Miss McRory was accustomed.
+
+I took what seemed to be the only possible course, and established her
+seated sideways on my saddle, with her foot--and it is but fair to say,
+a very small foot--in the leather instead of the stirrup, and her right
+hand knotted in Daniel's mane.  I held the off stirrup, and splashed
+beside her in the ruts and mud.  The mist was thicker than ever, the
+wind was pushing it in from the sea in great masses, and Miss McRory
+and I progressed onward in a magic circle of some twenty yards in
+diameter, occupied only by herself and me, with Daniel thrown in as
+chaperon.
+
+On arriving at the road I relied on the wind for guidance, and turning
+to the right, let it blow us in what was, I trusted, our course.  It
+was by this time past three o'clock, we were at least nine or ten miles
+from home, and one of my boots had begun to rub my heel.  There was
+nothing for it but to keep on as we were going, until we met something,
+or some one, or died.
+
+It is worthy of record that in these afflicting circumstances Miss
+Larkie McRory showed a staying power, attained, probably, in the long
+and hungry bicycle picnics of her tribe, that was altogether
+commendable.  Not for an instant did she fail to maintain in me the
+belief that she found me one of the most agreeable people she had ever
+met, a little older, perhaps, than Irving, D.I., but on that very
+account the more to be confided in.  It was not until the pangs of
+hunger recalled to me the existence of my sandwiches that I discovered
+she had no food with her, nor, as far as could be gathered, had she had
+any breakfast.
+
+"Sure they were all snoring asleep when I started.  I just got a cup o'
+tea in the kitchen----"
+
+This, I suppose, was a point at which I might suitably have said
+something incisive about the feats of her brethren on the previous
+night, but with deplorable weakness I merely offered her my sandwiches.
+Miss McRory replied that she'd fall off in a minute if she were to let
+go the mane, and why wouldn't I eat them myself?  I said if there were
+any shelter left in Ireland I would wait till I got there, and we could
+then decide who should eat them.
+
+Æons of mist and solitude ensued.  I must have walked for an hour or
+more, without meeting anyone except one old woman, who could only speak
+Irish, and I had begun to feel as if my spur were inside my boot
+instead of outside, when I became aware of something familiar about the
+look of the fences.  It was not, however, until I felt shelter rising
+blessedly about us, and saw the thorn bush with the rags hanging from
+it, that I realised that our luck had turned, and we had blundered our
+way back to the holy well under the side of Lonen Hill.  The well was
+like a tiny dripping cave, about as big as a beehive, with a few inches
+of water in it; a great boulder stood guard over it, and above it
+stooped the ancient and twisted thorn bush.  It seemed indicated as a
+place of rest, none the less that my heel was by this time considerably
+galled by my boot.
+
+Miss McRory glissaded from my saddle into my arms, and was assisted by
+me to deposit herself on a flat stone beside the well, stiff, wet, but
+still undefeated.  We shared my sandwiches, we drank whisky mixed with
+the water of the holy well, and Miss McRory dried her face with her
+handkerchief, and her complexion looked better than ever.  Daniel,
+slowly and deliberately, ate the rags off the thorn bush.  I have been
+at many picnics that I have enjoyed less.
+
+By the time we had got to the gingerbread biscuits I had discovered
+that Mr. Irving thought she had talked too much to me after dinner last
+night, and that it was a wonder to her how men could be so cross about
+nothing.  I said I was sorry she called it nothing, at which she looked
+up at me and down again at the gingerbread, and did not reply.  After
+this I felt emboldened to ask her why she had been called so
+inappropriate a name as "Larkie."
+
+Miss McRory agreed that it was indeed a silly old name, and that it was
+a friend of one of her brothers, a Mr. Mulcahy, who had said that she
+and her sisters were "'Lorky little gurls with lorge dork eyes.'  He
+had that way of speaking," she added, "because he thought it was grand,
+and he always kept his watch at English time.  He said he ran over to
+London so often it wasn't worth while to change it."
+
+She herself had never been out of Ireland, and she supposed she'd never
+get the chance.
+
+I said that when she married Mr. Mulcahy she could keep her watch at
+Irish time, so as to equalise things.
+
+Miss McRory suggested that I should give her a watch as a wedding
+present, and that, English or Irish time, it would be all hours of the
+night before we were home.
+
+I realised with a slight shock that the position had indeed become
+inverted when one of the House of McRory had to remind me, after about
+four hours in her undiluted society, of the flight of time.  It was now
+past four, which was bad enough, and a still greater shock awaited me
+in the discovery that I was dead lame, the interval of repose having
+been fatal to my damaged heel.
+
+I have always asserted, and shall continue to do so to my dying day,
+that the way out of the difficulty was suggested by Miss McRory.  I
+mounted Daniel, Miss McRory ascended the boulder by the holy well,
+announcing that she was as stiff as fifty crutches, and that once she
+got up she'd be there for life.  The thing was done somehow, thanks to
+the incomparable forbearance of Daniel, and with Miss McRory seated
+behind me on his broad back, and her arms clasped round my waist, I
+once more, and very cautiously, took the road.
+
+Daniel continued to conduct himself like a gentleman, but considering
+how precarious was the position of Miss McRory, it was unnerving to
+feel her shaken by silent and secret laughter.
+
+"You'll fall off," I warned her.
+
+She replied by a further paroxysm, and asked me what size I took in
+stays--she supposed about forty inches.
+
+Dusk was now an accomplished fact: thickened with fog and rain, it was
+even turning to darkness as we descended the long hill.  But, humanly
+speaking, the end was in sight.  There was, I knew, a public-house a
+couple of miles farther on, where a car might be hired, and there I
+proposed to bid a long farewell to Miss Larkie McRory, and to send her
+home by herself, to have rheumatic fever, as I assured her.
+
+We moved on and on, at a careful foot-pace: we were out in the wind
+again, and it was very cold.  It was also quite dark.  Silence fell
+upon us, and, after a time, the sustained pressure of Miss McRory's
+hat-brim against my shoulder suggested that it was the silence of
+exhaustion, if not of sleep.  I thought of her with compassion.  I
+believe I formulated her to myself as a poor little girl, and found
+myself asserting with defiance to imaginary detractors that no one
+could say she hadn't pluck, and that, in spite of her family, she
+really had a soul to be saved.
+
+Again we found ourselves in shelter, and a greater darkness in the
+darkness told that we were in the lee of a wooded hill.  I knew where I
+was now, and I said to Miss McRory that the pub was just round the
+corner, and she replied at once that that was where they always were,
+in Dublin anyway.  She also said she thought she heard horses' hoofs
+coming up behind us.  I pushed on.
+
+We turned the corner, and were immediately struck blind by the twin
+glare of the lamps of a motor, that lay motionless, as in ambush, at
+the side of the road.  Even the equanimity of Daniel was shattered; he
+swung to one side, he drifted like a blown leaf, and Miss McRory clung
+to me like a knapsack.  As we curveted in the full glare of the
+limelight, I was aware of a figure in a pot-hat and a vast fur coat
+standing near the motor.  Even as I recognised Lady Knox three or four
+muddy hounds trailed wearily into the glare, and a voice behind me
+shouted, "'Ware horse!"
+
+Flurry came on into the light: there was just room in me for a
+sub-conscious recognition of the fact that he was riding the missing
+grey cob, and that this was a typical thing, and one that might have
+been expected.
+
+
+At the hunt dinner that took place soon afterwards some one sang a
+song, one that I have ceased to find amusing.  The first verse runs as
+follows:
+
+  "Throttin' to the Fair,
+    Me and Moll Moloney,
+  Sittin', I declare,
+    On a single pony----"
+
+
+By a singular coincidence, the faces of all those present turned
+towards me.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+THE COMTE DE PRALINES
+
+"I had forgotten how nice London is!" purred Philippa, as we moved
+beautifully across the threshold of Bill Cunningham's club, and were
+conducted to the lift with a tender deference that was no more than was
+due to our best clothes.
+
+The Ladies' Tea-room at Bill's club was a pleasant place, looking
+forth, high above the noise, upon trees that were yellow in the hazy
+October afternoon.  In a very agreeable bow-window were Lady Derryclare
+and the tea-table, and with her were her son, and a small and
+ornamental young man, who was introduced to us as Mr. Simpson-Hodges.
+
+"Front name John, known to a large circle of admirers as 'Mossoo,'"
+supplemented Bill, whose hands were so clean that I found it difficult
+to recognise him.
+
+"So called because of the incredible circumstance that he can speak
+French, in spite of the best Public School education," said Lady
+Derryclare.  "When I think of the money that has been wasted on you!
+You good for nothing creature!"
+
+"It's more his looks," pursued Bill, "his dark foreign beauty----"
+
+"These humorists!" said Mr. Simpson-Hodges indulgently, showing a set
+of white teeth under a diminutive black moustache.  "Please, Lady
+Derryclare, let's talk of something pleasant."
+
+"Ask him about the chickens you made him get from the Chicken Farmers
+for the dance his regiment gave," said Bill to his mother.
+
+"Oh, that was rather a bad business," said Mr. Simpson-Hodges
+apologetically, with an eye on Philippa, who, in a new hat, was looking
+about five-and-twenty.  "I'm sure no one wants to hear about it."
+
+"Mossoo ran the supper and he ordered three brace," said Bill, "but
+they never turned up till the week after the show!  The postman was
+viewed coming up to the Mess towing something after him on a long
+painter.  The painter was superfluous.  The chickens would have
+followed him at a trot if he had been kind to them.  They kept them for
+the drag, I believe.  Didn't you, Mossoo?  He's one of the Whips, you
+know."
+
+"They'd have been quite useful," admitted Mr. Simpson-Hodges.
+
+"How interesting to be a Whip!" said Philippa, looking at him with
+egregious respect.
+
+"Rather too interesting, sometimes," replied Simpson-Hodges, expanding
+to the glance in a way not unfamiliar to me.  "Last time we were out
+the fellow with the drag started from the cross-roads where we were
+going to meet, and was asinine enough to take it a bit down the road
+before he went into the country, and, as it happened, we were bringing
+the hounds up to the meet by that particular road.  They simply put
+down their heads and ran it heel for all they were worth!  The First
+Whip and I galloped our best, but we couldn't get to their heads, and
+we all charged into the middle of the meet full-cry!"
+
+"Oh!  I wish I had been there!" said Philippa ardently.
+
+"We wished we were anywhere else," replied Mr. Simpson-Hodges; "the
+Brigadier was there, and everybody.  We heard all about it afterwards,
+I can tell you!"
+
+"That ought to have happened in Mr. Knox's country, Major Yeates!" said
+Lady Derryclare, whose interest in fox-hunting was more sympathetic
+than technical.
+
+"We don't run drags, Lady Derryclare," I said reproachfully, but Lady
+Derryclare had already entered upon another topic.
+
+Simpson-Hodges, however, did not end there.
+
+A week afterwards Philippa and I crept home, third class, with full
+trunks and empty pockets, sustained only by the aphorism, evolved by my
+wife, that economies, and not extravagances, are what one really
+regrets.  It was approaching the end of November before we next heard
+of Simpson-Hodges.  The Derryclares had come down for their first
+woodcock shoot, and Bill swooped over one morning in the big Daimler
+and whirled us back with him over the forty intervening miles of bog
+and mountain, to shoot, and to dance on the carpet after dinner, and to
+act charades; to further, in short, the various devices for exercising
+and disciplining a house party.  Mr. John Simpson-Hodges was there, no
+less ornamental than in London, and as useful as he was ornamental.  He
+shot well, he danced beautifully, and he made of the part of a French
+Count in a charade so surprising a work of art that people said--as is
+the habit of people--that he ought to be making a hundred a week on the
+stage.
+
+Before we left the Derryclares Philippa told me that she had arranged
+with "those boys"--by which she referred to Mr. Cunningham and the
+French Count--to come over next week and have a hunt with Flurry Knox's
+hounds.  Something whispered to me that there was more in this than met
+the eye, but as they were to provide their own mounts the position was
+unassailable, and I contented myself with telling her that a
+predilection for the society of the young was one of the surest signs
+of old age.
+
+It was not till we were all seated at breakfast on the morning of the
+meet (which was to be at Castle Knox), that it was suggested, with all
+the spontaneity of a happy thought, by Bill, that "Mossoo" should be
+introduced to the members of the Hunt as a Frenchman who was unable to
+speak English.
+
+"Call him the Comte de Pralines," said Philippa, with suspicious
+promptitude.
+
+"You can call him Napoleon Buonaparte if you like," I said defiantly,
+"_I_ shall stay at home!"
+
+"All the Curranhilty people will be there," said Philippa softly.
+
+The thought of introducing the Comte de Pralines to Miss Bobbie Bennett
+was certainly attractive.
+
+"I refuse to introduce him to Lady Knox," I said with determination,
+and knew that I had yielded.
+
+A meet at Castle Knox always brought out a crowd; there were generally
+foxes, and always luncheon, and there was a touch of the G.O.C. about
+Lady Knox that added a pleasing edge of anxiety, and raised the meet to
+something of the nature of a full-dress parade.  I held to my point
+about Lady Knox, and did nothing more compromising than tremble in the
+background, while Bill Cunningham presented the Comte de Pralines to
+the lady of the house, supplementing the presentation with the
+statements that this was his first visit to Ireland, and that he spoke
+no English.
+
+The Comte de Pralines, in the newest of pink coats, and the whitest of
+breeches, and the most glittering of boots and spurs, stood on the step
+below Lady Knox, with the bridle of his hireling over his arm, and his
+shining silk hat in his hand.  Still with his hat in his hand, and
+looking, as Miss Larkie McRory whispered to me, "as pretty as a
+Christmas card," the Count rippled forth a stream of mellifluous
+French, commenting upon the beauty of the day, of the place, of the
+scene.
+
+Lady Knox's face deepened to so apoplectic a crimson, and her eyes
+became so fixed that I, watching the scene apprehensively, doubted if
+it were not my duty to rush at her and cut open her hunting-stock.
+When the Count ceased, having, as far as I could gather, enquired as to
+when she had last been to Auteuil, and if she had ever hunted in
+France, Lady Knox paused, and said very slowly:
+
+"Er--_j'espère que nous aurons un bon jour aujourdhui_."  Then,
+rapidly, to me, "Take your friend in for a drink, Major Yeates."
+
+My heart bled for her, and also quaked for myself, but I was into it
+now, up to my chin.
+
+During the next ten minutes Bill Cunningham, feebly abetted by me,
+played the game remorselessly, sparing neither age nor sex.  In the
+hall, amidst the sloe-gins and the whiskies and sodas (to which the
+Count, for a foreigner, took remarkably kindly), introductions slipped
+between cup and lip, poisoning the former and paralysing the latter.
+The victims took it variously; some sought refuge in bright smiles and
+large foreign gestures; some, in complete mental overthrow, replied in
+broken English to Mossoo's sugared periods; all were alike in one
+point, they moved as swiftly as might be, and as far as possible, out
+of the immediate neighbourhood of the Comte de Pralines.  Philippa,
+who, without any solid attainment, can put up a very good bluff in
+French, joined spasmodically in these encounters, alternately goading
+Mossoo to fresh outrages, and backing out when the situation became too
+acute.  I found her, affecting to put her sandwiches into the case on
+her saddle, and giving way to her feelings, with her face pressed
+against her mare's shoulder.
+
+"I introduced him to Bobbie Bennett," she said brokenly; "and he asked
+her if she spoke French.  She looked at me as if she were drowning, and
+said, '_Seulement très petit_'!"
+
+I said, repressively, that Lady Knox could see her, and that people
+would think, firstly, that she was crying, and secondly, that she was
+mad.
+
+"But I am mad, darling!" replied my wife, turning a streaming face to
+me.
+
+I informed her of my contempt for her, and, removing myself from her
+vicinity, collected myself for the introduction of the Count to Flurry
+Knox and Dr. Hickey.  By this time most of the Field were mounted, and
+the Comte de Pralines bent to his horse's mane as he uncovered with
+grave courtesy on his presentation to the Master and the First Whip,
+and proceeded to express the profundity of his gratification at meeting
+an Irish Master of Hounds.  The objects of the attention were palpably
+discomposed by it; Flurry put a finger to his cap, with a look at me
+expressive of No Surrender; Dr. Hickey, in unconscious imitation of the
+Count, bowed low, but forgot about his cap.
+
+"He has no English, I'm told," said Flurry, eyeing the Count
+suspiciously.
+
+I stopped myself on the verge of bowing assent, so infectious was the
+grace of the Pralines manner.
+
+"Is he come to buy horses for the German Army?" went on Flurry.  (It
+need hardly be said that this occurred before the War.)
+
+I explained that he was French.
+
+"You wouldn't know what these foreigners might be up to," returned Mr.
+Knox, quite unconvinced.  "I'm going on now----"
+
+He too moved expeditiously out of the danger zone.
+
+The Field straggled down the avenue, and progressed over tracts of
+tussocky grass in the wake of the hounds, towards the plantation that
+was the first draw.  The Keeper was outside the wood, with the
+assurance that there was a score of foxes in it, and that they had the
+country ate.
+
+"Maybe they'll eat the hounds, so," said Flurry.  "Let you all stay
+outside.  You can be talking French now for a bit----"
+
+I looked round to see who were availing themselves of this permission.
+The Count had by this time been introduced to Miss Larkie McRory;
+Philippa was apparently acting as interpreter, and Miss McRory was
+showing no disposition to close the interview.  The Field had
+withdrawn, and had formed itself into a committee-meeting on the Count.
+
+[Illustration: Miss Larkie McRory.]
+
+It was warm and sunny in the shelter of the wood.  Although the time
+was November there were still green leaves on some of the trees; it was
+a steamy day after a wet night, and I thought to myself that if the
+hounds _did_ run--Here came a challenge from the wood, answered
+multitudinously, and the next minute they were driving through the
+laurels towards the entrance gates, with a cry that stimulated even the
+many-wintered Daniel to capers quite unbefitting his time of life, or
+mine.  The Castle Knox demesne is a large one, and being surrounded by
+a prohibitively high and coped wall, it is easier to find a fox there
+than to get away with one.  Mighty galloping on the avenues followed,
+with interludes in the big demesne fields, where every gate had been
+considerately left open, and in which every horse with any pretensions
+to _savoir faire_ stiffened his neck, and put up his back, and pulled.
+The hounds, a choir invisible, carried their music on through the
+plantations, with whimpering, scurrying pauses, with strophe and
+anti-strophe of soprano and bass.  Sometimes the cry bore away to the
+demesne wall, and some one would shout "They're away!" and the question
+of the Front Gate versus the Western Gate would divide us like a sword.
+Twice, in the undergrowth, above the sunk fence that separated us from
+the wood, the quick, composed face of the fox showed itself; at last,
+when things were getting too hot in the covert, he sprang like a cat
+over the ditch, and flitted across the park with that gliding gait that
+dissimulates its own speed, while I and my fellows offered a painful
+example of the discordance of the human voice when compared with that
+of the hound, and five or six couple pitched themselves out of the wood
+and stretched away over the grass.
+
+It was fortunate for the Comte de Pralines that his entirely British
+view-holloa was projected for the most part into my ear (the drum of
+which it nearly split) and was merged in the general enthusiasm as we
+let ourselves go.
+
+"For God's sake, Major Yeates!" said Michael, the Second Whip,
+thundering up beside me as we neared the covert on the further side of
+the park, "come into the wood with me and turn them hounds!  Mr.
+Flurry's back on another fox with the body of the pack, and he's very
+near his curse!"
+
+I followed Michael into the covert, and was myself followed by a
+section of the Field, who might, with great advantage, have remained
+outside.  In the twinkling of an eye Michael was absorbed into the
+depths of the wood; so also were the six couple, but not so my retinue,
+who pursued me like sleuth-hounds, as I traversed the covert at such
+speed as the narrow rides permitted.  I made at length the negative
+discovery that it contained nothing save myself and my followers, a
+select party, consisting of the Comte de Pralines, Miss McRory, Miss
+Bobbie Bennett, Lady Knox's coachman on a three-year-old, and a little
+boy in knickerbockers, on a midget pony with the bearing of a war-horse
+and a soul to match.  We had come to a baffled pause at the cross-ways,
+when faint and far away, an indisputable holloa was borne to us.
+
+"They've gone out the West Gate," said the coachman, from among the
+tree-trunks into which he had considerately manoeuvred the kicking end
+of the three-year-old.  "It must be they ran him straight out into the
+country----"
+
+We made for the West Gate, reached it without sight or sound of Flurry
+or anyone else, and, on the farm road outside it, pulled up to listen.
+
+The holloa was repeated; half a mile ahead a gesticulating figure
+signalled to us to come on.  I wish to put it on record that I said I
+could not hear the hounds.  The Comte de Pralines (excitable, like all
+Frenchmen) spurred his hireling at the opposite bank, saying, as he
+shot past me:
+
+"It's no damned use humbugging here any longer!"
+
+As I turned Daniel to follow him, my eyes met those of Miss Larkie
+McRory, alight with infernal intelligence; they challenged, but at the
+same time they offered confederacy.  I jumped into the field after the
+Count; Miss McRory followed.
+
+"I'll tell Lady Knox on you!" she murmured, as she pounded beside me on
+the long-legged spectre, who, it may be remembered, had been described
+as "the latther end of a car-horse."
+
+The holloa had come to us from the side of a smooth green hill, and
+between us and it was a shallow valley, neatly fenced with banks that
+did credit to Sir Valentine Knox's farming.  The horses were fresh, the
+valley smiled in the conventional way, and spread sleek pastures before
+us; we took the down grade at a cheerful pace, and the banks a shade
+faster than was orthodox, and the coachman's three-year-old made up in
+enthusiasm what he lacked in skill, and the pony, who from the first
+was running away, got over everything by methods known only to itself.
+The Comte de Pralines held an undeviating line for the spot whence the
+holloa had proceeded; when we reached it there was no one to be seen,
+but there was another holloa further on.  The pursuit of this took us
+on to a road, and here the Castle Knox coachman, who had scouted on
+ahead, yelled something to the effect that he saw a rider out before
+him, accompanying the statement by an application of the spurs to the
+dripping but undaunted three-year-old.  A stretching gallop up the road
+ensued, headed by the little boy and the coachman, who had both secured
+a commanding lead.  The pace held for about a hundred yards, when the
+road bent sharply to the left, more sharply indeed than was anticipated
+by the leaders, who, as their mounts skidded as it were on one wheel
+round the corner, sailed from their saddles with singular unanimity and
+landed in the ditch.  At the same moment the rider we had been
+following came into view; he was a priest, in immaculate black coat and
+top-hat, seated on a tall chestnut horse, and proceeding at a tranquil
+footpace on his own affairs.
+
+He had seen the fox, he admitted (I am inclined to think he had headed
+him), and he had heard a man shouting, but no hounds had come his way.
+He was entirely sympathetic, and, warm as I was at the moment, a chill
+apprehension warned me that we might presently need sympathy.
+
+"It's my belief," said Miss Bennett, voicing that which I had not put
+into words, "we've been riding after the fox, and the hounds didn't
+leave the covert at all!"
+
+An elaborate French oath from the Count fell, theatrical as a
+drop-scene, on the close of the first act.  Miss Larkie McRory looked
+at him admiringly, and allowed just the last rays of her glance to
+include me.
+
+It was when we had retraced our steps to the bend of the road that we
+had a full view of the Castle Knox coverts, crowning in gold and brown
+those pleasant green slopes, easy as the descent to Avernus, down which
+we had galloped with such generous ardour some fifteen minutes ago.
+Outside the West Gate, through which we had emerged from the demesne,
+were three motionless figures in scarlet; Lady Knox and her grey horse
+were also recognisable; a few hounds were straying undecidedly in the
+first of the grass fields that we had traversed.
+
+A note of the horn leaped to us across the valley, an angry and
+peremptory note.  One of the scarlet figures started at a canter and
+turned the hounds.  Another and longer blast followed.  As if in
+obedience to its summoning, the coachman's three-year-old came ramping,
+riderless, down the road; he passed us with his head high in air and
+his flashing eye fixed upon the distant group, and, with a long shrill
+neigh, put his tail over his back and directed his flight for his owner
+and her grey horse.
+
+"God help poor Tierney!" said Miss Bennett, in a stricken voice, "and
+ourselves too!  I believe they saw us all the time, and we galloping
+away on the line of the fox!"
+
+"I'm going home," I said.  "Will you kindly make my apologies to the
+Master?"
+
+"I'll kindly do no such thing," replied Miss Bennett.  "I'll let Flurry
+Knox cool off a bit before I meet him again, and that won't be this
+side of Christmas, if _I_ can help it!  Good-bye, dear friends!"
+
+She turned her mare, and set her face for her own country.
+
+There now remained only the Count, Miss McRory, and myself, and to
+remove ourselves from the field of vision of the party at the gate was
+our first care.  We had, no doubt, been thoroughly identified,
+nevertheless the immediate sensation of getting a furzy hill between us
+and Flurry was akin to that of escaping from the rays of a
+burning-glass.  In shelter we paused and surveyed each other.
+
+The Comte de Pralines, with his shiny hat very much on the back of his
+head, put down his reins, shoved his crop under his knee, and got out
+his cigarette case.
+
+"Well," he began philosophically, striking a match, "our luck ain't
+in----!"
+
+He broke off, the match went out, and a lively glow suffused his
+unsheltered countenance.
+
+"_Vous voyez mon cher--_" he resumed, very rapidly.  "_J'ai appris
+quelques petits mots----_"
+
+"What a lovely English accent he has!" interrupted Miss McRory
+rapturously; "it's a lot nicer than his French one.  To look at him
+you'd never think he was so clever.  It's a pity he wouldn't try to
+pick up a little more."
+
+"Now, that's hitting a man when he's down," said the Comte de Pralines.
+"I want some one to be kind to me.  I've had a poor day of it; no one
+would talk to me.  I stampeded them wherever I went."
+
+"I didn't notice Miss McRory stampeding to any great extent," I said.
+
+"Wait awhile!" rejoined Miss McRory.  "Maybe the stampeding will be
+going the other way when you and he meet Lady Knox!"
+
+"I shan't wait an instant," said the Comte de Pralines, "you and Major
+Yeates will explain."
+
+
+The horses had been moving on, and the covert was again in sight, about
+a quarter of a mile away on our left.  There was nothing to be seen,
+but hounds were hunting again in the demesne; their cry drove on
+through the woods inside the grey demesne wall; they were hunting in a
+body, and they were hunting hard.
+
+At each moment the cry was becoming more remote, but it was still
+travelling on inside the wall.  The fear of Flurry fell from us as a
+garment, and the only question that presented itself was whether to
+return to the West Gate or to hold on outside.  It was a long-accepted
+theory at Castle Knox that the demesne wall was not negotiable, and
+that the foxes always used the gates, like Christians; bearing this in
+mind, I counselled the Front Gate and the outside of the wall.  A
+couple of lanes favoured us; we presently found ourselves in a series
+of marshy fields, moving along abreast of the invisible hounds in the
+wood.  They were in the thickest and least accessible part of it, and
+Flurry's voice and horn came faintly as from a distance.
+
+I explained that it was impossible to ride that part of the wood, but
+that, if they held on as they were going, the Front Gate would make it
+all right for us, and of course Flurry would----
+
+"Oh! look, look, look!" shrieked Miss McRory, snatching at my arm and
+pointing with her whip.
+
+A short way ahead of us a huge elm tree had fallen upon the wall; the
+greenish-yellow leaves still clinging to its branches showed that the
+catastrophe was recent.  It had broken down the wall to within five or
+six feet of the ground, and was reclining in the breach that it had
+made, with its branches sprawling in the field.  I followed the line of
+Miss Larkie's whip, and was just in time to see a fox float like a red
+leaf from one of these to the ground, and glide straight across our
+front.  He passed out of sight over a bank, and the Count stood up in
+his stirrups, put his finger in his ear, and screamed in a way that
+must have been heard in the next county.  I contributed a not
+ineffective bellow, and Miss McRory decorated the occasion with long
+thin squeals.
+
+The hounds, inside the wall, answered in an agony that was only allayed
+by the discovery that the trunk of the tree formed as handy a bridge
+for them as for the fox.  They came dropping like ripe fruit through
+the branches, and, under our rejoicing eyes, swarmed to the fox's line,
+and flung on, in the fullest of full-cry, over the bank on which we had
+last seen him.  I have not failed to assure Flurry Knox that anything
+less suggestive of "sneaking away with the hounds" than the manner of
+our departure could hardly be conceived, but Mr. Knox has not withdrawn
+the phrase.
+
+It may be conceded that Flurry had grounds for annoyance.  Had I had
+the fox in one hand and the Ordnance Map in the other, I could hardly
+have improved on the course steered by our pilot.  Up hill for a bit,
+when the horses were fresh, with gradients just steep enough to temper
+Daniel's well-sustained tug of war, yet not so steep as to make a
+three-foot bank look like a house, or to guarantee a big knee at each
+"stone gap."  Then high and dry country, with sheep huddled in
+defensive positions in the corners of the fields, and grass like a
+series of putting-greens, minus the holes, and fat, comely banks, and
+thin walls, from which the small round stones rattled harmlessly as
+Miss McRory's car-horse swept through them.  Down into a long valley,
+with little sky-blue lakes, set in yellow sedge; and there was a
+helpful bog road there, that nicked nicely with the bending line of the
+hounds through the accompanying bog, and allayed a spasm of acute
+anxiety as to whether we should ever get near them again.  Then upwards
+once more, deviously, through rougher going, with patches of
+low-growing furze sprouting from blackened tracts where the hillside
+had been set on fire, with the hounds coming to their noses among
+brakes of briars and bracken; finally, in the wind and sun of the
+hill-top, a well-timed check.
+
+We looked back for the first time, half in fear that we might find
+Flurry hot on our track, half in hope that he and his horn were coming
+to our help; but neither in the green country nor in the brown valley
+was there any sign or sound of him.  There was nothing to be seen but a
+couple of men standing on a fence to watch us, nothing to be heard
+except cur dogs vociferating at every cottage.
+
+"Fifteen couple on," said the Count professionally.  "How many does
+Knox usually have out?"
+
+"All he's got," I said, mopping my brow.
+
+"I don't see the two that have no hair on their backs," said Miss
+McRory, whose eyes, much enhanced by the radiant carmine of her cheeks,
+beamed at us through wisps and loops of hair.  "I know them, they're
+always scratching, the poor things!"
+
+That Miss McRory and her steed kept, as they did, their place in what
+is known to history as the Great Castle Knox Run, is a matter that I do
+not pretend to explain.  Some antiquarian has unearthed the fact that
+the car-horse had three strains of breeding, and had twice been second
+in a Point-to-Point; but I maintain that credit must be ascribed to
+Miss Larkie, about whom there is something inevitable; some street-boy
+quality of being in the movement.
+
+We were now on a heathery table-land, with patches of splashy, rushy
+ground, from which the snipe flickered out as the hounds cast
+themselves through it.  Presently, on the top of a hard, peaty bank, a
+hound spoke, hesitatingly, yet hopefully, and plunged down on the other
+side; the pack crowded over, and drove on through the heather.  Daniel
+changed feet on a mat of ling with a large stone in it, and therefrom
+ramped carefully out over a deep cut in the peat, unforeseen, and
+masked by tufts of heather.  The hireling of the Comte de Pralines had,
+up to this, done his work blamelessly, if without originality; he had
+an anxiousness to oblige that had been matured during a dread winter
+when he had been the joint property of three subalterns, but he
+reserved to himself a determination to drop economically off his banks,
+and boggy slits were not in his list of possibilities.
+
+How the matter occurred I do not know, but, when I looked round, his
+head alone was visible, and the Count was standing on his in the
+heather.  Miss McRory's car-horse, who had pulled up in the act of
+following the Count, with a suddenness acquired, no doubt, in the
+shafts of a Cork covered-car, was viewing the scene with horror from
+the summit of the bank.  The hounds were by this time clear of the
+heather, and were beginning to run hard; it was not until I was on the
+further side of the next bank that I cast another fleeting look back;
+this time the Count was standing on his feet, but the hireling was
+still engulfed, and Miss McRory was still on the wrong side of the
+slit.  After that I forgot them, wholly and heartlessly, as is
+invariable in such cases.
+
+As a matter of fact, I had no attention to spare for anyone but myself,
+even though we went, for the first twenty minutes or so, as on rubber
+tyres, through bland dairy farms wherein the sweet influences of the
+dairy-cow had induced gaps in every fence, and gates into every road.
+The scent, mercifully for Daniel, was not quite what it had been; the
+fox had run through cattle, and also through goats (a small and odorous
+party, on whose behalf, indeed, some slight intervention on my part was
+required), and it was here, when crossing a road, that a donkey and her
+foal, moved by some mysterious attraction akin to love at first sight,
+attached themselves to me.  Undeterred by the fact that the mother's
+foreleg was fettered to her hind, the pair sped from field to field in
+my wake; at the checks, which just then were frequent, they brayed
+enthusiastically.  I thought to elude them at a steep drop into a road,
+but they toboganned down it without an effort; when they overtook me
+the fetter-chain was broken, and clanked from the mother's hind-leg as
+if she were a family ghost.
+
+There came at length a moment, outside a farm-house, when it seemed as
+if the fox had beaten us.  Here, on the farther side of Castle Knox, I
+was well out of my own country, and what the fox's point might be was
+represented by the letter X.  Nevertheless it was here that I lifted
+the hounds and brought off the cast of a life-time; I am inclined to
+think that he had lain down under a hayrick and was warned of our
+approach by the voices of my attendant jackasses; my cast was probably
+not much more of a fluke than such inspirations usually are, but the
+luck was with me.  Old Playboy, sole relic of my deputy Mastership,
+lifted his white head and endorsed my suggestion with a single bass
+note; Rally, Philippa's prize puppy, uttered a soprano cadenza, and the
+pack suddenly slid away over the pasture fields, with the smoothness
+and unanimity of the _Petits Chevaux_ over their green cloth.
+
+It was now becoming for Daniel and me something of an effort to keep
+our proud and lonely place in or about the next field to the hounds.
+The fields were coming smaller, the gaps fewer; Daniel had no intention
+of chucking it, but he gave me to understand that he meant to take the
+hills on the second speed.  And, unfortunately, the hills were coming.
+The hounds, by this time three fences ahead, flung over a bank on the
+upgrade, a bank that would give pause for reflection at the beginning
+of a run.  I tried back, scrambled into a lane, followed it up the
+hill, with the cry of the hounds coming fainter each minute, dragged a
+cart wheel and a furze bush out of a gap with my crop, found myself in
+a boggy patch of turnips, surrounded by towering fuchsia hedges, and
+realised that the pack had passed in music out of sight.
+
+I stood still and looked at my watch.  It was already an hour and
+twenty minutes from the word "Go!" and the hounds were not only gone
+but were still going.  A man who has lost hounds inevitably follows the
+line of least resistance.  I retired from the turnip field, and
+abandoned myself to the lane, which seemed not disinclined to follow
+the direction in which the hounds had been heading.  Since the hayrick
+episode they had been running right-handed, and the lane bent
+right-handed over the end of the hill, and presently deposited me on a
+road.  It was one of the moments when the greatness of the world is
+borne in upon the wayfarer.  There was a spacious view from the
+hill-side; three parishes, at least, offered themselves for my
+selection, and I surveyed them, solitary and remote as the evening
+star, and with no more reason than it for favouring one more than
+another.  A harrowing, and, by this time, but too familiar cry, broke
+on my ear, an undulating cry as of a thing that galloped as it roared.
+My admirers were still on my trail; I gave Daniel a touch of the spurs
+and trotted on to the right.
+
+No human being was visible, but some way ahead there was a slated house
+at a cross-roads; there, at all events, I could get my bearings.  There
+were porter-barrels outside it, and from some distance I heard two
+voices, male and female, engaged in loud and ferocious argument; I had
+no difficulty in diagnosing a public-house.  When Daniel and I darkened
+the doorway the shouting ceased abruptly, and I saw a farmer, in his
+Sunday clothes, making an unsteady retreat through a door at the back
+of the shop.  The other disputant, a large, middle-aged woman, remained
+entrenched behind the counter, and regarded me with a tranquil and
+commanding eye.  She informed me, as from a pulpit, that I was six
+miles from Castle Knox, and with dignity, as though leaving a pulpit,
+she moved from behind the counter, and advanced to the door to indicate
+my road.  I asked her if she had seen anything of the hounds.
+
+"There was one of your dogs looked in the door to me a while ago," she
+replied, "but he got a couple of boxes from the cat that have kittens;
+I d'no what way he went.  Indeed I was bothered at the time with that
+poor man that came in to thank me for the compliment I paid him in
+going to his sister's funeral."
+
+I said that he certainly seemed to feel it very much.  At which she
+looked hard at me and said that he was on his way to a wedding, and
+that it might be he had a drop taken to rise his heart.  "He was after
+getting a half a crown from a gentleman--a huntsman like yourself," she
+added, "that was striving to get his horse out of a ditch."
+
+"Was there a lady with him?" I asked.
+
+"There was, faith!  And the two o' them legged it away then through the
+country, and they galloping like the deer!"
+
+So, in all love, we parted; before I reached the next turning renewed
+sounds of battle told me that the compliment was still being pressed
+home.
+
+My road, bending ever to the right, strolled through an untidy
+nondescript country, with little bits of bog, and little lumps of hill,
+and little rags of fields.  I had jogged a mile or so when I saw a
+hound, a few fields away to my right, poking along on what appeared to
+be a line; he flopped into a boggy ditch, and scrambled from it on to a
+fence.  He stood there undecidedly, like any human being, reviewing the
+situation, and then I saw his head and stern go up.  The next moment I
+also heard what he had heard, a faint and far-away note of the horn.
+It came again, a long and questing call.
+
+The road was flat and fairly straight; far away upon it something was
+moving gradually into my scope of vision, something with specks of red
+in it.  It advanced upon me, firmly, and at a smart pace; heading it,
+like the ram of a battleship, was Mr. Knox.  With him, "of all his
+halls had nursed," remained only the two hounds with the hairless
+backs, the two who, according to Miss McRory, were always scratching.
+Behind him was a small and unsmiling selection from those who, like
+him, had lost the hunt.  Lady Knox headed them; my wife and Bill
+brought up the rear.  The hound whom I had seen in the bog had preceded
+me, and was now joining himself to his two comrades, putting the best
+face he could upon it, with a frowning brow and his hackles up.  The
+comrades, in their official position of sole representatives of the
+pack, received him with orthodox sternness, and though unable, for
+obvious reasons, to put their hackles up, the bald places on their
+backs were of an intimidating pink.
+
+My own reception followed the same lines.
+
+"Where are the hounds?" barked Flurry, in the awful tones of a parent
+addressing a governess who, through gross neglect, has mislaid her
+charges.
+
+Before I had had time to make up my mind whether to be truculent or
+pacific, there was a shout away on our left.  At some little distance
+up a by-road, a man was standing on a furze-plumed bank, beckoning to
+us with a driving-whip.  Flurry stood in his stirrups, and held up his
+cap.  The man yelled information that was wholly unintelligible, but
+the driving-whip indicated a point beyond him, and Flurry's brown mare
+jumped from a standstill to a gallop, and swung into the by-road.
+
+The little band of followers swung after him.  When Lady Knox was well
+ahead, I followed, and found myself battering between high banks behind
+Philippa and Bill Cunningham.
+
+"Where's Mossoo?" my wife said breathlessly, as Daniel's head drew
+level with her sandwich case.  "We met the man who pulled him out of
+the ditch--up in the hills there----"
+
+"Yes, by Jove!" said Bill, "Flurry asked him if it was a Frenchman, and
+the chap said, 'French or German, he had curses as good as yourself!'
+I told Flurry it must have been you!"
+
+"I don't mind Flurry, it's Lady Knox----" began Philippa.
+
+Here we all came to a violent full-stop.  Flurry's advance had been
+arrested by a covered-car and horse drawn across the road; the horse
+was eating grass, the driver, with the reins in his hand, was standing
+with his back to us on the top of the bank from which he had hailed us,
+howling plaudits, as if he were watching a race.  There were distant
+shouts, and barking dogs, and bellowing cattle, and blended with them
+was the unmistakable baying of hounds.
+
+I daresay that what Flurry said to the driver did him good--did Flurry
+good, I mean.  The car lurched to one side, and, as we squeezed past
+it, we saw between its black curtains a vision of a scarlet-faced
+bride, embedded in female relatives; two outside cars, driverless, and
+loaded with wedding guests, were drawn up a little farther on.  Flurry,
+still exploding like a shell, thundered on down the lane; the high bank
+ended at a gateway, he turned in, and as we crushed in after him we
+were greeted by a long and piercing "Who-whoop!"
+
+We were in a straggling field with furzy patches in it.  At the farther
+end of it was a crowd of country people on horses and on foot,
+obviously more wedding-guests; back of all, on a road below, was a
+white-washed chapel, and near it, still on the chestnut horse, was the
+priest who had headed the morning fox.  Close to one of the clumps of
+furze the Comte de Pralines was standing, knee-deep in baying hounds,
+holding the body of the fox high above his head, and uttering scream
+upon scream of the most orthodox quality.  He flung the fox to the
+hounds, the onlookers cheered, Miss McRory, seated on the car-horse,
+waved the brush above her head, and squealed at the top of her voice
+something that sounded like "Yoicks!"  Her hair was floating freely
+down her back; a young countryman, in such sacrificial attire as
+suggested the bridegroom, was running across the field with her hat in
+his hand.
+
+Flurry pulled up in silence; so did we.  We were all quite outside the
+picture, and we knew it.
+
+"Oh, the finest hunt ever you see!" cried the bridegroom as he passed
+us; "it was Father Dwyer seen him shnaking into the furze, the villyan!"
+
+"Worry, worry, worry!  Tear him and eat him, old fellows!" shouted the
+Comte de Pralines.  "Give the hounds room, can't you, you chaps!  I
+suppose you never saw them break up a fox before!"  This to the wedding
+guests, who had crowded in, horse and foot, on top of the scuffling,
+growling pack.
+
+Flurry turned an iron face upon me.  His eye was no bigger than a pin's
+head.
+
+"I suppose it's from Larkie McRory he got the English?" he said; "he
+learnt it quick."
+
+"The McRorys don't speak English!" said Lady Knox, in a voice like a
+north-east wind.
+
+"_Seulement très petit!_" Philippa murmured brazenly.
+
+Whether Lady Knox heard her or not, I am unable to say.  Her face was
+averted from me, and remained as inflexible as a profile on a coin--a
+Roman coin, for choice.
+
+The faculty of not knowing when you are beaten is one that has, I
+think, been lauded beyond its deserving.  Napoleon the Great has
+condemned manoeuvring before a fixed position, and Lady Knox was
+clearly a fixed position.  Accepting these tenets, I began an
+unostentatious retirement, in which I was joined by Philippa.  We were
+nearing safety and the gate of the field, when a yearning, choking wail
+came to us from the lane.
+
+"The Bride?" queried my wife hysterically.
+
+It was repeated; in the same instant my admirers, the jackasses, _mère
+et fils_, advanced upon the scene at a delirious gallop, and, sobbing
+with the ecstasy of reunion, resumed their attendance upon Daniel.
+
+For a moment the attention of the field, including even that of the
+Roman coin, was diverted from the Comte de Pralines, and was
+concentrated upon our retreat.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+THE SHOOTING OF SHINROE
+
+Mr. Joseph Francis M'Cabe rose stiffly from his basket chair, picked up
+the cushion on which he had been seated, looked at it with animosity,
+hit it hard with his fist, and, flinging it into the chair, replaced
+himself upon it, with the single word:
+
+"Flog!"
+
+I was aware that he referred to the flock with which the cushions in
+the lounge of Reardon's Hotel were stuffed.
+
+"They have this hotel destroyed altogether with their improvements,"
+went on Mr. M'Cabe between puffs, as he lit his pipe.  "God be with the
+time this was the old smoking-room, before they knocked it and the hall
+into one and spoilt the two of them!  There were fine solid chairs in
+it that time, that you'd sleep in as good as your bed, but as for these
+wicker affairs, I declare the wind 'd whistle through them the same as
+a crow's nest."  He paused, and brought his heel down heavily on the
+top of the fire.  "And look at that for a grate!  A Well-grate they
+call it,--_I'd_ say, 'Leave Well alone!'  Thirty years I'm coming to
+Sessions here, and putting up in this house, and in place of old Tim
+telling me me own room was ready for me, there's a whipper-snapper of a
+snapdragon in a glass box in the hall, asking me me name in broken
+English" (it may be mentioned that this happened before the War), "and
+'Had I a Cook's ticket?' and down-facing me that I must leave my key in
+what he called the 'Bew-ro.'"
+
+I said I knew of a lady who always took a Cook's ticket when she went
+abroad, because when she got to Paris there would be an Englishman on
+the platform to meet her, or at all events a broken Englishman.
+
+Mr. M'Cabe softened to a temporary smile, but held on to his grievance
+with the tenacity of his profession.  (I don't think I have mentioned
+that he is a Solicitor, of a type now, unfortunately, becoming
+obsolete.)  He had a long grey face, and a short grey moustache; he
+dyed his hair, and his age was known to no man.
+
+"There was one of Cook's tourists sat next me at breakfast," he
+resumed, "and he asked me was I ever in Ireland before, and how long
+was I in it.  'Wan day,' says I!"
+
+"Did he believe you?" I asked.
+
+"He did," replied Mr. M'Cabe, with something that approached compassion.
+
+I have always found old M'Cabe a mitigating circumstance of Sessions at
+Owenford, both in Court and out of it.  He was a sportsman of the
+ingrained variety that grows wild in Ireland, and in any of the
+horse-coping cases that occasionally refresh the innermost soul of
+Munster, it would be safe to assume that Mr. M'Cabe's special gifts had
+ensured his being retained, generally on the shady side.  He fished
+when occasion served, he shot whether it did or not.  He did not
+exactly keep horses, but he always knew some one who was prepared to
+"pass on" a thoroughly useful animal, with some infirmity so
+insignificant that until you tried to dispose of him you did not
+realise that he was yours, until his final passing-on to the next
+world.  He had certain shooting privileges in the mountains behind the
+town of Owenford (bestowed, so he said, by a grateful client), and it
+had often been suggested by him that he and I should anticipate some
+November Sessions by a day, and spend it "on the hill."  We were now in
+the act of carrying out the project.
+
+"Ah, these English," M'Cabe began again, mixing himself a glass of
+whisky and water, "they'd believe anything so long as it wasn't the
+truth.  Talking politics these lads were, and by the time they had
+their ham and eggs swallowed they had the whole country arranged.  'And
+look,' says they--they were anglers, God help us!--'look at all the
+money that's going to waste for want of preserving the rivers!'  'I beg
+your pardon,' says I, 'there's water-bailiffs on the most of the
+rivers.  I was defending a man not long since, that was cot by the
+water-bailiff poaching salmon on the Owen.  'And what proof have you?'
+says I to the water-bailiff.  'How do you know it was a salmon at all?'
+'Is it how would I know?' says the bailiff, 'didn't I gaff the fish for
+him meself!'"
+
+"What did your anglers say to that?" I enquired.
+
+"Well, they didn't quite go so far as to tell me I was a liar," said
+Mr. M'Cabe tranquilly.  "Ah, telling such as them the truth is wasting
+what isn't plenty!  Then they'll meet some fellow that lies like a
+tooth-drawer, and they'll write to the English _Times_ on the head of
+him!"  He stretched forth a long and bony hand for the tumbler of
+whisky and water.  "And talking of tooth-drawers," he went on, "there's
+a dentist comes here once a fortnight, Jeffers his name is, and a great
+sportsman too.  I was with him to-day"--he passed his hand consciously
+over his mouth, and the difference that I had dimly felt in his
+appearance suddenly, and in all senses of the word, flashed upon
+me--"and he was telling me how one time, in the summer that's past,
+he'd been out all night, fishing in the Owen.  He was going home before
+the dawn, and he jumped down off a bank on to what he took to be a
+white stone--and he aimed for the stone, mind you, because he thought
+the ground was wet--and what was it but a man's face!"  M'Cabe paused
+to receive my comment.  "What did he do, is it?  Ran off for his life,
+roaring out, 'There's a first-rate dentist in Owenford!'  The fellow
+was lying asleep there, and he having bundles of spurge with him to
+poison the river!  He had taken drink, I suppose."
+
+"Was he a water-bailiff too?" said I.  "I hope the conservators of the
+river stood him a set of teeth."
+
+"If they did," said M'Cabe, with an unexpected burst of feeling, "I
+pity him!"  He rose to his feet, and put his tumbler down on the
+chimney-piece.  "Well, we should get away early in the morning, and
+it's no harm for me to go to bed."
+
+He yawned--a large yawn that ended abruptly with a metallic click.  His
+eyes met mine, full of unspoken things; we parted in a silence that
+seemed to have been artificially imposed upon Mr. M'Cabe.
+
+The wind boomed intermittently in my chimney during the night, and a
+far and heavy growling told of the dissatisfaction of the sea.  Yet the
+morning was not unfavourable.  There was a broken mist, with shimmers
+of sun in it, and the carman said it would be a thing of nothing, and
+would go out with the tide.  The Boots, a relic of the old _régime_,
+was pessimistic, and mentioned that there were two stars squez up agin
+the moon last night, and he would have no dependence on the day.
+M'Cabe offered no opinion, being occupied in bestowing in a species of
+dog-box beneath the well of the car a young red setter, kindly lent by
+his friend the dentist.  The setter, who had formed at sight an
+unfavourable opinion of the dog-box, had resolved himself into an
+invertebrate mass of jelly and lead, and was with difficulty
+straightened out and rammed home into it.
+
+"Have we all now?" said M'Cabe, slamming the door in the dog's face.
+"Take care we're not like me uncle, old Tom Duffy, that was going
+shooting, and was the whole morning slapping his pockets and saying,
+'Me powder! me shot! me caps! me wads!' and when he got to the bog, 'O
+tare an' ouns!' says he, 'I forgot the gun!'"
+
+There are still moments when I can find some special and
+not-otherwise-to-be-attained flavour in driving on an outside car; a
+sense of personal achievement in sitting, by some method of instinctive
+suction, the lurches and swoops peculiar to these vehicles.  Reardon's
+had given us its roomiest car and its best horse, a yellow mare, with a
+long back and a slinging trot, and a mouth of iron.
+
+"Where did Mr. Reardon get the mare, Jerry?" asked M'Cabe, as we
+zigzagged in successive hairbreadths through the streets of Owenford.
+
+"D-Dublin, sir," replied the driver, who, with both fists extended in
+front of him and both heels planted against his narrow footboard,
+seemed to find utterance difficult.
+
+"She's a goer!" said M'Cabe.
+
+"She is--she killed two men," said Jerry, in two jerks.
+
+"That's a great credit to her.  What way did she do it?"
+
+"P-pulled the lungs out o' them!" ejaculated Jerry, turning the last
+corner and giving the mare a shade more of her head, as a tribute,
+perhaps, to her prowess.
+
+She swung us for some six miles along the ruts of the coast road at the
+same unflinching pace, after which, turning inland and uphill, we began
+the climb of four miles into the mountains.  It was about eleven
+o'clock when we pulled up beside a long and reedy pool, high up in the
+heather; the road went on, illimitably it seemed, and was lost, with
+its attendant telegraph posts, in cloud.
+
+"Away with ye now, Jerry," said M'Cabe; "we'll shoot our way home."
+
+He opened the back of the dog-box, and summoned its occupant.  The
+summons was disregarded.  Far back in the box two sparks of light and a
+dead silence indicated the presence of the dog.
+
+"How, snug you are in there!" said M'Cabe; "here, Jerry, pull him out
+for us.  What the deuce is this his name is?  Jeffers told me
+yesterday, and it's gone from me."
+
+"I d'no would he bite me?" said Jerry, taking a cautious observation
+and giving voice to the feelings of the party.  "Here, poor fellow!
+Here, good lad!"
+
+The good lad remained immovable.  The lure of a sandwich produced no
+better result.
+
+"We can't be losing our day with the brute this way," said M'Cabe.
+"Tip up the car.  He'll come out then, and no thanks to him."
+
+As the shafts rose heavenwards, the law of gravitation proved too many
+for the setter, and he slowly slid to earth.
+
+"If I only knew your dam name we'd be all right now," said M'Cabe.
+
+The carman dropped the shafts on to the mare, and drove on up the pass,
+with one side of the car turned up and himself on the other.  The
+yellow mare had, it seemed, only begun her day's work.  A prophetic
+instinct, of the reliable kind that is strictly founded on fact, warned
+me that we might live to regret her departure.
+
+The dentist's setter had, at sight of the guns, realised that things
+were better than he had expected, and now preceded us along the edge of
+the lake with every appearance of enthusiasm.  He quartered the ground
+with professional zeal, he splashed through the sedge, and rattled
+through thickets of dry reeds, and set successively a heron, a
+water-hen, and something, unseen, that I believe to have been a
+water-rat.  After each of these efforts he rushed in upon his quarry,
+and we called him by all the gun-dog names we had ever heard of, from
+Don to Grouse, from Carlo to Shot, coupled with objurgations on a
+rising scale.  With none of them did we so much as vibrate a chord in
+his bosom.  He was a large dog, with a blunt stupid face, and a faculty
+for excitement about nothing that impelled him to bound back to us as
+often as possible, to gaze in our eyes in brilliant enquiry, and to
+pant and prance before us with all the fatuity of youth.  Had he been
+able to speak, he would have asked idiotic questions, of that special
+breed that exact from their victim a reply of equal imbecility.
+
+The lake and its environs, for the first time in M'Cabe's experience,
+yielded nothing; we struck up on to the mountain side, following the
+course of an angry stream that came racing down from the heights.  We
+worked up through ling and furze, and skirted flocks of pale stones
+that lay in the heather like petrified sheep, and the dog, ranging
+deliriously, set water-wagtails and anything else that could fly; I
+believe he would have set a blue-bottle, and I said so to M'Cabe.
+
+"Ah, give him time; he'll settle down," said M'Cabe, who had a
+thankfulness for small mercies born of a vast experience of makeshifts;
+"he might fill the bag for us yet."
+
+We laboured along the flank of the mountain, climbing in and out of
+small ravines, jumping or wading streams, sloshing through yellow
+sedgery bog; always with the brown heather running up to the misty
+skyline, and always with the same atrocious luck.  Once a small pack of
+grouse got up, very wild, and leagues out of range, thanks to the
+far-reaching activities of the dog, and once a hermit woodcock exploded
+out of a clump of furze, and sailed away down the slope, followed by
+four charges of shot and the red setter, in equally innocuous pursuit.
+And this, up to luncheon time, was the sum of the morning's sport.
+
+We ate our sandwiches on a high ridge, under the lee of a tumbled pile
+of boulders, that looked as if they had been about to hurl themselves
+into the valley, and had thought better of it at the last moment.
+Between the looming, elephant-grey mountains the mist yielded glimpses
+of the far greenness of the sea, the only green thing in sight in this
+world of grey and brown.  The dog sat opposite to me, and willed me to
+share my food with him.  His steady eyes were charged with the
+implication that I was a glutton; personally I abhorred him, yet I
+found it impossible to give him less than twenty-five per cent. of my
+sandwiches.
+
+"I wonder did Jeffers take him for a bad debt," said M'Cabe
+reflectively, as he lit his pipe.
+
+I said I should rather take my chance with the bad debt.
+
+"He might have treated me better," M'Cabe grumbled on, "seeing that I
+paid him seven pound ten the day before yesterday, let alone that it
+was me that was the first to put him up to this--this bit of Shinroe
+Mountain that never was what you might call strictly preserved.  When
+he came here first he didn't as much as know what cartridges he'd want
+for it.  'Six and eight,' says I, 'that's a lawyer's fee, so if you
+think of me you'll not forget it!'  And now, if ye please," went on Mr.
+Jeffers' preceptor in sport, "he's shooting the whole country and
+selling all he gets!  And he wouldn't as much as ask me to go with him;
+and the excuse he gives, he wouldn't like to have an old hand like me
+connyshooring his shots!  How modest he is!"
+
+I taunted M'Cabe with having been weak enough thus to cede his rights,
+and M'Cabe, who was not at all amused, said that after all it wasn't so
+much Jeffers that did the harm, but an infernal English Syndicate that
+had taken the Shinroe shooting this season, and paid old Purcell that
+owned it ten times what it was worth.
+
+"It might be as good for us to get off their ground now," continued
+M'Cabe, rising slowly to his feet, "and try the Lackagreina Valley.
+The stream below is their bounds."
+
+This, I hasten to say, was the first I had heard of the Syndicate, and
+I thought it tactless of M'Cabe to have mentioned it, even though the
+wrong that we had done them was purely technical.  I said to him that I
+thought the sooner we got off their ground the better, and we descended
+the hill and crossed the stream, and M'Cabe said that he could always
+shoot this next stretch of country when he liked.  With this assurance,
+we turned our backs on the sea and struck inland, tramping for an hour
+or more through country whose entire barrenness could only be explained
+on the hypothesis that it has been turned inside out to dry.  So far it
+had failed to achieve even this result.
+
+The weather got thicker, and the sport, if possible, thinner; I had
+long since lost what bearings I possessed, but M'Cabe said he knew of a
+nice patch of scrub in the next valley that always held a cock.  The
+next valley came at last, not without considerable effort, but no patch
+of scrub was apparent.  Some small black and grey cattle stood and
+looked at us, and a young bull showed an inclination to stalk the dog;
+it seemed the only sport the valley was likely to afford.  M'Cabe
+looked round him, and looked at his watch, and looked at the sky, which
+did not seem to be more than a yard above our heads, and said without
+emotion:
+
+"Did ye think of telling the lad in the glass box in the hall that we
+might want some dinner kept hot for us?  I d'no from Adam where we've
+got to!"
+
+There was a cattle track along the side of the valley which might,
+though not necessarily, lead somewhere.  We pursued it, and found that
+it led, in the first instance, to some blackfaced mountain sheep.  A
+cheerful interlude followed, in which the red setter hunted the sheep,
+and we hunted the setter, and what M'Cabe said about the dentist in the
+intervals of the chase was more appropriate to the occasion than to
+these pages.
+
+When justice had been satiated, and the last echo of the last yell of
+the dog had trembled into silence among the hills, we resumed the
+cattle-track, which had become a shade more reliable, and, as we
+proceeded, began to give an impression that it might lead somewhere.
+The day was dying in threatening stillness.  Lethargic layers of mist
+bulged low, like the roof of a marquee, and cloaked every outline that
+could yield us information.  The dog, unchastened by recent events, and
+full of an idiot optimism, continued to range the hillside.
+
+"I suppose I'll never get the chance to tell Jeffers my opinion of that
+tom-fool," said M'Cabe, following with an eye of steel the
+perambulations of the dog; "the best barrister that ever wore a wig
+couldn't argue with a dentist!  He has his fist half way down your
+throat before you can open your mouth; and in any case he'll tell me we
+couldn't expect any dog would work for us when we forgot his name.
+What's the brute at now?"
+
+The brute was high above us on the hillside, setting a solitary furze
+bush with convincing determination, and casting backward looks to see
+if he were being supported.
+
+"It might be a hare," said M'Cabe, cocking his gun, with a revival of
+hope that was almost pathetic, and ascending towards the furze bush.
+
+I neither quickened my pace nor deviated from the cattle track, but I
+may admit that I did so far yield to the theory of the hare as to slip
+a cartridge into my gun.
+
+M'Cabe put his gun to his shoulder, lowered it abruptly, and walked up
+to the furze bush.  He stooped and picked up something.
+
+"He's not such a fool after all!" he called out; "ye said he'd set a
+blue-bottle, and b' Jove ye weren't far out!"
+
+He held up a black object that was neither bird nor beast.
+
+I took the cartridge out of my gun as unobtrusively as possible, and
+M'Cabe and the dog rejoined me with the product of the day's sport.  It
+was a flat-sided bottle, high shouldered, with a short neck; M'Cabe
+extracted the cork and took a sniff.
+
+"Mountain dew no less!" (Mr. M'Cabe adhered faithfully to the stock
+phrases of his youth.)  "This never paid the King a shilling!  Give me
+the cup off your flask, Major, till we see what sort it is."
+
+It was pretty rank, and even that seasoned vessel, old M'Cabe, admitted
+that it might be drinkable in another couple of years, but hardly in
+less; yet as it ran, a rivulet of fire, through my system, it seemed to
+me that even the water in my boots became less chill.
+
+"In the public interest we're bound to remove it," said M'Cabe, putting
+the bottle into his game bag; "any man that drank enough of that 'd rob
+a church!  Well, anyway, we're not the only people travelling this
+path," he continued; "whoever put his afternoon tea to hide there will
+choose a less fashionable promenade next time.  But indeed the poor man
+couldn't be blamed for not knowing such a universal genius of a dog was
+coming this way!  Didn't I tell you he'd fill the bag for us!"
+
+He extracted from his pockets a pair of knitted gloves, and put them
+on; it was equivalent to putting up the shutters.
+
+It was shortly after this that we regained touch with civilisation.
+Above the profile of a hill a telegraph post suddenly showed itself
+against the grey of the misty twilight.  We made as bee-like a line for
+it as the nature of the ground permitted, and found ourselves on a
+narrow road, at a point where it was in the act of making a hairpin
+turn before plunging into a valley.
+
+"The Beacon Bay road, begad!" said M'Cabe; "I didn't think we were so
+far out of our way.  Let me see now, which way is this we'd best go."
+
+He stood still and looked round him, taking his bearings; in the
+solitude the telegraph posts hummed to each other, full of information
+and entirely reticent.
+
+The position was worse than I thought.  By descending into the valley
+we should, a couple or three miles farther on, strike the coast road
+about six miles from home; by ascending the hill and walking four
+miles, we should arrive at the station of Coppeen Road, and, with luck,
+there intercept the evening train for Owenford.
+
+"And that's the best of our play, but we'll have to step out,"
+concluded M'Cabe, shortening the strap of his game-bag, and settling it
+on his back.
+
+"If I were you," I said, "I'd chuck that stuff away.  Apart from
+anything else, it's about half a ton extra to carry."
+
+"There's many a thing, Major, that you might do that I might not do,"
+returned M'Cabe with solemnity, "and in the contrairy sense the
+statement is equally valid."
+
+He faced the hill with humped shoulders, and fell with no more words
+into his poacher's stride, and I followed him with the best imitation
+of it that I could put up after at least six hours of heavy going.
+M'Cabe is fifteen years older than I am, and I hope that when I am his
+age I shall have more consideration than he for those who are younger
+than myself.
+
+It was now nearly half-past five o'clock, and by the time we had
+covered a mile of puddles and broken stones it was too dark to see
+which was which.  I felt considerable dubiety about catching the train
+at Coppeen Road, all the more that it was a flag station, demanding an
+extra five minutes in hand.  Probably the engine-driver had long since
+abandoned any expectation of passengers at Coppeen Road, and, if he
+even noticed the signal, would treat it as a practical joke.  It was
+after another quarter of an hour's trudge that a distant sound entered
+into the silence that had fallen upon M'Cabe and me, an intermittent
+grating of wheels upon patches of broken stone, a steady hammer of
+hoofs.
+
+M'Cabe halted.
+
+"That car's bound to be going to Owenford," he said; "I wonder could
+they give us a lift."
+
+A single light (the economical habit of the South of Ireland) began to
+split the foggy darkness.
+
+"Begad, that's like the go of Reardon's mare!" said M'Cabe, as the
+light swung down upon us.
+
+We held the road like highwaymen, we called upon the unseen driver to
+stop, and he answered to the name of Jerry.  This is not a proof of
+identity in a province where every third man is dignified by the name
+of Jeremiah, but as the car pulled up it was Reardon's yellow mare on
+which the lamplight fell, and we knew that the fates had relented.
+
+We should certainly not catch the train at Coppeen Road, Jerry assured
+us; "she had," he said, "a fashion of running early on Monday nights,
+and in any case if you'd want to catch that thrain, you should make
+like an amber-bush for her."
+
+We agreed that it was too late for the preparation of an ambush.
+
+"If the Sergeant had no objections," continued Jerry, progressing
+smoothly towards the tip that would finally be his, "it would be no
+trouble at all to oblige the gentlemen.  Sure it's the big car I have,
+and it's often I took six, yes, and seven on it, going to the races."
+
+I was now aware of two helmeted presences on the car, and a decorous
+voice said that the gentlemen were welcome to a side of the car if they
+liked.
+
+"Is that Sergeant Leonard?" asked M'Cabe, who knew every policeman in
+the country.  "Well, Sergeant, you've a knack of being on the spot when
+you're wanted!"
+
+"And sometimes when he's not!" said I.
+
+There was a third and unhelmeted presence on the car, and something of
+stillness and aloofness in it had led me to diagnose a prisoner.
+
+The suggested dispositions were accomplished.  The two policemen and
+the prisoner wedged themselves on one side of the car, M'Cabe and I
+mounted the other, and put the dog on the cushion of the well behind us
+(his late quarters in the dog-box being occupied by half a mountain
+sheep, destined for the hotel larder).  The yellow mare went gallantly
+up to her collar, regardless of her augmented load; M'Cabe and the
+Sergeant leaned to each other across the back of the car, and fell into
+profound and low-toned converse; I smoked, and the dog, propping his
+wet back against mine, made friends with the prisoner.  It may be the
+Irish blood in me that is responsible for the illicit sympathy with a
+prisoner that sometimes incommodes me; I certainly bestowed some of it
+upon the captive, sandwiched between two stalwarts of the R.I.C., and
+learning that the strong arm of the Law was a trifle compared with the
+rest of its person.
+
+"What sport had you, Major?" enquired Jerry, as we slackened speed at a
+hill.
+
+I was sitting at the top of the car, under his elbow, and he probably
+thought that I was feeling neglected during the heart-to-heart
+confidences of M'Cabe and the Sergeant.
+
+"Not a feather," I replied.
+
+"Sure the birds couldn't be in it this weather," said Jerry
+considerately; he had in his time condoled with many sportsmen.  "I'm
+after talking to a man in Coppeen Road station, that was carrying the
+game bag for them gentlemen that has Mr. Purcell's shooting on Shinroe
+Mountain, and what had the four o' them after the day--only one
+jack-snipe!"
+
+"They went one better than we did," I said, but, as was intended, I
+felt cheered--"what day were they there?"
+
+"To-day, sure!" answered Jerry, with faint surprise, "and they hadn't
+their luncheon hardly ate when they met one on the mountain that told
+them he seen two fellas walking it, with guns and a dog, no more than
+an hour before them.  'That'll do!' says they, and they turned about
+and back with them to Coppeen Road to tell the police."
+
+"Did they see the fellows?" I asked lightly, after a panic-stricken
+pause.
+
+"They did not.  Sure they said if they seen them, they'd shoot them
+like rooks," replied Jerry, "and they would too.  It's what the man was
+saying if they cot them lads to-day they'd have left them in the way
+they'd be given up by both doctor and priest!  Oh, they're fierce
+altogether!"
+
+I received this information in a silence that was filled to bursting
+with the desire to strangle M'Cabe.
+
+Jerry leaned over my shoulder, and lowered his voice.
+
+"They were saying in Coppeen Road that there was a gentleman that came
+on a mothor-bike this morning early, and he had Shinroe shot out by ten
+o'clock, and on with him then up the country; and it isn't the first
+time he was in it.  It's a pity those gentlemen couldn't ketch _him_!
+_They'd_ mothor-bike him!"
+
+It was apparent that the poaching of the motor-bicycle upon the
+legitimate preserves of carmen was responsible for this remarkable
+sympathy with the law; I, at all events, had it to my credit that I had
+not gone poaching on a motor-bicycle.
+
+Just here M'Cabe emerged from the heart-to-heart, and nudged me in the
+ribs with a confederate elbow.  I did not respond, being in no mood for
+confederacy, certainly not with M'Cabe.
+
+"The Sergeant is after telling me this prisoner he has here is
+prosecuted at the instance of that Syndicate I was telling you about,"
+he whispered hoarsely in my ear, "for hunting Shinroe with greyhounds.
+He was cited to appear last week, and he didn't turn up; he'll be
+before you to-morrow.  I hope the Bench will have a fellow-feeling for
+a fellow-creature!"
+
+The whisper ended in the wheezy cough that was Mr. M'Cabe's equivalent
+for a laugh.  It was very close to my ear, and it had somewhere in it
+the metallic click that I had noticed before.
+
+I grunted forbiddingly, and turned my back upon M'Cabe, as far as it is
+possible to do so on an outside car, and we hammered on through the
+darkness.  Once the solitary lamp illumined the prolonged countenance
+of a donkey, and once or twice we came upon a party of sheep lying on
+the road; they melted into the night at the minatory whistle that is
+dedicated to sheep, and on each of these occasions the dentist's dog
+was shaken by strong shudders, and made a convulsive attempt to spring
+from the car in pursuit.  We were making good travelling on a long
+down-grade, a smell of sea-weed was in the mist, and a salt taste was
+on my lips.  It was very cold; I had no overcoat, my boots had plumbed
+the depths of many bogholes, and I found myself shivering like the dog.
+
+It was at this point that I felt M'Cabe fumbling at his game-bag, that
+lay between us on the seat.  By dint of a sympathy that I would have
+died rather than betray, I divined that he was going to tap that fount
+of contraband fire that he owed to the dentist's dog.  It was,
+apparently, a matter of some difficulty; I felt him groping and tugging
+at the straps.
+
+I said to myself, waveringly: "Old blackguard!  I won't touch it if he
+offers it to me."
+
+M'Cabe went on fumbling:
+
+"Damn these woolly gloves!  I can't do a hand's turn with them."
+
+In the dark I could not see what followed, but I felt him raise his
+arm.  There was a jerk, followed by a howl.
+
+"Hold on!" roared M'Cabe, with a new and strange utterance, "Thtop the
+horth!  I've dropped me teeth!"
+
+The driver did his best, but with the push of the hill behind her the
+mare took some stopping.
+
+"Oh, murder! oh, murder!" wailed M'Cabe, lisping thickly, "I pulled
+them out o' me head with the glove, trying to get it off!" He scrambled
+off the car.  "Give me the lamp!  Me lovely new teeth----"
+
+I detached the lamp from its socket with all speed, and handed it to
+M'Cabe, who hurried back on our tracks.  From motives of delicacy I
+remained on the car, as did also the rest of the party.  A minute or
+two passed in awed silence, while the patch of light went to and fro on
+the dark road.  It seemed an intrusion to offer assistance, and an
+uncertainty as to whether to allude to the loss as "them," or "it,"
+made enquiries a difficulty.
+
+"For goodneth'ake have none o' ye any matcheth, that ye couldn't come
+and help me?" demanded the voice of M'Cabe, in indignation blurred
+pathetically by his gosling-like lisp.
+
+I went to his assistance, and refrained with an effort from suggesting
+the employment of that all-accomplished setter, the dentist's dog, in
+the search; it was not the moment for pleasantry.  Not yet.
+
+We crept along, bent double, like gorillas; the long strips of broken
+stones yielded nothing, the long puddles between them were examined in
+vain.
+
+"What the dooth will I do to-morrow?" raged M'Cabe, pawing in the
+heather at the road's edge.  "How can I plead when I haven't a blathted
+tooth in me head?"
+
+"I'll give you half a crown this minute, M'Cabe," said I brutally, "if
+you'll say 'Sessions'!"
+
+Here the Sergeant joined us, striking matches as he came.  He worked
+his way into the sphere of the car-lamp, he was most painstaking and
+sympathetic, and his oblique allusions to the object of the search were
+a miracle of tact.
+
+"I see something white beyond you, Mr. M'Cabe,"' he said respectfully,
+"might that be them?"
+
+M'Cabe swung the lamp as indicated.
+
+"No, it might not.  It's a pebble," he replied, with pardonable
+irascibility.
+
+Silence followed, and we worked our way up the hill.
+
+"What's that, sir?" ventured the Sergeant, with some excitement,
+stopping again and pointing.  "I think I see the gleam of the gold!"
+
+"Ah, nonthenth, man!  They're vulcanite!" snapped M'Cabe, more
+irascibly than ever.
+
+The word nonsense was a disastrous effort, and I withdrew into the
+darkness to enjoy it.
+
+"What colour might vulcanite be, sir?" murmured a voice beside me.
+
+Jerry had joined the search-party; he lighted, as he spoke, an inch of
+candle.  On hearing my explanation he remarked that it was a bad
+chance, and at the same instant the inch of candle slipped from his
+fingers and fell into a puddle.
+
+"Divil mend ye for a candle!  Have ye a match, sir?  I haven't a one
+left!"
+
+As it happened, I had no matches, my only means of making a light being
+a patent tinder-box.
+
+"Have you a match there?" I called out to the invisible occupants of
+the car, which was about fifteen or twenty yards away, advancing
+towards it as I spoke.  The constable politely jumped off and came to
+meet me.
+
+As he was in the act of handing me his match-box, the car drove away
+down the hill.
+
+I state the fact with the bald simplicity that is appropriate to great
+disaster.  To be exact, the yellow mare sprang from inaction into a
+gallop, as if she had been stung by a wasp, and had a start of at least
+fifty yards before either the carman or the constable could get under
+weigh.  The carman, uttering shrill and menacing whistles, led the
+chase, the constable, though badly hampered by his greatcoat, was a
+good second, and the Sergeant, making the best of a bad start, followed
+them into the night.
+
+The yellow mare's head was for home, and her load was on its own legs
+on the road behind her; hysterical yelps from the dentist's dog
+indicated that he also was on his own legs, and was, in all human
+probability, jumping at the mare's nose.  As the rapturous beat of her
+hoofs died away on the down-grade, I recalled the assertion that she
+had pulled the lungs out of two men, and it seemed to me that the
+prisoner had caught the psychological moment on the hop.
+
+"They'll not ketch him," said M'Cabe, with the flat calm of a broken
+man, "not to-night anyway.  Nor for a week maybe.  He'll take to the
+mountains."
+
+The silence of the hills closed in upon us, and we were left in our
+original position, plus the lamp of the car, and minus our guns, the
+dentist's dog, and M'Cabe's teeth.
+
+Far, far away, from the direction of Coppeen Road, that sinister
+outpost, where evil rumours were launched, and the night trains were
+waylaid by the amber-bushes, a steady tapping sound advanced towards
+us.  Over the crest of the hill, a quarter of a mile away, a blazing
+and many-pointed star sprang into being, and bore down upon us.  "A
+motor-bike!" ejaculated M'Cabe.  "Take the light and thtop him--he
+wouldn't know what I wath thaying--if he ran over them they're done
+for!  For the love o' Merthy tell him to keep the left thide of the
+road!"
+
+I took the lamp, and ran towards the bicyclist, waving it as I ran.
+The star, now a moon of acetylene ferocity, slackened speed, and a
+voice behind it said:
+
+"What's up?"
+
+I stated the case with telegraphic brevity, and the motor-bicycle slid
+slowly past me.  Its rider had a gun slung across his back, my lamp
+revealed a crammed game-bag on the carrier behind him.
+
+"Sorry I can't assist you," he called back to me, keeping carefully at
+the left-hand side of the road, "but I have an appointment."  Then, as
+an afterthought, "There's a first-rate dentist in Owenford!"
+
+The red eye of the tail light glowed a farewell and passed on, like all
+the rest, into the night.
+
+I rejoined M'Cabe.
+
+He clutched my arm, and shook it.
+
+"That wath Jefferth!  _Jefferth_, I tell ye!  The dirty poacher!  And
+hith bag full of our birdth!"
+
+It was not till the lamp went out, which it did some ten minutes
+afterwards, that I drew M 'Cabe from the scene of his loss, gently, as
+one deals with the bereaved, and faced with him the six-mile walk to
+Owenford.
+
+
+
+
+PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. LTD.
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+EDINBURGH AND LONDON
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+_BY THE SAME AUTHORS_
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+SOME EXPERIENCES OF AN IRISH
+R.M.  With 31 Illustrations by E. [OE]. SOMERVILLE.  Crown 8vo.
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+IRISH R.M.  With 35 Illustrations by E. [OE]. SOMERVILLE.  Crown 8vo.
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+Illustrations by E. [OE]. SOMERVILLE.  Crown 8vo.
+
+*** _In this volume is included a reprint of "Slipper's
+ABC of Fox-hunting" with numerous illustrations._
+
+
+ALL ON THE IRISH SHORE: Irish
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+The Project Gutenberg E-text of In Mr. Knox's Country,
+by E. &OElig;. Somerville and Martin Ross
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of In Mr. Knox's Country, by 
+E. OEnone Somerville and Martin Ross
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: In Mr. Knox's Country
+
+Author: E. OEnone Somerville
+        Martin Ross
+
+Illustrator: E. OEnone Somerville
+
+Release Date: November 19, 2011 [EBook #38062]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN MR. KNOX'S COUNTRY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-cover"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-cover.jpg" ALT="Cover" BORDER="2">
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-front"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-front.jpg" ALT="&quot;If ever you see hounds pointing this way, don't spare spurs to get to the cliff before them!&quot;  [Page 4.]" BORDER="2">
+<H4 CLASS="h4center">
+&quot;If ever you see hounds pointing this way, <BR>
+don't spare spurs to get to the cliff before them!&quot;  [<A HREF="#p4">Page 4.</A>]
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="t1">
+In Mr. Knox's Country
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="t3">
+By
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="t2">
+E. &OElig;. Somerville and Martin Ross
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="t4">
+Authors of "Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.," "Further<BR>
+Experiences of an Irish R.M.," "Some Irish Yesterdays,"<BR>
+"All on the Irish Shore," "Dan Russel the Fox,"<BR>
+"The Real Charlotte," etc. etc. etc.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="t3">
+With 8 Illustrations by E. &OElig;. Somerville
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="t4">
+Longmans, Green and Co.<BR>
+39 Paternoster Row, London<BR>
+Fourth Avenue & 30th Street, New York<BR>
+Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras<BR>
+1915<BR>
+<BR>
+All rights reserved
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="t2">
+CONTENTS
+</P>
+
+<TABLE ALIGN="center" WIDTH="80%">
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">I.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap01">THE AUSSOLAS MARTIN CAT</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">II.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap02">THE FINGER OF MRS. KNOX</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">III.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap03">THE FRIEND OF HER YOUTH</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">IV.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap04">HARRINGTON'S</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">V.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap05">THE MAROAN PONY</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">VI.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap06">MAJOR APOLLO RIGGS</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">VII.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap07">WHEN I FIRST MET DR. HICKEY</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">VIII.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap08">THE BOSOM OF THE McRORYS</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">IX.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap09">PUT DOWN ONE AND CARRY TWO</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">X.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap10">THE COMTE DE PRALINES</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">XI.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap11">THE SHOOTING OF SHINROE</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+</TABLE>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="t2">
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+</P>
+
+<H4 STYLE="margin-left: 10%">
+<A HREF="#img-front">
+"If ever you see hounds pointing this way, don't spare spurs to get<BR>
+  to the cliff before them!" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . <I>Frontispiece</I>
+</A>
+</H4>
+
+<H4 STYLE="margin-left: 10%">
+<A HREF="#img-003">
+Kitty the Shakes
+</A>
+</H4>
+
+<H4 STYLE="margin-left: 10%">
+<A HREF="#img-049">
+"I heard scald-crow laughter behind me in the shawls"
+</A>
+</H4>
+
+<H4 STYLE="margin-left: 10%">
+<A HREF="#img-111">
+"Lyney's a tough dog!"
+</A>
+</H4>
+
+<H4 STYLE="margin-left: 10%">
+<A HREF="#img-139">
+"Walkin' Aisy"
+</A>
+</H4>
+
+<H4 STYLE="margin-left: 10%">
+<A HREF="#img-171">
+James
+</A>
+</H4>
+
+<H4 STYLE="margin-left: 10%">
+<A HREF="#img-214">
+Miss Cooney O'Rattigan
+</A>
+</H4>
+
+<H4 STYLE="margin-left: 10%">
+<A HREF="#img-259">
+Miss Larkie McRory
+</A>
+</H4>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap01"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="t2">
+IN MR. KNOX'S COUNTRY
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="t3b">
+I
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="t4b">
+THE AUSSOLAS MARTIN CAT
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Flurry Knox and I had driven some fourteen miles to a tryst with one
+David Courtney, of Fanaghy.  But, at the appointed cross-roads, David
+Courtney was not.  It was a gleaming morning in mid-May, when
+everything was young and tense and thin and fit to run for its life,
+like a Derby horse.  Above us was such of the spacious bare country as
+we had not already climbed, with nothing on it taller than a thorn-bush
+from one end of it to the other.  The hill-top blazed with yellow
+furze, and great silver balls of cloud looked over its edge.  Nearly as
+white were the little white-washed houses that were tucked in and out
+of the grey rocks on the hill-side.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's up there somewhere he lives," said Flurry, turning his cart
+across the road; "which'll you do, hold the horse or go look for him?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I said I would go to look for him.  I mounted the hill by a wandering
+bohireen resembling nothing so much as a series of bony elbows; a
+white-washed cottage presently confronted me, clinging, like a
+sea-anemone, to a rock.  I knocked at the closed door, I tapped at a
+window held up by a great, speckled foreign shell, but without success.
+Climbing another elbow, I repeated the process at two successive
+houses, but without avail.  All was as deserted as Pompeii, and, as at
+Pompeii, the live rock in the road was worn smooth by feet and scarred
+with wheel tracks.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+An open doorway faced me; I stooped beneath its lintel and asked of
+seeming vacancy if there were "anyone inside."  There was no reply.  I
+advanced into a clean kitchen, with a well-swept earthen floor, and was
+suddenly aware of a human presence very close to me.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A youngish woman, with a heavy mop of dark hair, and brown eyes staring
+at the opposite wall, was sitting at the end of a settle behind the
+door.  Every bit of her was trembling.  She looked past me as if I did
+not exist.  Feeling uncertain as to whether she or I were mad, I put to
+her my question as to where David Courtney lived, without much
+expectation of receiving an answer.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Still shaking from head to foot, and without turning her eyes, she
+replied:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"A small piece to the north.  The house on the bare rock."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The situation showed no symptom of expansion; I faltered thanks to her
+profile and returned to Flurry.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The house of David Courtney produced David Courtney's large and
+handsome wife, who told us that Himself was gone to a funeral, and all
+that was in the village was gone to it, but there was a couple of the
+boys below in the bog.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What have they done with those cubs?" asked Flurry.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mrs. Courtney shot at him a dark-blue side-glance, indulgent and
+amused, and, advancing to the edge of her rock terrace, made a trumpet
+of her hands and projected a long call down the valley.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Mikeen!  Con!  Come hither!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+From a brown patch in the green below came a far-away response, and we
+presently saw two tall lads coming towards us, running up the hill as
+smoothly and easily as a couple of hounds.  Their legs were bare and
+stained with bog-mould, they were young and light and radiant as the
+May weather.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I did not withhold my opinion of them from their proprietor.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why, then, I have six more as good as them!" replied Mrs. Courtney,
+her hands on her hips.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We took the horse from the shafts and pushed him, deeply suspicious,
+into a darksome lair, in one corner of which glimmered a pale object,
+either pig or calf.  When this was done we followed Mikeen and Con up
+through blossoming furze and blue-grey rock to the ridge of the hill,
+and there came face to face with the vast blue dazzle of the Atlantic,
+with a long line of cliffs standing it off, in snowy lather, as far as
+eye could follow them into the easterly haze.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's the cliff over-right you now," said one of the boys, pointing
+downwards, with a hand dark with bog-stuff, to a grey and green wedge
+thrust out into the blue.  "It's there where she have her den.  She
+have a pat' down for herself in it&mdash;it's hardly a bird could walk
+it&mdash;the five pups was following her, and two o' them rolled down into
+the strand, and our dogs held them.  Ourselves was below in the cove
+gathering seaweed."
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="p4"></A>
+
+<P>
+"Make a note of it now, Major," said Flurry, "and if ever you see
+hounds pointing this way, don't spare spurs to get to the cliff before
+them!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why don't you get them out and blow up the place?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Is it get them out of that hole!" said one of the boys.  "If all the
+foxes in Europe was inside in it you couldn't get them out!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We mightn't want them either," said Flurry, his eye ranging the face
+of the cliff, and assimilating its uncompromising negations.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Then there's plenty that would!" returned Mikeen, looking at us with
+an eye as blue and bright as the sea.  "There was a man east here that
+cot a fox and her five young ones in the one night, and he got three
+half-crowns for every lad o' them!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He'd be turned out of hell for doing that," said Flurry, very severely.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We went back to the cottage on the rock, and the matter entered upon
+its more serious phase.  I took no part in the negotiations, and
+employed myself in converse with Mrs. Courtney, who&mdash;it may not be out
+of place to recall&mdash;informed me, amongst other domestic details, that
+the farm wouldn't carry all the children she had, and that nowadays,
+when the ger'rls would be going to America, it's white nightdresses and
+flannelette nightdresses she should give them; and further, that she
+thought, if she lived to be as old as a goat, she'd never see them so
+tasty.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+On the way home I asked Flurry what he was going to do with the two
+cubs, now immured in a market basket under the seat of the dog-cart.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Flurry was ambiguous and impenetrable; there were certain matters in
+which Flurry trusted nobody, knowing the darkness of his own heart and
+the inelasticity of other people's points of view.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That woman, you know, that told you the way," he remarked, with
+palpable irrelevance, "'Kitty the Shakes,' they call her&mdash;they say she
+mightn't speak to anyone once in three months, and she shakes that way
+then.  It's a pity that was the house you went into first."
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-003"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-003.jpg" ALT="Kitty the Shakes." BORDER="2">
+<H4 CLASS="h4center">
+Kitty the Shakes.
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+"Why so?" said I.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's the why!" said Flurry.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+It was during the week following this expedition that Philippa and I
+stayed for a few days at Aussolas, where Flurry and Mrs. Flurry were
+now more or less permanently in residence.  The position of guest in
+old Mrs. Knox's house was one often fraught with more than the normal
+anxieties proper to guests.  Her mood was like the weather, a matter
+incalculable and beyond control; it governed the day, and was the <I>leit
+motif</I> in the affairs of the household.  I hope that it may be given to
+me to live until my mood also is as a dark tower full of armed men.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+On the evening of our arrival my wife, whose perception of danger is
+comparable only to that of the wild elephant, warned me that Mrs. Knox
+was rheumatic, and that I was on no account to condole with her.  Later
+on the position revealed itself.  Mrs. Knox's Dublin doctor had ordered
+her to Buxton with as little delay as possible; furthermore, she was to
+proceed to Brighton for the summer, possibly for the winter also.  She
+had put Aussolas on a house agent's books, "out of spite," Flurry said
+sourly; "I suppose she thinks I'd pop the silver, or sell the feather
+beds."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was a tribute to Mrs. Knox's character that her grandson treated her
+as a combatant in his own class, and did not for an instant consider
+himself bound to allow her weight for either age or sex.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At dinner that night Mrs. Knox was as favourable to me as usual; yet it
+was pointed out to me by Mrs. Flurry that she was wearing two shawls
+instead of one, always an indication to be noted as a portent of storm.
+At bridge she played a very sharp-edged game, in grimness scarcely
+mitigated by two well-brought-off revokes on the part of Philippa, who
+was playing with Flurry; a gross and unprincipled piece of chivalry on
+my wife's part that was justly resented by Mr. Knox.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Next morning the lady of the house was invisible, and Mullins, her
+maid, was heard to lament to an unknown sympathiser on the back stairs
+that the divil in the wild woods wouldn't content her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the grove at Aussolas, on a height behind the castle, romantically
+named Mount Ida, there is a half-circle of laurels that screens, with
+pleasing severity, an ancient bench and table of stone.  The spot
+commands a fair and far prospect of Aussolas Lake, and, nearer at hand,
+it permitted a useful outlook upon the kitchen garden and its affairs.
+When old Mrs. Knox first led me thither to admire the view, she
+mentioned that it was a place to which she often repaired when the cook
+was on her trail with enquiries as to what the servants were to have
+for dinner.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Since our expedition to Fanaghy the glory of the weather had remained
+unshaken, and each day there was a shade of added warmth in the
+sunshine and a more caressing quality in the wind.  Flurry and I went
+to Petty Sessions in the morning, and returned to find that Mrs. Knox
+was still in her room, and that our respective wives were awaiting us
+with a tea-basket in the classic shades of Mount Ida.  Mrs. Knox had
+that mysterious quality of attraction given to some persons, and some
+dogs, of forming a social vortex into which lesser beings inevitably
+swim; yet I cannot deny that her absence induced a sneaking sensation
+of holiday.  Had she been there, for example, Mrs. Flurry would
+scarcely have indicated, with a free gesture, the luxuriance of the
+asparagus beds in the kitchen garden below, nor promised to have a
+bundle of it cut for us before we went home; still less would she and
+Philippa have smoked cigarettes, a practice considered by Mrs. Knox to
+be, in women, several degrees worse than drinking.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To us there, through the green light of young beech leaves and the
+upstriking azure glare of myriads of bluebells, came the solid presence
+of John Kane.  It would be hard to define John Kane's exact status at
+Aussolas; Flurry had once said that, whether it was the house, or the
+garden, or the stables, whatever it'd be that you wanted to do, John
+Kane'd be in it before you to hinder you; but that had been in a moment
+of excusable irritation, when John Kane had put a padlock on the oat
+loft, and had given the key to Mrs. Knox.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+John Kane now ascended to us, and came to a standstill, with his soft
+black hat in his hands; it was dusty, so were his boots, and the
+pockets of his coat bulked large.  Among the green drifts and flakes of
+the pale young beech leaves his bushy beard looked as red as a
+squirrel's tail.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I have the commands here, Master Flurry," he began, "and it's to
+yourself I'd sooner give them.  As for them ger'rls that's inside in
+the kitchen, they have every pup in the place in a thrain at the back
+door, and, if your tobacco went asthray, it's me that would be blemt."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The commands"&mdash;<I>i.e.</I> some small parcels&mdash;were laid on the stone
+table, minor pockets yielded an assortment of small moneys that were
+each in turn counted and placed in heaps by their consort parcels.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And as for the bottle, the misthress wrote down for me," said John
+Kane, his eye rounding up his audience like a sheep-dog, "I got me
+'nough with the same bottle.  But sure them's the stupidest people in
+Hennessy's!  'Twas to Hennessy himself I gave the misthress's paper,
+and he was there looking at it for a while.  'What have she in it?'
+says he to me.  'How would I know,' says I, 'me that have no learning?'
+He got the spy-glass to it then, and 'twas shortly till all was in the
+shop was gethered in it looking at it.  'Twould take an expairt to read
+it!' says one fella&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"True for him!" said Flurry.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"&mdash;&mdash;  'She have written it in Latin!' says Hennessy.  'Faith she's
+able to write it that way, or anny other way for yee!' says I.  'Well,
+I'll tell ye now what ye'll do,' says Hennessy.  'There's a boy in the
+Medical Hall, and he's able to read all languages.  Show it to him,'
+says he.  I showed it then to the boy in the Medical Hall.  Sure, the
+very minute he looked at it&mdash;'Elliman's Embrocation,' says he."  John
+Kane waved his hand slightly to one side; his gestures had throughout
+been supple and restrained.  "Sure them's the stupidest people in
+Hennessy's!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+My sympathies were with the house of Hennessy; I, too, had encountered
+Mrs. Knox's handwriting, and realised the high imaginative and
+deductive qualities needed in its interpreter.  No individual word was
+decipherable, but, with a bold reader, groups could be made to conform
+to a scheme based on probabilities.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You can tell the mistress what they were saying at Hennessy's about
+her," said Flurry.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I will, your honour," replied John, accepting the turn in the
+conversation as easily as a skilful motorist changes gear.  "I suppose
+you'll have a job for me at Tory Lodge when I get the sack from the
+misthress?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No, but they tell me I'm to be put on the Old Age Pension Committee,"
+returned Flurry, "and I might get a chance to do something for you if
+you'd give over dyeing that beard you have."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm sorry to say it's the Almighty is dyeing my beard for me, sir,"
+replied John Kane, fingering a grey streak on his chin, "and I think
+He's after giving yourself a touch, too!"  He glanced at the side of
+Flurry's head, and his eye travelled on to mine.  There was an almost
+flagrant absence of triumph in it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He put aside a beechen bough with his hand; "I'll leave the things on
+the hall table for you, sir," he said, choosing the perfect moment for
+departure, and passed out of sight.  The bough swung into place behind
+him; it was like an exit in a pastoral play.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"She never told me about the embrocation," said Sally, leaning back
+against the mossed stones of the bench and looking up into the web of
+branches.  "She never will admit that she's ill."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Poor old Mrs. Knox!" said Philippa compassionately, "I thought she
+looked so ill last night when she was playing bridge.  Such a tiny
+fragile thing, sitting wrapped up in that great old chair&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Philippa is ineradicably romantic, yet my mind, too, dwelt upon the old
+autocrat lying there, ill and undefeated, in the heart of her ancient
+fortress.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Fragile!" said Flurry, "you'd best not tell her that.  With my
+grandmother no one's ill till they're dead, and no one's dead till
+they're buried!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Away near the house the peacock uttered his defiant screech, a note of
+exclamation that seemed entirely appropriate to Aussolas; the
+turkey-cock in the yard accepted the challenge with effusion, and from
+further away the voice of Mrs. Knox's Kerry bull, equally instant in
+taking offence, ascended the gamut of wrath from growl to yell.
+Blended with these voices was another&mdash;a man's voice, in loud harangue,
+advancing down the long beech walk to the kitchen garden.  As it
+approached, the wood-pigeons bolted in panic, with distracted clappings
+of wings, from the tall firs by the garden wall in which they were wont
+to sit arranging plans of campaign with regard to the fruit.  We sat in
+tense silence.  The latch of the garden gate clicked, and the voice
+said in stentorian tones:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"&mdash;&mdash;My father 'e kept a splendid table!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I hear wheels!" breathed Sally Knox.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A hawthorn tree and a laburnum tree leaned over the garden gate, and
+from beneath their canopy of cream and pale gold there emerged the
+bath-chair of Mrs. Knox, with Mrs. Knox herself seated in it.  It was
+propelled by Mullins&mdash;even at that distance the indignation of Mullins
+was discernible&mdash;and it progressed up the central path.  Beside it
+walked the personage whose father had kept a splendid table.
+Parenthetically it may be observed that he did credit to it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Glory be to Moses!  Look at my grandmother!" said Flurry under his
+breath.  "How fragile she is!  Who the dickens has she got hold of?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He thinks she's deaf, anyhow," said Sally.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's where he makes the mistake!" returned Flurry.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I don't see your glawss, Mrs. Knox," shouted the stout gentleman.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's very possible," replied the incisive and slightly cracked voice
+of Mrs. Knox, "because the little that is left of it is in the mortar
+on the wall, to keep thieves out, which it fails to do."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The pair passed on, and paused, still in high converse, at the
+asparagus beds; Mullins, behind the bath-chair, wiped her indignant
+brow.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You'll go home without the asparagus," whispered Flurry, "she has
+every stick of it counted by now!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They moved on, heading for the further gate of the garden.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'll bet a sovereign he's come after the house!" Flurry continued,
+following the <I>cortège</I> with a malevolent eye.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Later, when we returned to the house, we found a motor-bicycle, dusty
+and dwarfish, leaning against the hall door steps.  Within was the
+sound of shouting.  It was then half-past seven.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Is it possible that she's keeping him for dinner?" said Sally.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Take care he's not staying for the night!" said Flurry.  "Look at the
+knapsack he has on the table!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There's only one room he can possibly have," said Mrs. Flurry, with a
+strange and fixed gaze at her lord, "and that's the James the Second
+room.  The others are cleared for the painters."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, that will be all right," replied her lord, easily.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When I came down to dinner I found the new arrival planted on his
+short, thick legs in front of the fireplace, still shouting at Mrs.
+Knox, who, notwithstanding the sinister presence of the two shawls of
+ill-omen, was listening with a propitious countenance.  She looked very
+tired, and I committed the <I>gaucherie</I> of saying I was sorry to hear
+she had not been well.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, that was nothing!" said Mrs. Knox, with a wave of her tiny,
+sunburnt, and bediamonded hand.  "I've shaken that off, 'like dewdrops
+from the lion's mane!'  This is Mr. Tebbutts, from&mdash;er&mdash;England, Major
+Yeates."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mr. Tebbutts, after a bewildered stare, presumably in search of the
+lion, proclaimed his gratification at meeting me, in a voice that might
+have been heard in the stable yard.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At dinner the position developed apace.  The visitor was, it appeared,
+the representative of a patriarchal family, comprising samples of all
+the relationships mentioned in the table of affinities, and
+<I>fortissimo</I>, and at vast length, he laid down their personal histories
+and their various requirements.  It was pretty to see how old Mrs.
+Knox, ill as she looked, and suffering as she undoubtedly was, mastered
+the bowling.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Did the Tebbutts ladies exact bathing for their young?  The lake
+supplied it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+("It's all mud and swallow-holes!" said Flurry in an audible aside.)
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Did the brothers demand trout fishing? the schoolboys rabbit shooting?
+the young ladies lawn tennis and society?&mdash;all were theirs, especially
+the latter.  "My grandson and his wife will be within easy reach in
+their own house, Tory Lodge!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The remark about the swallow-holes had not been lost upon the Lady of
+the Lake.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mrs. Knox had her glass of port at dessert, an act equivalent to
+snapping her rheumatic fingers in our faces, and withdrew, stiff but
+erect, and still on the best of terms with her prospective tenant.  As
+I held the door open for her, she said to me:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"''Twas whispered in heaven, 'twas muttered in hell.'"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+By an amazing stroke of luck I was enabled to continue:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'And echo caught softly the sound as it fell!'" with a glance at Mr.
+Tebbutts that showed I was aware the quotation was directed at his
+missing aspirates.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As the door closed, the visitor turned to Flurry and said impressively:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There's just one thing, Mr. Knox, I should like to mention, if you
+will allow me.  Are the drains quite in order?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"God knows," said Flurry, pulling hard at a badly-lighted cigarette and
+throwing himself into a chair by the turf fire.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Mrs. Knox's health has held out against them for about sixty years," I
+remarked.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, as to that," replied Mr. Tebbutts, "I feel it is only right to
+mention that the dear old lady was very giddy with me in the garden
+this afternoon."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Flurry received this remarkable statement without emotion.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Maybe she's taken a fancy to you!" he said brutally.  "If it wasn't
+that it was whipped cream."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mr. Tebbutts' bulging eyes sought mine in complete mystification; I
+turned to the fire, and to it revealed my emotions.  Flurry was not at
+all amused.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well&mdash;er&mdash;I understood her maid to say she 'ad bin ailing," said the
+guest after a pause.  "I'd have called it a kind of a megrim myself,
+and, as I say, I certainly perceived a sort of charnel-'ouse smell in
+the room I'm in.  And look 'ere, Mr. Knox, 'ere's another thing.  'Ow
+about rats?  You know what ladies are; there's one of my
+sisters-in-law, Mrs. William Tebbutts, who'd just scream the 'ouse down
+if she 'eard the 'alf of what was goin' on behind the panelling in my
+room this evening."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Anyone that's afraid of rats had better keep out of Aussolas," said
+Flurry, getting up with a yawn.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Mr. Tebbutts is in the James the Second room, isn't he?" said I, idly.
+"Isn't that the room with the powdering-closet off it?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It is," said Flurry.  "Anything else you'd like to know?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I recognised that someone had blundered, presumably myself, and made a
+move for the drawing-room.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mrs. Knox had retired when we got there; my wife and Mrs. Flurry
+followed suit as soon as might be; and the guest said that, if the
+gentlemen had no objection, he thought he'd turn in too.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Flurry and I shut the windows&mdash;fresh air is a foible of the female
+sex&mdash;heaped turf on the fire, drew up chairs in front of it, and
+composed ourselves for that sweetest sleep of all, the sleep that has
+in it the bliss of abandonment, and is made almost passionate by the
+deep underlying knowledge that it can be but temporary.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+How long we had slumbered I cannot say; it seemed but a moment when a
+door opened in our dreams, and the face of Mr. Tebbutts was developed
+before me in the air like the face of the Cheshire cat, only without
+the grin.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Mr. Knox!  Gentlemen!" he began, as if he were addressing a meeting.
+The thunder had left his voice; he stopped to take breath.  He was in
+his shirt and trousers, and the laces of his boots trailed on the floor
+behind him.  "I've 'ad a bit of a start upstairs.  I was just winding
+up my watch at the dressing-table when I saw some kind of an animal
+gloide past the fireplace and across the room&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What was it like?" interrupted Flurry, sitting up in his chair.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, Mr. Knox, it's 'ard to say what it was like.  It wasn't a cat,
+nor yet it wasn't what you could call a squirrel&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Flurry got on to his feet.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"By the living Jingo!" he said, turning to me an awestruck countenance;
+"he's seen the Aussolas Martin Cat!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I had never before heard of the Aussolas Martin Cat, and it is
+indisputable that a slight chill crept down my backbone.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mr. Tebbutts' eyes bulged more than ever, and his lower lip fell.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What way did it go?" said Flurry; "did it look at you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It seemed to disappear in that recess by the door," faltered the seer
+of the vision; "it just vanished!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I don't know if it's for my grandmother or for me," said Flurry in a
+low voice, "but it's a death in the house anyway."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The colour in Mr. Tebbutts' face deepened to a glossy sealing-wax red.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If one of you gents would come upstairs with me," he said, "I think
+I'll just get my traps together.  I can be back at the 'otel in 'alf an
+'our&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Flurry and I accompanied Mr. Tebbutts to the James the Second room.
+Over Mrs. Knox's door there were panes of glass, and light came forth
+from them.  (It is my belief that Mrs. Knox never goes to bed.)  We
+trod softly as we passed it, and went along the uncarpeted boards of
+the Musicians' Gallery above the entrance hall.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There certainly was a peculiar odour in the James the Second room, and
+the adjective "charnel-'ouse" had not been misapplied.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I thought about a dead rat, and decided that the apparition had been
+one of the bandit tribe of tawny cats that inhabited the Aussolas
+stables.  And yet legends of creatures that haunted old houses and
+followed old families came back to me; of one in particular, a tale of
+medieval France, wherein "a yellow furry animal" ran down the throat of
+a sleeping lady named Sagesse.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mr. Tebbutts, by this time fully dressed, was swiftly bestowing a brush
+and comb in his knapsack.  Perhaps he, too, had read the legend about
+Madame Sagesse.  Flurry was silently, and with a perturbed countenance,
+examining the room; rapping at the panelling and peering up the
+cavernous chimney; I heard him sniff as he did so.  Possibly he also
+held the dead-rat theory.  He opened the flap in the door of the
+powdering-closet, and, striking a match, held it through the opening.
+I looked over his shoulder, and had a glimpse of black feathers on the
+floor, and a waft of a decidedly "charnel-'ouse" nature.  "Damn!"
+muttered Flurry to himself, and slammed down the flap.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I think, sir," said Mr. Tebbutts, with his knapsack in his hand and
+his cap on his head, "I must ask you to let Mrs. Knox know that this
+'ouse won't suit Mrs. William Tebbutts.  You might just say I was
+called away rather sudden.  Of course, you won't mention what I saw
+just now&mdash;I wouldn't wish to upset the pore old lady&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We followed him from the room, and treading softly as before, traversed
+the gallery, and began to descend the slippery oak stairs.  Flurry was
+still looking furtively about him, and the thought crossed my mind that
+in the most hard-headed Irishman there wanders a vein of superstition.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Before we had reached the first landing, the violent ringing of a
+handbell broke forth in the room with the light over the door, followed
+by a crash of fire-irons; then old Mrs. Knox's voice calling
+imperatively for Mullins.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was a sound of rushing, slippered feet, a bumping of furniture;
+with a squall from Mullins the door flew open, and I was endowed with a
+never-to-be-forgotten vision of Mrs. Knox, swathed in hundreds of
+shawls, in the act of hurling the tongs at some unseen object.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Almost simultaneously there was a scurry of claws on the oak floor
+above us, Mrs. Knox's door was slammed, and something whizzed past me.
+I am thankful to think that I possess, as a companion vision to that of
+Mrs. Knox, the face of Mr. Tebbutts with the candle light on it as he
+looked up from the foot of the stairs and saw the Aussolas Martin Cat
+in his track.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Look out, Tebbutts!" yelled Flurry.  "It's you he's after!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mr. Tebbutts here passed out of the incident into the night, and the
+Aussolas Martin Cat was swallowed up by a large hole in the surbase in
+the corner of the first landing.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He'll come out in the wine-cellar," said Flurry, with the calm that
+was his in moments of crisis, "the way the cat did."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I pulled myself together.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What's happened to the other Fanaghy cub?" I enquired with, I hope,
+equal calmness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He's gone to blazes," replied Flurry; "there isn't a wall in this
+house that hasn't a way in it.  I knew I'd never have luck with them
+after you asking the way from Kitty the Shakes."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As is usual in my dealings with Flurry, the fault was mine.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+While I reflected on this, the stillness of the night was studded in a
+long and diminishing line by the running pant of the motor-bicycle.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap02"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="t3b">
+II
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="t4b">
+THE FINGER OF MRS. KNOX
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A being stood in a dark corner under the gallery of the hall at
+Aussolas Castle; a being who had arrived noiselessly on bare feet, and
+now revealed its presence by hard breathing.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Come in, Mary," commanded old Mrs. Knox without turning her head;
+"make up the fire."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I will, ma'am," murmured the being, advancing with an apologetic eye
+upon me, and an undulating gait suggestive of a succession of incipient
+curtsies.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She was carrying an armful of logs, and, having stacked them on the
+fire in a heap calculated to set alight any chimney less roomy than the
+Severn Tunnel, she retired by way of the open hall door with the same
+deferential stealth with which she had entered.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The hen-woman," explained Mrs. Knox casually, "the only person in this
+place who knows a dry log from a wet one."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Like all successful rulers, Mrs. Knox had the power of divining in her
+underlings their special gifts, and of wresting them to the sphere in
+which they shone, no matter what their normal functions might be.  She
+herself pervaded all spheres.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There's no pie but my grandmother has a finger in it," was Flurry
+Knox's epitome of these high qualities; a sour tribute from one
+freebooter to another.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If the Mistress want a thing she mus' have it!" was the comment of
+John Kane, the gamekeeper, as he threw down the spade with which he was
+digging out a ferret, and armed himself with a holly-bush wherewith to
+sweep the drawing-room chimney.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As Mrs. Knox and I sat by the hen-woman's noble fire, and gossiped, the
+cook panted in with the tea-tray; the butler, it appeared, had gone out
+to shoot a rabbit for dinner.  All these things pointed to the fact
+that Mrs. Knox's granddaughter-in-law, Mrs. Flurry, was not, at the
+moment, in residence at Aussolas.  The Jungle was creeping in; Sally
+Knox, by virtue, I suppose, of her English mother, spasmodically
+endeavoured to keep it out, but with her departure the Wild triumphed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was an October afternoon, grey and still; the hall door stood open,
+as indeed it always did at Aussolas, and on the topmost of the broad
+limestone steps Mrs. Knox's white woolly dog sat, and magisterially
+regarded lake and wood and lawn.  The tawny bracken flowed like a sea
+to the palings that bounded the lawn; along its verge squatted the
+rabbits, motionless for the most part, sometimes languidly changing
+their ground, with hops like the dying efforts of a mechanical toy.
+The woolly dog had evidently learned in many fruitless charges the
+futility of frontal attack; a close and menacing supervision from the
+altitude of the steps was all that was consistent with dignity, but an
+occasional strong shudder betrayed his emotion.  The open door framed
+also a pleasing view of my new car, standing in beautiful repose at the
+foot of the steps, splashed with the mud of a twenty-mile run from an
+outlying Petty Sessions Court; her presence added, for me, the touch of
+romance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was twilight in the back of the hall by the fireplace; the flames of
+the logs, branching like antlers, made a courteous and not too
+searching inquisition into dark corners, and lighted with a very
+suitable evasiveness Mrs. Knox's Witch of Endor profile.  She wore her
+usual velvet bonnet; the rest of her attire recalled to my memory the
+summary of it by her kinswoman, Lady Knox, "A rag bag held together by
+diamond brooches."  Yet, according to her wont, her personality was the
+only thing that counted; it reduced all externals to a proper
+insignificance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The object of my visit had ostensibly been to see her grandson, but
+Flurry was away for the night.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He's sleeping at Tory Lodge," said Mrs. Knox.  "He's cubbing at
+Drumvoortneen, and he has to start early.  He tried to torment me into
+allowing him to keep the hounds in the yard here this season, but I had
+the pleasure of telling him that old as I might be, I still retained
+possession of my hearing, my sense of smell, and, to a certain extent,
+of my wits."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I should have thought," I said discreetly, "that Tory Lodge was more
+in the middle of his country."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Undoubtedly," replied Flurry's grandmother; "but it is not in the
+middle of my straw, my meal, my buttermilk, my firewood, and anything
+else of mine that can be pilfered for the uses of a kennel!"  She
+concluded with a chuckle that might have been uttered by a scald-crow.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I was pondering a diplomatic reply, when the quiet evening was rent by
+a shrill challenge from the woolly dog.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Thy sentinel am I!" he vociferated, barking himself backwards into the
+hall, in proper strategic retreat upon his base.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A slow foot ascended the steps, and the twilight in the hall deepened
+as a man's figure appeared in the doorway; a middle-aged man, with his
+hat in one hand, and in the other a thick stick, with which he was
+making respectfully intimidating demonstrations to the woolly dog.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Who are you?" called out Mrs. Knox from her big chair.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm Casey, your ladyship," replied the visitor in a deplorable voice,
+"from Killoge."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Cornelius Casey?" queried Mrs. Knox.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No, but his son, your honour ma'am, Stephen Casey, one of the tenants."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, come in, Stephen," said Mrs. Knox affably, supplementing her
+spectacles with a gold-rimmed single eye-glass, and looking at him with
+interest.  "I knew your father well in old times, when he used to stop
+the earths in Killoge Wood for the Colonel.  They tell me that's all
+cut down now?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There's not the boiling of a kettle left in it afther Goggin, my
+lady!" said Casey eagerly.  Mrs. Knox cut him short.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Many a good hunt the Colonel had out of Killoge, and I too, for the
+matter of that!" she added, turning to me; "my cousin Bessie Hamilton
+and I were the only huntresses in the country in those days, and people
+thought us shocking tomboys, I believe.  Now, what with driving motors
+and riding astride, the gentlemen are all ladies, and the ladies are
+gentlemen!"  With another scald-crow chuckle she turned to Casey.  "Did
+your father ever tell you of the great hunt out of Killoge into the
+Fanaghy cliffs?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He did, your ladyship, he did!" responded Casey, with a touch of life
+in his lamentable voice.  "Often he told me that it knocked fire from
+his eyes to see yourself facing in at the Killoge river."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I was riding Bijou, the grandmother of old Trinket, in that run," said
+Mrs. Knox, leaning back in her chair, with a smile that had something
+of the light of other days in it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I remembered the story that Colonel Knox had run away with her after a
+hunt, and wondered if that had been the occasion when she had knocked
+fire from the eyes of Cornelius Casey.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Her thin old hand drooped in momentary languor over the arm of her
+chair; and the woolly dog thrust his nose under it, with a beady eye
+fixed upon the hot cakes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Here!" said Mrs. Knox, sitting up, and throwing a buttery bun on the
+floor.  "Be off with you!  Well, Casey," she went on, "what is it you
+want with me?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Great trouble I got, Mrs. Knox, your honour ma'am," replied Casey from
+the door-mat, "great trouble entirely."  He came a step or two nearer.
+He had a long, clean-shaved face, with mournful eyes, like a sick
+bloodhound, and the enviable, countryman's thatch of thick, strong
+hair, with scarcely a touch of grey in it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That Goggin, that has the shop at Killoge Cross, has me processed.
+I'm pairsecuted with him; and the few little bastes I has, and me
+donkey and all&mdash;" his voice thinned to a whimper, "he's to drive them
+to-morrow&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I suppose that's Goggin, the Gombeen?" said Mrs. Knox; "how were you
+fool enough to get into dealings with him?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The statement of Casey's wrongs occupied quite ten minutes, and was
+generous in detail.  His land was bad, ever and always.  The grass that
+was in it was as bare as that you could pick pins in it.  He had no
+pushing land at all for cattle.  Didn't he buy a heifer at Scabawn fair
+and the praisings she got was beyant all raves, and he had her one
+month, and kinder company he never had, and she giving seven pints at
+every meal, and wasn't that the divil's own produce?  One month,
+indeed, was all he had her till she got a dropsy, and the dropsy
+supported her for a while, and when it left her she faded away.  And
+didn't his wife lose all her hens in one week?  "They fell dead on her,
+like hailstones!"  He ceased, and a tear wandered down the channels in
+his long cheek.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"How much do you owe Goggin?" asked Mrs. Knox sharply.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What Casey owed to Goggin had, as might have been expected, but a
+remote relation to the sum that Goggin was now endeavouring to extract
+from Casey.  At the heart of the transaction was a shop account,
+complicated by loans of single pounds (and in my mind's eye I could
+see, and with my mind's nose I could smell, the dirty crumpled notes).
+It was further entangled by per-contra accounts of cribs of turf,
+scores of eggs, and a day's work now and again.  I had, from the
+judgment seat, listened to many such recitals, so, apparently, had Mrs.
+Knox, judging by the ease with which she straightened Casey's devious
+narrative at critical points, and shepherded him to his facts, like a
+cunning old collie steering a sheep to its pen.  The conclusion of the
+matter was that Goggin was, on the morrow, to take possession of
+Casey's remaining stock, consisting of three calves, a donkey, and a
+couple of goats, in liquidation of a debt of £15, and that he, Stephen
+Casey, knew that Mrs. Knox would never be satisfied to see one of her
+own tenants wronged.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I have no tenants," replied Mrs. Knox tartly; "the Government is your
+landlord now, and I wish you joy of each other!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Then I wish to God it was yourself we had in it again!" lamented
+Stephen Casey; "it was better for us when the gentry was managing their
+own business.  They'd give patience, and they'd have patience."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, that will do now," said Mrs. Knox; "go round to the servants'
+hall and have your tea.  I'll see what I can do."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was silence while Stephen Casey withdrew.  As the sound of his
+hobnailed tread died away the woolly dog advanced very stiffly to the
+hall door, and, with his eyes fixed on the departing visitor, licked
+his lips hungrily.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"When those rascals in Parliament took our land from us," said Mrs.
+Knox, flinging a sod of turf on to the huge fire with practised aim,
+"we thought we should have some peace, now we're both beggared and
+bothered!"  She turned upon me a countenance like that of an ancient
+and spectacled falcon.  "Major Yeates!  You have often offered me a
+drive in your motor-car.  Will you take me to Killoge to-morrow
+morning?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was a brisk and windy morning, with the sharpness of 9 A.M. in it,
+when Mullins, Mrs. Knox's tirewoman, met me at the hall door of
+Aussolas with her arms full of shawls, and a countenance dark with doom
+and wrath.  She informed me that it was a shame for me to be enticing
+the Mistress out of her bed at this hour of the morning, and that she
+would get her death out of it.  I was repudiating this soft impeachment
+(which had indeed some flavour of the Restoration drama about it), when
+the companion of my flight appeared.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"How would anyone know the minute&mdash;" continued Mullins, addressing the
+universe, "that this what's-this-I'll-call-it wouldn't turn into a
+bog-hole?"  She put this conundrum while fiercely swaddling her
+mistress in cloak upon cloak.  I attempted no reply, and Mrs. Knox,
+winking both eyes at me over the rim of the topmost shawl, was hoisted
+into the back of the car; as we glided away I had, at all events, the
+consolation of knowing that, in the event of an accident, Mrs. Knox in
+her cloaks would float from the car as softly and bulkily as a bumble
+bee.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As we ran out of the gates on to the high road I remembered that my
+passenger's age was variously reckoned at from ninety to a hundred, and
+thought it well to ask her if fifteen miles an hour would be too fast
+for pleasure.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You can't go too fast to please me," replied Mrs. Knox, through the
+meshes of a Shetland shawl.  "When I was a girl I rode a fourteen-hand
+pony to the fourteenth milestone on the Cork road in a minute under the
+hour!  I think you should be able to double that!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I replied to this challenge with twenty miles an hour, which, with a
+head wind and a bad road, I considered to be fast enough for any old
+lady.  As a matter of fact it was too fast for her costume.  We had run
+some eight or nine miles before, looking back, I noticed that a change
+of some sort had occurred.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, the red one blew away long ago!" screamed Mrs. Knox against the
+wind; "it doesn't matter, I shall get it back&mdash;I'll ask Father Scanlan
+to speak about it at Mass next Sunday.  There's a veil gone too&mdash;how
+frantic Mullins will be!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A skirl of laughter came from the recesses of the remaining shawls.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We were running now on a level road under the lee of a long line of
+hills; a strip of plantation, gay with the yellows and greens of
+autumn, clung to a steep slope ahead of us, and, at the top of it, some
+ragged pines looked like blots against the sky.  As we neared it, a
+faint and long-drawn call came from the height; presently among the
+tree-trunks we saw hounds, like creatures in a tapestry hunting scene,
+working up and up through the brown undergrowth.  I slackened speed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Pon my honour, we've hit off the Hunt!" exclaimed Mrs. Knox.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As she spoke there was a responsive yelp from a tract of briars in the
+lower part of the wood; two or three couples jostled downwards to their
+comrade, and a full chorus, led by the soprano squeals of the Hunt
+terrier, arose and streamed along the wood above the road.  I came to a
+full stop, and, just in front of us, a rabbit emerged very quietly from
+the fence of the wood, crept along in the ditch, and disappeared in a
+hole in the bank.  The hounds still uttered the classic pæans of the
+Chase; hoofs clattered in a steep lane on the hill-side, and Flurry
+Knox charged on to the road a little ahead of us.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Forrad, forrad, forrad!" he shouted as he came.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit!" cackled his grandmother at him in malevolent
+imitation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I let the car go, and as we flew past him he asked me, sideways out of
+a very red face, what the devil I was doing there.  It was evident that
+Mrs. Knox's observation had been accepted in the spirit in which it was
+offered.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That will do my young gentleman no harm!" said Mrs. Knox complacently,
+as we became a speck in the distance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was about ten o'clock when we ran down a valley between steep hills
+to Killoge cross-roads.  The hill-sides were set thick with tree
+stumps, like the crowded headstones of a cemetery, with coarse grass
+and briars filling the spaces between them.  Here and there a slender,
+orphaned ash sapling, spared because despised, stood among the havoc,
+and showed with its handful of yellow leaves what the autumn colours
+might once have been here.  A starkly new, cemented public-house, with
+"J. Goggin" on the name board, stood at the fork of the roads.
+Doubtless into it had flowed the blood-money of the wood; it
+represented the alternative offered to the community by Mr. Goggin.  I
+slowed up and looked about me.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I suppose this is&mdash;or was&mdash;Killoge Wood?" I said to my passenger.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mrs. Knox was staring through her spectacles at the devastated
+hill-side.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Ichabod, Ichabod!" she murmured, and leaned back in her place.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A man got up from a heap of stones by the roadside and came slowly
+towards the car.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, Stephen," began Mrs. Knox irritably, "what about the cattle?  He
+looks as if he were walking behind his own coffin!" she continued in a
+loud aside to me.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Stephen Casey removed his hat, and with it indicated a group composed
+of three calves&mdash;and nothing can look as dejected as an ill-fed,
+under-bred calf&mdash;two goats, and a donkey, attended by a boy with a
+stick, and a couple of cur dogs.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Himself and the sheriff's man is after driving them, my lady," replied
+their proprietor, and proceeded to envelop the name of Goggin in a
+flowing mantle of curses.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There, that will do for the present," said Mrs. Knox peremptorily, as
+Casey, with tears streaming down his face, paused to catch his wind.
+"Where's Goggin?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The two of them is inside in the shop," answered the miserable Casey,
+still weeping copiously.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I drove over to the public-house, thinking that if Casey could not put
+up a better fight than this it would be difficult to do much for him.
+The door of the pub was already filled by the large and decent figure
+of Mr. Goggin, who advanced to meet us, taking off his hat
+reverentially; I remembered at once his pale and pimpled face, his pink
+nose, his shabby grey and yellow beard.  He had been before me in a
+matter of selling drink on Sunday, and had sailed out of court in
+stainless triumph, on sworn evidence that he was merely extending
+hospitality to some friends that had come to make a match for a niece
+of his own, and were tired after walking the land and putting a price
+on the cattle.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, Goggin," said Mrs. Knox, waving towards the hill-side a tiny
+hand in a mouldy old black kid glove, "you've done a great work here!
+You've destroyed in six months what it took the Colonel and the Lord
+Almighty eighty years to make.  That's something to be proud of!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Goggin, again, and with even deeper reverence, removed his hat, and
+murmured something about being a poor man.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It was your own grandfather that planted those trees for the Colonel,"
+continued Mrs. Knox, diving, as it were, into an ancient armoury and
+snatching a rusty weapon from the wall.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's the case, ma'am," replied Mr. Goggin solemnly.  "The Lord have
+mercy on his soul!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You'll be wanting mercy on your own soul in the next world, if you
+meet the Colonel there!" said Mrs. Knox unhesitatingly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I mightn't have the honour of meeting the Colonel there, ma'am!"
+tittered Goggin sycophantically.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You might not indeed," responded Mrs. Knox, "but you might find your
+grandfather making up a good fire for you with the logs out of Killoge
+Wood!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Ha, ha!  That's good, faith!" said a fat voice from the
+porter-flavoured depths of the pub.  I recognised among other half-seen
+faces the round cheeks and bristling moustache of little M'Sweeny, the
+sheriff's officer, at Goggin's elbow.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And what's this I hear about Stephen Casey?" went on Mrs. Knox, in
+shrill and trenchant tones, delivering her real attack now that she had
+breached the wall.  "You lent him five pounds two years ago, and now
+you're driving all his stock off!  What do you call that, I'd thank you
+to tell me?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the discussion that followed I could almost have been sorry for
+Goggin, so entirely over-weighted was he by Mrs. Knox's traditional
+prestige, by my official position, by knowledge of the unseen audience
+in the pub, and by the inherent rottenness of his case.  Nevertheless,
+the defence put forward by him was a very creditable work of art.  The
+whole affair had its foundation in a foolish philanthropy, the outcome
+of generous instincts exploited to their utmost, only, indeed, kept
+within bounds by Mr. Goggin's own financial embarrassments.  These he
+primarily referred back to the excessive price extorted from him by
+Mrs. Knox's agent for the purchase of his land under the Act; and
+secondarily to the bad debts with which Stephen Casey and other
+customers had loaded him in their dealings with his little shop.  There
+were moments when I almost had to accept Mr. Goggin's point of view, so
+well-ordered and so mildly stated were his facts.  But Mrs. Knox's
+convictions were beyond and above any possibility of being shaken by
+mere evidence; she has often said to me that if all justice magistrates
+were deaf there would be more done.  She herself was not in the least
+deaf, but she knew Mr. Goggin, which did as well.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Fifteen pounds worth of stock to pay a debt that was never more than
+£7!  What do you call that, Major Yeates?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She darted the question at me.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I had, some little time before, felt my last moment of sympathy with
+Goggin expire, and I replied with considerable heat that, if Mrs. Knox
+would forgive my saying so, I called it damned usury.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+From this point the Affaire Casey went out swiftly on an ebb tide.  It
+was insinuated by someone, M'Sweeny, I think, that an instalment of
+five pounds might be accepted, and the eyes of Goggin turned,
+tentatively, to Mrs. Knox.  It has always been said of that venerable
+warrior that if there were a job to be done for a friend she would work
+her fingers to the bone, but she would never put them in her pocket.  I
+observed that the eye of Goggin, having failed in its quest of hers,
+was concentrating itself upon me.  The two walls of a corner seemed to
+rise mysteriously on either side of me; I suddenly, and without
+premeditation, found myself promising to be responsible for the five
+pounds.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Before the glow of this impulse had time to be succeeded by its too
+familiar reaction, the broken, yet persistent cry of hounds came to my
+ear.  It advanced swiftly, coming, seemingly, from higher levels, into
+the desolated spaces that had once been Killoge Wood.  From the inner
+depths of Mrs. Knox's wrappings the face of the woolly dog amazingly
+presented itself; from the companion depths of the public-house an
+equally unexpected party of <I>convives</I> burst forth and stood at gaze.
+Mrs. Knox tried to stand up, was borne down by the sheer weight of rugs
+and the woolly dog, glared at me for a tense moment, and hissed,
+"They're coming this way!  Try to get a view!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Before the words had passed her lips someone in the group at the door
+vociferated, "Look at him above!  Look at him!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I looked "above," but could see nothing.  Not so the rest of the group.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Now! look at him going west the rock!  Now!  He's passing the little
+holly-tree&mdash;he's over the fence&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I bore, as I have so often borne, the exasperation of, as it were,
+hearing instead of seeing a cinematograph, but I saw no reason why I
+should submit to the presence of Mr. M'Sweeny, who had sociably sprung
+into the motor beside me in order to obtain a better view.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Look at him over the wall!" howled the cinematograph.  "Look at the
+size he is!  Isn't he the divil of a sheep!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was at this moment that I first caught sight of the fox, about fifty
+yards on the farther side of Casey's assortment of live stock and their
+guardian cur dogs, gliding over the wall like a cat, and slipping away
+up the road.  At this point Mr. M'Sweeny, finding the disadvantage of
+his want of stature, bounded on to the seat beside me and uttered a
+long yell.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Hi!  At him!  Tiger, good dog!  Hi!  Rosy!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I cannot now say whether I smote M'Sweeny in the legs before he jumped,
+or if I merely accelerated the act; he appeared to be running before he
+touched the ground, and he probably took it as a send-off, administered
+in irrepressible fellow-feeling.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Tiger and Rosy were already laying themselves out down the road, and
+their yelps streamed back from them like the sparks from an engine.
+The party at the door was suddenly in full flight after them with a
+swiftness and unanimity that again recalled the cinematograph.  They
+caught away with them Stephen Casey and his animals; and I had an
+enlivening glimpse of the donkey at the top of the hunt, braying as it
+went; of Goggin trying in vain to stem the companion flight of the
+calves.  The bend of the road hid them all from us; the thumping of
+heavy feet, the sobbing bray of the donkey, passed rapidly into
+remoteness, and Mrs. Knox and I were left with nothing remaining to us
+of the situation save the well-defined footmarks of M'Sweeny on the
+seat beside me (indelible, as I afterwards discovered).
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Get on, Major Yeates!" screamed Mrs. Knox, above the barking of the
+woolly dog.  "We must see it out!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I started the car, and just before we in our turn rounded the corner I
+looked back, and saw the leading hounds coming down the hill-side.  I
+slackened and saw them drop into the road and there remain, mystified,
+no doubt, by the astonishing variety of scents, from goat to gombeen
+man, that presented themselves.  Of Flurry and his followers there was
+no sign.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Get on, get on," reiterated Mrs. Knox, divining, no doubt, my
+feelings; "we shall do no more harm than the rest!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I gave the car her head, knowing that whatever I did Flurry would have
+my blood.  In less than two minutes we were all but into Stephen
+Casey's goats, who, being yoked together in body but not in spirit,
+required the full width of the road for their argument.  We passed
+Stephen Casey and the gombeen man cornering the disputed calves in the
+sympathetic accord that such an operation demands.  As we neared
+M'Sweeny, who brought up the rear, the body of the hunt, still headed
+by the donkey, swept into a field on the left of the road.  The fox, as
+might have been expected, had passed from the ken of the cur dogs, and
+these, intoxicated by the incitements of their owners, now flung
+themselves, with the adaptability of their kind, into the pursuit of
+the donkey.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I stopped and looked back.  The leading hounds were galloping behind
+the car; I recognised at their heads Rattler and Roman, the puppies I
+had walked, and for a moment was touched by this mark of affection.
+The gratification was brief.  They passed me without a glance, and with
+anticipatory cries of joy flung themselves into the field and joined in
+the chase of the donkey.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They'll kill him!" exclaimed Mrs. Knox, restraining with difficulty
+the woolly dog; "what good is Flurry that he can't keep with his
+hounds!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Galloping hoofs on the road behind us clattered a reply, accompanied by
+what I can only describe as imprecations on the horn, and Flurry
+hurtled by and swung his horse into the field over a low bank with all
+the dramatic fury of the hero rushing to the rescue of the leading
+lady.  It recalled the incidents that in the palmy days of the
+Hippodrome gloriously ended in a plunge into deep water, amid a salvo
+of firearms.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In Flurry's wake came the rest of the pack, and with them Dr. Jerome
+Hickey.  "A great morning's cubbing!" he called out, snatching off his
+old velvet cap.  "Thirty minutes with an old fox, and now a nice burst
+with a jackass!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For the next three or four minutes shrieks, like nothing so much as
+forked lightning, lacerated the air, as the guilty hounds began to
+receive that which was their due.  It seemed possible that my turn
+would come next; I looked about to see what the chances were of turning
+the car and withdrawing as soon as might be, and decided to move on
+down the road in search of facilities.  We had proceeded perhaps a
+hundred yards without improving the situation, when my eye was caught
+by something moving swiftly through the furze-bushes that clothed a
+little hill on the right of the road.  It was brownish red, it slid
+into the deep furze that crested the hill, and was gone.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Here was a heaven-sent peace-offering!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Tally-ho!" I bellowed, rising in my place and waving my cap high in
+air.  "Tally-ho, over!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The forked lightning ceased.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What way is he?" came an answering bellow from Flurry.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"This way, over the hill!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The hounds were already coming to the holloa.  I achieved some very
+creditable falsetto screeches; I leaped from the car, and cheered and
+capped them over the fence; I shouted precise directions to the Master
+and Whip, who were now, with the clamours proper to their calling,
+steeplechasing into the road and out of it again, followed by two or
+three of the Field, including the new District Inspector of the Royal
+Irish Constabulary (recently come from Meath with a high reputation as
+a goer).  They scrambled and struggled up the hill-side, through rocks
+and furze (in connection with which I heard the new D.I. making some
+strenuous comments to his Meath hunter), the hounds streamed and
+screamed over the ridge of the hill, the riders shoved their puffing
+horses after them, topped it, and dropped behind it.  The furzy skyline
+and the pleasant blue and white sky above it remained serene and silent.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I returned to the car, and my passenger, who, as I now realised, had
+remained very still during these excitements.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That was a bit of luck!" I said happily, inflated by the sense of
+personal merit that is the portion of one who has viewed a fox away.
+As I spoke I became aware of something fixed in Mrs. Knox's expression,
+something rigid, as though she were repressing emotion; a fear flashed
+through my mind that she was overtired, and that the cry of the hounds
+had brought back to her the days when she too had known what a first
+burst away with a fox out of Killoge Wood had felt like.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Major Yeates," she said sepulchrally, and yet with some inward thrill
+in her voice, "I think the sooner we start for home the better."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I could not turn the car, but, rather than lose time, I ran it
+backwards towards the cross-roads; it was a branch of the art in which
+I had not become proficient, and as, with my head over my shoulder, I
+dodged the ditches, I found myself continually encountering Mrs. Knox's
+eye, and was startled by something in it that was both jubilant and
+compassionate.  I also surprised her in the act of wiping her eyes.  I
+wondered if she were becoming hysterical, and yearned for Mullins as
+the policeman (no doubt) yearns for the mother of the lost child.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+On the road near the public-house we came upon M'Sweeny, Goggin, and
+Casey, obviously awaiting us.  I stopped the car, not without
+reluctance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That will be all right, Goggin," said Mrs. Knox airily; "we're in a
+hurry to get home now."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The three protagonists looked at one another dubiously, and
+simultaneously cleared their throats.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I beg your pardon, Mrs. Knox, ma'am," began Mr. Goggin very
+delicately.  "Mr. M'Sweeny would be thankful to speak a word to you
+before you go."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, let him speak and be quick about it," returned Mrs. Knox, who
+seemed to have recovered remarkably from her moment of emotion.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You must excuse me, Major Yeates," said Mr. M'Sweeny, chivalrously
+selecting me as the person to whom to present the business end of the
+transaction, "but I'm afraid I must trouble you about that little
+matter of the five pounds that we arranged a while ago&mdash;I couldn't go
+back without it was settled&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mr. Goggin coughed, and looked at his boots; Stephen Casey sighed
+heavily.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At the same moment I thought I heard the horn.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm afraid I haven't got it with me," I said, pulling out a handful of
+silver and a half-sovereign.  "I suppose eighteen and sixpence wouldn't
+be any use to you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mr. M'Sweeny smiled deprecatingly, as at a passing jest, and again I
+heard the horn, several harsh and prolonged notes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mrs. Knox leaned forward and poked me in the back with some violence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Goggin will lend it to you," she said, with the splendid simplicity of
+a great mind.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It must be recorded of Goggin that he accepted this singular inversion
+of the position like a gentleman.  We moved on to his house and he went
+in with an excellent show of alacrity to fetch the money wherewith I
+was to stop his own mouth.  It was while we were waiting that a small
+wet collie, reddish-brown in colour, came flying across the road, and
+darted in at the open door of the house.  Its tongue was hanging out,
+it was panting heavily.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I seen her going over the hill, and the hounds after her; I thought
+she wouldn't go three sthretches before they'd have her cot," said
+M'Sweeny pleasantly.  "But I declare she gave them a nice chase.  When
+she seen the Doctor beating the hounds, that's the time she ran."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I turned feebly in my place and looked at Mrs. Knox.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It was a very natural mistake," she said, again wiping her eyes; "I
+myself was taken in for a moment&mdash;but only for a moment!" she added,
+with abominable glee.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I gave her but one glance, laden with reproach, and turned to M'Sweeny.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You'll get the five pounds from Goggin," I said, starting the car.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As we ran out of Killoge, at something near thirty miles an hour, I
+heard scald-crow laughter behind me in the shawls.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-049"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-049.jpg" ALT="&quot;I heard scald-crow laughter behind me in the shawls.&quot;" BORDER="2">
+<H4 CLASS="h4center">
+&quot;I heard scald-crow laughter behind me in the shawls.&quot;
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap03"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="t3b">
+III
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="t4b">
+THE FRIEND OF HER YOUTH
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It has come to this with me, I am not the country-house visitor that I
+once was.  It is a sign of age, I suppose, and of growing unamiability;
+so, at any rate, my wife tells me.  For my part, I think it indicates a
+power of discriminating between the things that are good enough, and
+the infinitely more numerous things that are the reverse.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Do you mean to say this isn't good enough?" said Philippa, putting
+down the novel that, at 11 A.M., she was shamelessly reading, and
+indicating our surroundings with a swing of her open parasol.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was a perfect morning in August.  She and I were seated in
+incredible leisure, in comfortable basket chairs, on a space of sward
+that sank in pleasant curves to the verge of the summer sea.  We looked
+across three miles of burnished water to the Castle Manus hills, that
+showed mistily through grey veils of heat; in the middle distance a
+40-ton cutter yacht drowsed at anchor; at the end of the sward a
+strand, theatrical in the perfection of its pale sand and dark rocks,
+laid itself out to attract the bather.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I think it is very good," I replied, "but it won't last.  At any
+minute old Derryclare will come and compel me to go out trawling, or
+mending nets, or cutting up bait, or mucking out the dinghey&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You may be thankful if he lets you off with that!" said Philippa,
+flitting from her first position and taking up one in advance of mine.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Following the direction of her eyes, I perceived, as it were at the
+back of the stage, two mysterious, shrouded figures pursuing a swift
+course towards the house through a shrubbery of immense hydrangea
+bushes.  Their heads resembled monster black door-handles, round their
+shoulders hung flounces of black muslin; in gauntleted hands they bore
+trays loaded with "sections" of honey; even at a distance of fifty
+yards we could see their attendant <I>cortège</I> of indignant bees.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Taken thirty pounds this morning!" shouted the leading door-handle,
+speeding towards the house.  "Splendid heather honey!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You ought to show some interest," said my wife malignly.  "Go in and
+look at it.  He's your host!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Not if he were all the hosts of Midian!" I said, but I felt shaken.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I rose from my chair.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm going to the motor-house," I said firmly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Very well, I shall bathe," replied Philippa.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I suppose you are aware that your old friend, Mr. Chichester, is at
+present in possession of the bathing cove," I returned, "and it might
+be as well to ascertain the opinion of your hostess on the subject of
+mixed bathing."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Did you observe that Lord Derryclare was wearing your new
+motor-gloves?" said Philippa as I moved away.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I magnanimously left the last word with her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Derryclares were in the habit of hurling themselves, at intervals,
+out of civilisation, and into the wilderness, with much the same zest
+with which those who live in the wilderness hurl themselves into
+civilisation.  In the wilderness, twenty miles from a railway station,
+they had built them a nest, and there led that variety of the simple
+life that is founded on good servants, old clothes, and a total
+indifference to weather.  Wandering friends on motor tours swooped
+occasionally out of space; married daughters, with intervals between
+visits to be filled in, arrived without warning, towing reluctant
+husbands (who had been there before).  Lost men, implicated with Royal
+Commissions and Congested Districts, were washed in at intervals; Lady
+Derryclare said she never asked anyone; people came.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is true that she had asked us, but the invitation had been given on
+our wedding-day, and had been put away with our duplicate wedding
+presents; we had now disinterred it, because I had bought a motor, and
+was still in the stage of enthusiasm when the amateur driver will beat
+up visits for his wife to pay.  I do not know how Chichester got there;
+he, like Lady Derryclare, dated from the benighted period before
+Philippa knew me, and I may admit that, in common with most husbands, I
+am not attracted by the male friends of my wife's youth.  If Chichester
+had been the type she fancied, was I merely a Super-Chichester?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Chichester was an elderly young man, worn smooth by much visiting in
+country houses, and thoroughly competent in the avocations proper to
+his career.  He knew the best "stands" at half the shoots in Ireland,
+and could tell to half a crown the value set upon each by the keeper;
+if you gave him a map he could put a pudgy finger upon the good cooks
+as promptly as an archbishop upon his cathedral towns; he played a
+useful and remunerative game of bridge; to see his eye, critical, yet
+alight with healthful voracity, travelling down the array of dishes on
+the side-table at breakfast, and arranging unhesitatingly the order in
+which they were to be attacked, was a lesson to the heedless who blunt
+the fine edge of appetite with porridge.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He faced me at lunch, plump and pink and shining after his bathe; he
+was clean-shaved (the only reliable remedy for a greying moustache, as
+I did not fail to point out to Philippa); it increased his resemblance
+to a well-fed and <I>passé</I> schoolboy.  Old Derryclare, whose foible it
+was to believe that he never had any luncheon, was standing at the
+sideboard, devouring informally a slice of bread and honey.  One of his
+eyes was bunged up by bee-stings, and the end of his large nose shone
+red from the same cause.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Bill," he said, addressing his eldest son, "don't you forget to take
+those sections on board this afternoon."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No fear!" responded Bill, helping himself to a beaker of barley-water
+with hands that bore indelible traces of tar and motor grease.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Bill was a vigorous youth, of the type that I have heard my friend
+Slipper describe as "a hardy young splinter"; he was supposed to be
+preparing for a diplomatic career, and in the meantime was apparently
+qualifying for the engine-room of a tramp steamer (of which, it may be
+added, his father would have made a most admirable skipper).
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Great stuff, honey, with a rice-pudding," went on Bill.  "Mrs. Yeates,
+do you know I can make a topping rice-pudding?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I noticed that Chichester, who was seated next to Philippa, suddenly
+ceased to chew.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I can do you a very high-class omelette, too," continued Bill, bashing
+a brutal spoon into the fragile elegance of something that looked as if
+it were made of snow and spun glass.  "I'm not so certain about my
+mutton-chops and beefsteak, but I've had the knives sharpened, anyhow!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Chichester turned his head away, as from a jest too clownish to be
+worthy of attention.  His cheek was large, and had a tender, beefy
+flush in it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"In my house," he said to Philippa, "I never allow the knives to be
+sharpened.  If meat requires a sharp knife it is not fit to eat."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No, of course not!" replied Philippa, with nauseating hypocrisy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The principle on which my wife buys meat," I said to the table at
+large, "is to say to the butcher, 'I want the best meat in your shop;
+but don't show it to me!'"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Mrs. Yeates is quite right," said Chichester seriously; "you should be
+able to trust your butcher."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The door flew open, and Lady Derryclare strode in, wrestling as she
+came with the strings of a painting apron, whose office had been no
+sinecure.  She was tall and grey-haired, and was just sufficiently
+engrossed in her own pursuits to be an attractive hostess.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It was perfectly lovely out there on the <I>Sheila</I>," she said, handing
+the apron to the butler, who removed it from the room with respectful
+disapproval.  "If only she hadn't swung with the tide!  I found my
+sketch had more and more in it every moment&mdash;turning into a panorama,
+in fact!  Yachts would be perfect if they had long solid legs and stood
+on concrete."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I said that I thought a small island would do as well.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Lady Derryclare disputed this, and argued that an island would involve
+a garden, whereas the charm of a yacht was that one hideous bunch of
+flowers on the cabin table was all that was expected of it, and that
+kind people ashore always gave it vegetables.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I said that these things did not concern me, as I usually neither
+opened my eyes or touched food while yachting.  I said this very
+firmly, being not without fear that I might yet find myself hustled
+into becoming one of the party that was to go aboard the <I>Sheila</I> that
+very night.  They were to start on the top of the tide, that is to say,
+at 4 A.M. the following morning, to sail round the coast to a bay some
+thirty miles away, renowned for its pollack-fishing, and there to fish.
+Pollack-fishing, as a sport, does not appeal to me; according to my
+experience, it consists in hauling up coarse fish out of deep water by
+means of a hook baited with red flannel.  It might appear
+poor-spirited, even effeminate, but nothing short of a press-gang
+should get me on board the <I>Sheila</I> that night.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Every expedition requires its martyr," said Lady Derryclare, helping
+herself to some of the best cold salmon it has been my lot to
+encounter, "it makes it so much pleasanter for the others; some one
+they can despise and say funny things about."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The situation may produce its martyr," I said.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Lady Derryclare glanced quickly at me, and then at Chichester, who was
+now expounding to Philippa the method, peculiar to himself, by which he
+secured mountain mutton of the essential age.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At nine-thirty that night I sat with my hostess and my wife, engaged in
+a domestic game of Poker-patience.  Shaded lights and a softly burning
+turf fire shed a mellow radiance; an exquisite completeness was added
+by a silken rustle of misty rain against the south window.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Do you think they'll start in this weather?" said Philippa
+sympathetically.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Seventy-five, and one full house, ten, that's eighty-five," said Lady
+Derryclare abstractedly.  "Start? you may be quite sure they'll start!
+Then we three shall have an empty house.  That ought to count at least
+twenty!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Lady Derryclare was far too good a hostess not to appreciate the charms
+of solitude; that Philippa and I should be looked upon as solitude was
+soothing to the heart of the guest, the heart that, however good the
+hostess, inevitably conceals some measure of apprehension.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Has Mr. Chichester been on board the <I>Sheila</I>?" I enquired, with
+elaborate unconcern.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"<I>Never!</I>" said Lady Derryclare melodramatically.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I believe he has done some yachting?" I continued.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"A five-hundred-ton steam yacht to the West Indies!" replied Lady
+Derryclare.  "Bathrooms and a <I>chef</I>&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was a thumping of heavy feet outside the door, and the yacht
+party entered, headed by Lord Derryclare with a lighted lantern.  They
+were clad in oilskins and sou'-westers; Bill had a string of onions in
+one hand and a sponge-bag in the other; Chichester carried a large
+gold-mounted umbrella.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You look as if you were acting a charade," said Lady Derryclare,
+shuffling the cards for the next game, the game that would take place
+when the pleasure-seekers had gone forth into the rain.  "The word is
+Fare-well, I understand?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It occurred to me that to fare well was the last thing that Chichester
+was likely to do; and, furthermore, that the same thing had occurred to
+him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Fare thee well, my own Mary Anne!'" sang Lord Derryclare, in a voice
+like a bassoon, and much out of tune.  "It's a dirty night, but the
+glass is rising, and" (here he relapsed again into song) "'We are bound
+for the sea, Mary Anne!  We are bound for the sea!'"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Then we're to meet you on Friday?" said Philippa, addressing herself
+to Chichester in palpable and egregious consolation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Dear lady," replied Chichester tartly, "in the South of Ireland it is
+quite absurd to make plans.  One is the plaything of the climate!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"All aboard," said Lord Derryclare, with a swing of his lantern.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As they left the room the eye of Bill met mine, not without
+understanding.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Now D's perfectly happy," remarked Lady Derryclare, sorting her suits;
+"but I'm not quite so sure about the Super-Cargo."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The game progressed pleasantly, and we heard the rain enwrap the house
+softly, as with a mantle.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The next three days were spent in inglorious peace, not to say sloth.
+On one of them, which was wet, I cleared off outstanding letters and
+browsed among new books and innumerable magazines: on the others, which
+were fine, I ran the ladies in the car back into the hills, and
+pottered after grouse with a venerable red setter, while Lady
+Derryclare painted, and Philippa made tea.  When not otherwise
+employed, I thanked heaven that I was not on board the <I>Sheila</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+On Thursday night came a telegram from the yacht:
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"Ronnie's flotilla in; luncheon party to-morrow; come early.&mdash;BILL."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+At nine o'clock the next morning we were on the road; there was a light
+northerly breeze, enough to dry the roads and to clear the sky of all
+save a few silver feathers of cloud; the heather was in bloom on the
+hills, the bogs were bronze and green, the mountains behind them were
+as blue as grapes; best of all, the car was running like a saint,
+floating up the minor hills, pounding unfalteringly up the big ones.
+She and I were still in the honeymoon stage, and her most normal
+virtues were to me miraculous; even my two ladies, though, like their
+sex, grossly utilitarian, and incapable, as I did not fail to assure
+them, of appreciating the poesy of mechanism, were complimentary.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In that part of Ireland in which my lot is cast signposts do not exist.
+The residents, very reasonably, consider them to be superfluous, even
+ridiculous, in view of the fact that every one knows the way, and as
+for strangers, "haven't they tongues in their heads as well as
+another?"  It all tends to conversation and an increased knowledge of
+human nature.  Therefore it was that when we had descended from the
+hills, and found ourselves near the head of Dunerris Bay, at a junction
+of three roads, any one of which might have been ours, our only course
+was to pause there and await enlightenment.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It came, plentifully, borne by an outside car, and bestowed by no less
+than four beautifully dressed young ladies.  I alighted and approached
+the outside car, and was instructed by the driver as to the route, an
+intricate one, to Eyries Harbour.  The young ladies offered
+supplementary suggestions; they were mysteriously acquainted with the
+fact that the <I>Sheila</I> was our destination, and were also authorities
+on the movements of that section of the British Navy that was known to
+the family of Sub-Lieutenant the Hon. Ronald Cunningham as "Ronnie's
+Flotilla."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We met the yacht gentlemen at tea on Mr. Cunningham's torpedo-boat
+yesterday afternoon," volunteered the prettiest of the young ladies,
+with a droop of her eyelashes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The party then laughed, and looked at each other, as those do who have
+together heard the chimes at midnight.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why, we're going to lunch with them to-day at the hotel at Ecclestown!
+And with you, too!" broke in another, with a sudden squeal of laughter.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I said that the prospect left nothing to be desired.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Mr. Chichester invited us yesterday!" put in a third from the other
+side of the car.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I don't think it's pollack he'll order for luncheon," said the fourth
+of the party from under the driver's elbow, a flapper, with a slow,
+hoarse voice, and a heavy cold in her head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Shut up, Katty, you brat!" said the eldest, with lightning utterance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The quartette again dissolved into laughter.  I said "Au revoir," and
+withdrew to report progress to my deeply interested passengers.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As the outside car disappeared from view at a corner, the Flapper waved
+a large pocket-handkerchief to me.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You seem to have done wonderfully well in the time," said Lady
+Derryclare kindly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For half an hour or more we ran west along the southern shore of the
+great bay; Ecclestown, where Chichester's luncheon-party was to take
+place, was faintly visible on the further side.  So sparkling was the
+sea, so benign the breeze, that even I looked forward without anxiety,
+almost with enjoyment, to the sail across the bay.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is a bland and peaceful suggestion about the word village that is
+wholly inapplicable to the village of Eyries, a collection of dismal,
+slated cabins, grouped round a public-house, like a company of shabby
+little hens round a shabby and bedraggled cock.  The road that had
+conveyed us to this place of entertainment committed suicide on a weedy
+beach below, its last moments much embittered by chaotic heaps of
+timber, stones, and gravel.  A paternal Board was building a pier, and
+"mountains of gold was flying into it, but the divil a much would ever
+come out of it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This I was told by the publican as I bestowed the car in an outhouse in
+his yard, wherein, he assured me, "neither chick nor child would find
+it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The <I>Sheila</I> was anchored near the mouth of the harbour; there was a
+cheerful air of expectancy about her, and her big mainsail was hoisted;
+her punt, propelled by Bill, was already tripping towards us over the
+little waves; the air was salt, and clean, and appetising.  Bill
+appeared to be in robust health; he had taken on a good many extra
+tones of sunburn, and it was difficult, on a cursory inspection, to
+decide where his neck ended and his brown flannel shirt began.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"&mdash;&mdash;Oh, a topping time!" he said, as we moved out over the green,
+clear water, through which glimmered to us the broken pots and pans of
+Eyries that lay below.  "Any amount of fish going.  We've had to give
+away no end."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I should like to hear what you've been giving Mr. Chichester to eat?"
+said Lady Derryclare suavely.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, there was the leg of mutton that we took with us; he ate that
+pretty well; and a sort of a hash next day, fair to middling."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And after that?" said his mother, with polite interest.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, after that," said Bill, leaning his elbows on his sculls and
+ticking off the items on his fingers, "we had boiled pollack, and fried
+pollack, and pollack <I>réchauffé aux fines herbes</I>&mdash;onions, you know&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Bill broke off artistically, and I recalled to myself a saying of an
+American sage, "Those that go down to the sea in ships see the works of
+the Lord, but those that go down to the sea in cutters see hell."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He went ashore yesterday," said Bill, resuming his narrative and the
+sculls, "and came aboard with a pig's face and a pot of jam that he got
+at the pub, and I say!&mdash;that pig's face!&mdash;Phew!  My aunt!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been,'" quoted Lady Derryclare.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Philippa shuddered aloud.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But he's going to come level to-day," went on Bill; "he's standing us
+all lunch at the Ecclestown Hotel, Ronnie's skipper and all.  He spent
+a good half-hour writing out a menu, and Ronnie took it over last
+night.  We had tea on board Ronnie's ship, you know."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We said we knew all about the tea-party and the guests.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, you do, do you?" said Bill; "then you know a good deal!
+Chichester can tell you a bit more about the dark one if you like to
+ask him!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He seems to have outgrown his fancy for fair people," I said.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Philippa put her nose in the air.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He's gorgeously dressed for the occasion," continued Bill.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"More than you are!" said his mother.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, my one don't care.  No more does Ronnie's.  What they enjoyed was
+the engine-room."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It seems to me," said Lady Derryclare to Philippa, "that we are rather
+superfluous to this entertainment."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Chichester stood at the gangway and helped the ladies on to the narrow,
+hog-backed deck of the <I>Sheila</I>.  He was indeed beautifully dressed,
+but to the critical eye it seemed that the spotless grey flannel suit
+hung a shade easier, and that the line of his cheek was less freshly
+rounded.  His nose had warmed to a healthful scarlet, but his eye was
+cold, and distinctly bleak.  He was silent, not, it was obvious to me,
+because he had nothing to say, but because he might have more to say
+than would be convenient.  In all senses save the literal one he
+suggested the simple phrase, "Fed up."  I felt for him.  As I saw the
+grim deck-bosses on which we might have to sit, and the dark mouth of
+the cabin in which we might have to eat, and tripped over a rope, and
+grasped at the boom, which yielded instead of supporting me, I thought
+with a lover's ardour of the superiority&mdash;whether as means of
+progression or as toy&mdash;of the little car, tucked away in the Eyries
+publican's back-yard, where neither chick nor child would find her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You ought to have come with us, Yeates," said Derryclare, emerging
+from the companion-hatch with a fishing-line in his hand.  "Great
+sport! we got a hundred and fifty yesterday&mdash;beats trout-fishing!
+Doesn't it, Chichester?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Chichester smiled sarcastically and looked at his watch.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Quite right," said his lordship, twisting his huge hairy paw, and
+consulting the nickel time-keeper on his wrist.  "Time to be
+off&mdash;mustn't keep our young ladies waiting.  We'll slip across in no
+time with this nice breeze.  Regular ladies' day.  Now then, Bill! get
+that fores'l on her&mdash;we'll up anchor and be off!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There are few places in creation where the onlooker can find himself
+more painfully and perpetually <I>de trop</I> than on the deck of a small
+yacht.  I followed the ladies to the saloon.  Chichester remained on
+deck.  As I carefully descended the companion-ladder I saw him looking
+again at his watch, and from it across the bay to the hazy white
+specks, some four miles away, in one of which assiduous waiters were
+even now, it might be, setting forth the repast that was to indemnify
+him for three days of pollack.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"P'ff; I wonder if they ever open the windows," said Lady Derryclare,
+fitting herself skilfully into the revolving chair at the end of the
+cabin table.  "Do sit down&mdash;these starting operations are always
+lengthy."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I took my seat, that is to say, I began to sit down in the air, well
+outside the flap of the table, and gradually inserted myself underneath
+it.  The bunch of flowers, foretold by Lady Derryclare, confronted us,
+packed suffocatingly into its vase, and even the least astute of the
+party (I allude to myself) was able unhesitatingly to place it as an
+attention from the fair ones of the outside car.  Behind my shoulders,
+a species of trough filled the interval between the back of the seat
+and the sloping side of the yacht; in it lay old tweed caps, old
+sixpenny magazines, field-glasses, cans of tobacco, and a well-worn box
+of "Patience" cards.  Above and behind it a rack made of netting was
+darkly charged with signal-flags, fishing-rods, and minor offal.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Think of them all, smoking here on a wet night," said Lady Derryclare
+with abhorrence; "with the windows shut and no shade on the lamp!  Let
+nothing tempt any of you to open the pantry door; we might see the
+pig's face.  Unfortunate George Chichester!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I shouldn't pity him too much," said I.  "I expect he wouldn't take
+five pounds for his appetite this moment!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The rhythmic creak of the windlass told that the anchor was coming up.
+It continued for some moments, and then stopped abruptly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Now then, all together!" said Lord Derryclare's voice.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A pause, punctuated by heavy grunts of effort&mdash;then Bill's voice.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What the blazes is holding it?  Come on, Chichester, and put your back
+into it!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Chichester's back, ample as it would seem, had no appreciable effect on
+the situation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You ought to go and help them, Sinclair," said my wife, with that
+readiness to offer a vicarious sacrifice that is so characteristic of
+wives.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I said I would wait till I was asked.  I had not to wait long.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I took my turn at the warm handle-bar of the windlass, and grunted and
+strove as strenuously as my predecessors.  The sun poured down in
+undesired geniality, the mainsail lurched and flapped; the boom tugged
+at its tether; the water jabbered and gurgled past the bows.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I think we're in the <I>consommé</I>!" remarked Bill, putting his hands in
+his pockets.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Here," said Lord Derryclare, with a very red face; "confound her!
+we'll sail her off it!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Chichester sat down in a deck-chair as remote as possible from his
+kind, and once again consulted his watch.  Bill took the tiller; ropes
+were hauled, slacked, made fast; the boom awoke to devastating life;
+the <I>Sheila</I> swung, tilted over to the breeze, and made a rush for
+freedom.  The rush ended in a jerk, the anchor remained immovable, and
+the process was repeated in the opposite direction, with a vigour that
+restored Chichester abruptly to the bosom of society&mdash;in point of fact,
+my bosom.  He said nothing, or at least nothing to signify, as I
+assisted him to rise, but I felt as if I were handling a live shell.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+During the succeeding quarter of an hour the <I>Sheila</I>, so it seemed to
+my untutored mind, continued to sail in tangents towards all the points
+of the compass, and at the end of each tangent was brought up with an
+uncompromising negative from the anchor.  By that time my invariable
+yacht-headache was established, and all the other men in the ship were
+advancing, at a varying rate of progress, into a frame of mind that
+precluded human intercourse, and was entirely removed from perceiving
+any humour in the situation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Through all these affairs the sound of conversation ascended steadily
+through the main-hatch.  Lady Derryclare and my wife were playing
+Patience in the cabin, and were at the same time discussing intricate
+matters in connection with District Nurses, with that strange power of
+doing one thing and talking about another that I have often noticed in
+women.  It was at about this period that the small, rat-like head of
+Bill's kitchen-maid, Jimmy, appeared at the fore-hatch (accompanied by
+a reek of such potency that I immediately assigned it to the pig's
+face), and made the suggestion about the Congested Diver.  That the
+Diver, however congested, was a public official, engaged at the moment
+in laying the foundations of the Eyries Pier, did not, this being
+Ireland, complicate the situation.  The punt, with Bill, hot and
+taciturn, in the stern, sprang forth on her errand, smashing and
+bouncing through the sharpened edges of the little waves.  As I faced
+that dainty and appetising breeze, I felt the first pang of the same
+hunger that was, I knew, already gnawing Chichester like a wolf.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We must have fouled some old moorings," said Derryclare, coming up
+from the cabin, with a large slice of bread and honey in his hand, and
+an equanimity somewhat restored by a working solution of the problem.
+"Damn nuisance, but it can't be helped.  Better get something to eat,
+Chichester; you won't get to Ecclestown before three o'clock at the
+best."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No, thank you," said Chichester, without raising his eyes from the
+four-day-old paper that he was affecting to read.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I strolled discreetly away, and again looked down through the skylight
+into the cabin.  The ladies were no longer there, and, in defiance of
+all nautical regulations, a spirit-lamp with a kettle upon it was
+burning on the table, a sufficient indication to a person of my
+experience that Philippa and Lady Derryclare had abandoned hope of the
+Ecclestown lunch and were making tea.  The prospect of something to
+eat, of any description, was not unpleasing; in the meantime I took the
+field-glasses, and went forward to follow, pessimistically, the
+progress of the punt in its search for the Diver.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was no one on the pier.  Bill landed, went up the beach, and was
+lost to sight in the yard of the public-house.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It must be he's at his dinner," said Jimmy at my elbow, descrying
+these movements with a vision that appeared to be equal to mine plus
+the field-glasses.  There was an interval, during which I transferred
+my attention to Ecclestown; its white hotel basked in sunshine, settled
+and balmy, as of the land of Beulah.  Its comfortable aspect suggested
+roast chicken, tingling glasses of beer, even of champagne.  A
+torpedo-boat, with a thread of smoke coming quietly from its foremost
+funnel, lay in front of the hotel.  It seemed as though it were
+enjoying an after-luncheon cigarette.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They're coming out now!" said Jimmy, with excitement; "it must be they
+were within in the house looking at the motor."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I turned the field-glasses on Eyries; a fair proportion of its
+population was emerging from the yard of the public-house, and the
+length to which their scientific interest had carried them formed a
+pleasing subject for meditation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There's the ha'past-one mail-car coming in," said Jimmy; "it's likely
+he'll wait for the letters now."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The mirage of the Ecclestown lunch here melted away, as far as I was
+concerned, and with a resignation perfected in many Petty Sessions
+courts, I turned my appetite to humbler issues.  To those who have
+breakfasted at eight, and have motored over thirty miles of moorland,
+tea and sardines at two o'clock are a mere affair of outposts, that
+leave the heart of the position untouched.  Yet a temporary glow of
+achievement may be attained by their means, and the news brought back
+by Bill, coupled with a fresh loaf, that the Diver was coming at once,
+flattered the hope that the game was still alive.  Bill had also
+brought a telegram for Chichester.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Who has the nerve to tell Mr. Chichester that there's something to eat
+here?" said Lady Derryclare, minutely examining the butter.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Philippa is obviously indicated," I said malignly.  "She is the Friend
+of his Youth!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You're all odious," said Philippa, sliding from beneath the flap of
+the table with the light of the lion-tamer in her eye.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What transpired between her and the lion we shall never know.  She
+returned almost immediately, with a heightened colour, and the
+irrelevant information that the Diver had come on board.  The news had
+the lifting power of a high explosive.  We burst from the cabin and
+went on deck as one man, with the exception of my wife, who, with a
+forethought that did her credit, turned back to improvise a cosy for
+the teapot.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Diver was a large person, of few words, with a lowering brow and a
+heavy moustache.  He did not minimise the greatness of his
+condescension in coming aboard the yacht; he listened gloomily to the
+explanations of Lord Derryclare.  At the conclusion of the narrative he
+moved in silence to the bows and surveyed the situation.  His boat,
+containing the apparatus of his trade, was alongside; a stalwart
+underling, clad in a brown jersey, sat in the bows; in the stern was
+enthroned the helmet, goggling upon us like a decapitated motorist.  It
+imparted a thrill that I had not experienced since I read Jules Verne
+at school.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Here, Jeremiah," said the Diver.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The satellite came on deck with the single sinuous movement of a salmon.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Diver motioned him to the windlass.  "We'll take a turn at this
+first," he said.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They took each a handle, they bent to their task, and the anchor rose
+at their summons like a hot knife out of butter.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Every man present, with the exception of the Diver and the satellite,
+made the simple declaration that he was damned, and it was in the
+period of paralysis following on this that a fresh ingredient was added
+to the situation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A giant voice filled the air, and in a windy bellow came the words:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Nice lot you are!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We faced about and saw "Ronnie's torpedo-boat" executing a sweeping
+curve in the mouth of Eyries Harbour.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Couldn't wait any longer!" proceeded the voice of the Megaphone.
+"We've got to pick up the others outside.  Thanks awfully for luncheon!
+Top-hole!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+T.B. No. 1000 completed the curve and headed for the open sea with a
+white mane of water rising above her bows.  There was something else
+white fluttering at the stern.  I put up the field-glasses, and with
+their aid perceived upon the deck a party of four ladies, one of whom
+was waving a large pocket handkerchief.  The glasses were here taken
+out of my hand by Chichester, but not before I had identified the
+Flapper.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What Chichester said of Ronnie was heard only by me, and possibly by
+Jimmy, who did not count.  I think it may have saved his life, being
+akin to opening a vein.  That I was the sole recipient of these
+confidences was perhaps due to the fact that the <I>Sheila</I>, so swiftly
+and amazingly untethered, here began to fall away to leeward, with all
+the wilful helplessness of her kind, and instant and general confusion
+was the result.  There were a few moments during which ropes, spars,
+and human beings pursued me wherever I went.  Then I heard Lord
+Derryclare's voice&mdash;"Let go that anchor again!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The sliding rattle of the chain followed, the anchor plunged; the
+<I>status quo</I> was re-established.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Chichester went ashore with the Diver to catch the outgoing mail-car.
+The telegram that had arrived with Bill was brought into action
+flagrantly, and was as flagrantly accepted.  (It was found,
+subsequently, on his cabin floor, and was to the effect that the
+cartridges had been forwarded as directed.) The farewells were made,
+the parting regrets very creditably accomplished, and we stood on the
+deck and saw him go, with his suit-case, his rods, his gun-case, heaped
+imposingly in the bow, his rug, and his coats, the greater and the
+less, piled beside him in the stern.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The wind had freshened; the Diver and Jeremiah drove the boat into it
+with a will, and the heavy oars struck spray off the crests of the
+waves.  We saw Chichester draw forth the greater coat, and stand up and
+put it on.  The boat lurched, and he sat down abruptly, only to start
+to his feet again as if he had been stung by a wasp.  He thrust his
+hand into the pocket, and Philippa clutched my arm.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Could it have been into the pocket of his coat that I put the
+teapot&mdash;&mdash;?" she breathed.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap04"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="t3b">
+IV
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="t4b">
+HARRINGTON'S
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Breakfast was over; Philippa was feeding the dogs.  Philippa's cousin,
+Captain Andrew Larpent, R.E., was looking out of the window with that
+air of unemployment that touches the conscience of a host like a spur.
+Andrew did not smoke, a serious matter in a male guest, which means
+that there are, for him, no moments of lethargy, and that, when he
+idles, his idleness stands stark in the foreground against a clear sky,
+a reproach and a menace to his entertainers.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was a cold day about the middle of September, and there was an
+unrest among the trees that commemorated a night of storm; the gravel
+was wet, the lawn-tennis ground was strewn with sycamore leaves.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I suppose you'll say I'm drunk," said Andrew, "but the fact remains
+that I see two Natives coming up the drive."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the green tunnel that was the avenue at Shreelane were two dark
+figures; both were dressed in frock-coats, of which the tails fluttered
+meagrely in the wind; their faces were black; with the half-hearted
+blackness of a leg in a black silk stocking; one of them wore a tall
+hat.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"This is what comes of leaving Calcutta without paying your bills," I
+suggested; "or perhaps it's a Missionary Deputation&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Natives advanced into the middle distance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's the Sweep!" exclaimed Philippa.  "It's my beloved Cantillon!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She flung open the window.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, Cantillon!" she cried, invoking the gentleman in the top-hat as if
+he were an idol, "I've been longing to see you!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The leading Native halted beneath the window and curtseyed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I partly guessed it, my Lady!" he replied modestly, and curtseyed
+again.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Then why didn't you come before?" screamed Philippa, suppressing with
+difficulty the indignation of the dogs.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I had the toothache, my Lady, and a howlt in my poll," returned the
+sweep, in dignified narrative.  "I may say my hands was crackin' with
+the stren'th of pain, and these four days back there was the rumour of
+passpiration all over me, with respex to ye&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'll see you in the kitchen," said Philippa, shutting the window
+abruptly.  "My poor friends," she continued, "this means a cold
+luncheon for you, and a still colder reception for me from Mrs.
+Cadogan, but if I let Cantillon escape me now, I may never see him
+again&mdash;which is unthinkable!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I presume that white is the complimentary colour of a sweep.  In half
+an hour after the arrival of Mr. Cantillon the sitting-rooms were
+snowed over with sheets, covering alike floor and furniture, while he
+and his disciple moved from room to room on tiptoe, with ostentatious
+humility, leaving a round black spoor upon the snow.  My writing-table
+was inaccessible, so also was the piano, which could usually be trusted
+to keep Andrew quiet for an hour of the morning.  Perhaps it would be
+more accurate to say it kept him occupied.  Captain Larpent had not
+been many years in the service of his country, yet it was already told
+of him that "From Birr to Bareilly," undeterred by hardships, his
+intrepid piano had accompanied him, and that house-rents fell to zero
+within a half-mile radius of his vicinity.  Daily the walls of
+Shreelane shook to the thunder of his practising; nightly his duets
+with my wife roared like a torrent over my sleeping head.  Sometimes,
+also, he sang, chiefly in German (a language I do not understand), and
+with what seemed to me superfluous energy.  But this, I am told, means
+"temperament."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Haunting as a waltz refrain the flavour of soot stole through the menu
+at dinner; it was whispered in the soup, it was muttered in the
+savoury, and in the coffee it abandoned subterfuge and shouted down all
+opposition.  Next morning, at breakfast, Philippa asked if the car
+wanted exercise, because it seemed to her a day marked out by
+Providence for calling on the Chicken Farmers.  We might start early,
+take sandwiches, show Andrew something of the country&mdash;the programme
+was impulsively sketched in, but none the less I divined that an
+indignant household had demanded a day of atonement in which to
+obliterate the memory of the sweep.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was, as well as I remember, in the preceding spring that the Chicken
+Farmers had come before the swallow dared, and had taken&mdash;in addition
+to the winds of March&mdash;a small farm about midway in the wilderness
+between us and the Derryclares.  They were two young women who had
+recently been commended to our special attention by Lady Derryclare;
+they were, she said, Pioneers, and were going to make their fortunes,
+and would incidentally set an example to the district.  Philippa had
+met them on the Derryclares' yacht.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"One of them is very pretty," she explained to Andrew, "and the other
+is a doctor."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I wonder which of them does most damage?" said Andrew.  "I think I'll
+stay at home."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+None the less he came.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was not until the car was at the door that I found we were to be
+favoured with the society of my eldest son, Anthony, in consequence of
+the facts that (1) the day before had been his ninth birthday, (2) that
+he had not cried when he met the sweep in the passage, and (3) that for
+lack of the kitchen fire he had had no birthday cake.  Minx, also, was
+one of us, but as she came as a stowaway, this did not transpire till
+later, when explanations were superfluous.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was at the moment of departure that I perceived a donkey-cart,
+modestly screening itself behind the evergreens on the way to the yard,
+and one of Flurry Knox's men approached me with Mr. Knox's compliments,
+and would I lend him the loan of the long ladder?  Some two years ago,
+in a moment of weakness, I had provided myself with a ladder wherewith
+to attain to the eaveshoots of Shreelane, since when I had found myself
+in the undesired position of public benefactor.  How life without a
+long ladder had hitherto been possible for my neighbours I was at a
+loss to imagine, and as I was also at a loss for any valid excuse for
+refusing to lend it, the ladder enjoyed a butterfly existence of
+country-house visiting.  Its visits to Mr. Knox had been especially
+lengthy and debilitating.  It is, as Mrs. Cadogan is wont to say, the
+last straw that puts the hump on the camel.  The blood suddenly mounted
+to my brain, and with it came inspiration.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You can tell Mr. Knox that the eaveshoots of this house are leaking
+like sieves, and I want the ladder myself."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the glow of satisfaction kindled by the delivery of this message I
+started the caravan.  The western breeze fanned my brow agreeably, the
+car purred her satisfaction with our new and only stretch of
+steam-rolled road, and Anthony was still in the condition of Being Good
+(a condition, nevertheless, by no means to be relied on, and quite
+distinct from Goodness).
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We ran west, we ran north; we skirted grey and sounding bays of the
+Atlantic; we climbed high among heathery, stone-besprinkled moors; we
+lunched by the roadside in the lee of a rick of turf, and Anthony, by
+this time emerging from the condition of Being Good, broke the Thermos,
+and flashed his birthday electric torch in Minx's face until she very
+properly bit him, and Philippa slurred over the incident with impartial
+chocolate, and said it was time to start.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The region in which the Chicken Farmers had established themselves
+suggested the nurture of snipe and sea-gulls rather than chickens.  It
+was an indeterminate patchwork of stony knobs of hill and pockets of
+bog, among which the road humped and sagged, accepting pessimistically
+the facts of nature.  Hardy, noisy hill-streams scurried beside it, or
+over it, as seemed good to them; finally a sharp turn, a high horizon
+of sea, and a steep down-hill grade, ending on the shore of a small,
+round lake.  There was a little pink box of a house on its farther
+side, with a few bunches of trees round it, and among them a pigmy
+village of prim wooden huts.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's the place," said Philippa, who had been there with Lady
+Derryclare.  "And those are the last cry in hen-houses.  Now remember,
+both of you, one of them is a doctor, Scotch, and a theosophist, or
+something mysterious of that sort; and the pretty one was engaged to a
+gunner and it was broken off&mdash;why, I don't know&mdash;drink, I fancy, or
+mad&mdash;so you had better be careful&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I shall be guarded in my condolences," I said, turning in at the
+little gate, with the sensation of being forcibly fed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"As far as one can gather," said Andrew, "there remains no topic in
+heaven or earth that&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Music and poultry," said Philippa in a breath, as I drew up at the
+hall door.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Andrew rang the bell, and a flock of white ducks hurried up from among
+the trees and gathered round him with loud cries of welcome.  There was
+no other reply to his summons, and at the second essay the bell-wire
+came out by the roots with generous completeness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The ladies is gone to th' oxtion!" cried a voice from among the
+hen-coops, and the ducks lifted up their voices in ardent reply.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Where is the auction?" Philippa called, when a comparative silence had
+fallen.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"In Harrington's, beyond at the Mines!" replied the oracle, on a
+well-sustained high G.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Put the cards on the hall table," said Philippa, "we might go back
+that way."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Several things combine in the spell that an auction casts upon my wife,
+as upon many others of her sex; the gamble, the competition, the lure
+of the second-hand, the thrill of possible treasure-trove.  We
+proceeded along the coast road towards the mines, and I could hear
+Philippa expounding to her first-born the nature and functions of
+auctions, even as the maternal carnivore instructs her young in the art
+of slaughter.  The road with which we were now dealing ran, or, it
+would be more accurate to say, walked, across the stony laps of the
+hills.  The cliffs were on our right; the sea was still flustered after
+the storm, like a dog that has fought and is ready to fight again.  We
+toiled over the shoulder of a headland, and there caught sight of
+"Harrington's."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+On a green plateau, high above the sea, were a couple of iron sheds and
+a small squat tower; landward of them was a square and hideous house,
+of the type that springs up, as if inevitably, in the neighbourhood of
+mines, which are, in themselves, among the most hideous works of man.
+One of the sheds had but half a roof; a truck lay on its side in a pool
+of water; defeat was written starkly over all.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Copper, and precious little of it," I explained to Andrew; "and they
+got some gold too&mdash;just enough to go to their heads, and ruin them."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Did they put it in their mouths&mdash;where you have it, Father?" enquired
+Anthony, who was hanging on my words and on the back of my seat.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Suppose you shut yours," I replied, with the brutality that is the
+only effective defence against the frontal attacks of the young.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We found the yard at Harrington's thronged with a shabby company of
+carts, cars, and traps of many varieties; donkey-carts had made their
+own of the road outside, even the small circle of gravel in front of
+the hall door was bordered by bicycles; apparently an auction was a
+fashionable function in the region of the Lug-na-Coppal copper-mines.
+Dingy backs bulged from the open door of the hall, and over their heads
+as we arrived floated the voice of the auctioneer, demanding in tragic
+incredulity if people thought his conscience would permit him to let an
+aneroid barometer go for half-a-crown.  Without a word Philippa
+inserted herself between the backs, followed by her son, and was lost
+to view.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Thank you, madam!" said the voice, with a new note of cheer in it.
+"Five shillings I am bid!  Any advance on five shillings?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's a good weather-glass!" hissed a farmer's daughter with a plumed
+hat, to a friend with a black shawl over her head.  "An' I coming into
+the house to-day I gave it a puck, and it knocked a lep out o' the
+needle.  It's in grand working order."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm told it was the last thing in the house poor Mr. Harrington left a
+hand on, the day he made away with himself, the Lord save us!" remarked
+a large matron, casually, to Andrew and me.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I thought the Coroner's Jury found that he fell down the shaft?" I
+returned, accepting the conversational opening in the spirit in which
+it was offered.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The matron winked at me with a mixture of compassion and confederacy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Ah, the poor fellow was insured, and the jury were decent men, they
+wouldn't wish to have anything said that 'd put the wife out of the
+money."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The right men in the right place, evidently," said Andrew, who rather
+fancies his dry humour.  "But apart from the climate and the
+architecture, was there any reason for suicide?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm told he was a little annoyed," said an enormous old farmer,
+delicately.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It was the weather preyed on him," said the matron.  "There was a
+vessel was coming round to him with coal and all sorts, weather-bound
+she was, in Kinsale, and in the latther end she met a rock, and she
+went down in a lump, and his own brother that was in her was drownded."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There were grounds for annoyance, I admit," said Andrew.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The big farmer, who had, perhaps, been one of the jury, remarked
+non-committally that he wouldn't say much for the weather we were
+getting now, and there was one of them planets was after the moon
+always.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We moved on to the yard, in which prospective buyers were prowling
+among wheelbarrows, coils of rope, ladders, and the various rubbish
+proper to such scenes, and Andrew discoursed of the accessories that
+would be needed for the repair of my eaveshoots, with the
+large-mindedness of the Government official who has his own spurs and
+another man's horse.  He was in the act of assuring me that I should
+save half a man's wages by having a second long ladder, when some one
+in the house began to play on a piano, with knowledge and vigour.  The
+effect on Captain Larpent was as when a hound, outside a covert, hears
+the voice of a comrade within.  The room from which the music came was
+on the ground floor, the back door was open, and Andrew walked in.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That is one of those young ladies who have come here to make their
+fortunes with poultry," observed a melancholy-looking clergyman at my
+elbow, "Miss Longmuir, I expect; she is the musician.  Her friend, Dr.
+Catherine Fraser, is here also.  Wonderful young ladies&mdash;no wish for
+society.  I begged them to come and live near my church&mdash;I offered them
+a spare corner of the churchyard for their hen-coops&mdash;all of no avail."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I said that they seemed hard to please.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Very, very," assented the clergyman; "yet I assure you there is
+nothing cynical about them.  They are merely recloozes."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He sighed, on what seemed to be general grounds, and moved away.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I followed Andrew into the house and found myself in the kitchen.  The
+unspeakable dreariness of an auction was upon it.  Pagodas of various
+crockeries stood high on the tables, and on benches round the walls
+sat, rook-like, an assembly of hooded countrywomen.  A man with a dingy
+pale face was standing in front of the cold fireplace, addressing the
+company.  On my arrival he removed his hat with stately grace, and with
+an effort I recognised Cantillon the sweep, in mufti&mdash;that is to say,
+minus some of his usual top-dressing of soot.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's what I was saying, Major Yeates," he resumed.  "I'm sweeping
+those chimneys thirty years, and five managers I seen in this house,
+and there wasn't one o' them that got the price of their ticket to Cork
+out o' that mine.  This poor man was as well-liked as anyone in the
+world, but there was a covey of blagyards in it that'd rob St. Pether,
+let alone poor Mr. Harrington!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The company assented with a groan of general application, and the
+ensuing pause was filled by the piano in the next room, large and heavy
+chords, suggestive of the hand of Andrew.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"God!  Mrs. Harrington was a fine woman!" croaked one of the rooks on
+the bench.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"She was, and very stylish," answered another.  "Oh, surely she was a
+crown!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And very plain," put in a third, taking up the encomium like a part in
+a fugue, "as plain as the grass on the hills!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I moved on, and met my wife in a crowd at the door of the dining-room,
+and in an atmosphere which I prefer not to characterise.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I've got the barometer!" she said breathlessly.  "No one bid for it,
+and I got it for five shillings!  A lovely old one.  It's been in the
+house for at least fifty years, handed on from one manager to another."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It doesn't seem to have brought them luck," I said.  "What have you
+done with Anthony?  Lost him, I hope!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There have been moments when I could have spared him," Philippa
+admitted, "especially when it came to his bidding against me, from the
+heart of the crowd, for a brass tea-kettle, and running the price up to
+the skies before I discovered him.  Then I found him upstairs,
+auctioning a nauseous old tail of false hair, amidst the yells of
+country girls; and finally he tried to drop out of the staircase
+window&mdash;ten feet at least&mdash;with a stolen basket of tools round his
+neck.  I just saw his hands on the edge of the window-sill."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I think it's time to go home," I said grimly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Darling, <I>not</I> till I've bought the copper coal-scuttle.  Come and
+look at it!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I followed her, uttering the impotent growls of a husband.  As we
+approached the drawing-room the music broke forth again, this time in
+power.  Three broad countrywomen, in black hooded cloaks and brown kid
+gloves, were seated on a sofa; two deeply-engrossed backs at the piano
+accounted for the music.  There is no denying the fact that a piano
+duet has some inescapable association with the schoolroom, no matter
+how dashing the execution, how superior the performers.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Poor old 'Semiramide'!" whispered Philippa; "I played that overture
+when I was twelve!"  Over her shoulder I had a view of Andrew's sleek
+black poll and brown neck, and an impression of fluffy hair, and a
+slight and shapely back in a Norfolk jacket.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He seems to have done very well in the time," I said.  "That's the
+pretty one, isn't it?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I here became aware that the hall was filling with people, and that Mr.
+Armstrong, the auctioneer, with his attendant swarm of buyers, was at
+my elbow.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's a sweet instrument," he said dispassionately, "and, I may say,
+magnificently played.  Come, ladies and gentlemen, we'll not interrupt
+the concert.  It might be as good for me to take the yard next, before
+the rain comes."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He led away his swarm, like a queen bee; "Semiramide" stormed on; some
+people strayed into the room and began to examine the furniture.  The
+afternoon had grown overcast and threatening, and I noticed that a tall
+man in dark clothes and a yachting cap had stationed himself near the
+treble's right hand.  He was standing between her and the light, rather
+rudely, it seemed to me, but the players did not appear to notice.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That was rather a free and easy fellow," I said to Philippa, as we
+were borne along to the back door by the tide of auction.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Who?  Do you mean Mr. Armstrong?" said Philippa.  "I'm rather fond of
+him&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No, the tall chap in the yachting cap."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I didn't notice him&mdash;" began Philippa, but at this moment we were shot
+into the yard by pressure from behind.  Mr. Armstrong took his stand on
+a packing-case, the people hived in round him, and I saw my wife no
+more.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Coils of fencing wire and sheets of corrugated iron were proffered, and
+left the audience cold; a faint interest was roused when the
+auctioneer's clerk held up one of a party of zinc pails for inspection.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You'd count the stars through that one!" said a woman beside me.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You can buy it for a telescope, ma'am!" said Mr. Armstrong swiftly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, well, hasn't he a very fine delivery!" said my neighbour,
+regarding Mr. Armstrong as if he were a landscape.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Hannah," said the woman on my other hand, in a deep and reproachful
+contralto, speaking as if I did not exist, "did ye let the kitchen
+chairs go from you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There wasn't one o' them but had a leg astray," apologised
+Hannah&mdash;"they got great hardship.  When Harrington 'd have a drop taken
+he'd throw them here and there."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Ladies!  Ladies!" reproved Mr. Armstrong.  "Is this an oxtion or is it
+a conversassiony?  John! show that ladder."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"A big lot of use a forty-foot ladder'd be to the people round this
+place!" said a superior young farmer in a new suit of clothes; "there
+isn't a house here, unless it's my father's, would have any occasion
+for it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Hannah dug me hard in the ribs with her elbow and put out her tongue.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Five shillings I am bid for a forty-foot ladder!" said Mr. Armstrong
+to the Heavens; "I'd get a better price at a jumble sale!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Look at the poker they have in it by the way of a rung!" continued the
+young farmer.  "I wouldn't be bothered buying things at oxtions; if it
+was only gettin' marr'ed you were you'd like a new woman!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Seven and six!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To my own astonishment I heard my voice saying this.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Seven and six I am bid," said the auctioneer, seizing me with his eye.
+"Ten shillings may I say?  Thank you, sir&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The clergyman had entered the lists against me.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I advanced against him by half-crowns; the audience looked on as at a
+battle of giants.  At twenty-five shillings I knew that he was
+weakening; at thirty shillings the ladder was mine.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I backed out of the crowd with the victor's laurels on my brow, and, as
+I did so, a speck of rain hit me in the eye.  The sea was looking cold
+and angry, and the horizon to windward was as thick as a hedge.  It was
+obviously time to go, and I proceeded in the direction of the car.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As I left the yard a remarkable little animal, which for a single wild
+instant I took for a fox or a badger, came running up the road.  It was
+reddish brown, with white cheeks and a white throat; it advanced
+hesitatingly and circled round me with agitated and apologetic whimpers.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Minx!" I said incredulously.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The fox or badger flung itself on its side and waved a forepaw at me.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's hunting rabbits below on the cliffs she was," said a boy in a
+white flannel jacket, who was sitting on the wall.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, there you are," said Philippa's voice behind me; "I wanted to
+remind you to remember the aneroid.  It's on the dining-room table.
+I'm feeling rather unhappy about that child," she went on, "I can't
+find him anywhere."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"<I>I'll</I> go in and find him," I said, with a father's ferocity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I hope he's there," said Philippa uncomfortably.  "Good gracious!  Is
+that Minx?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I left the boy to explain, and made for the house, getting through the
+crowd in the doorway by the use of tongue and elbows, and making my way
+upstairs, strode hastily through the dark and repellent bedrooms of
+"Harrington's."  Anthony was not there.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the dining-room I heard Andrew's voice.  I went in and found him
+sitting at the dinner-table with two ladies, one of whom was holding
+his hand and examining it attentively.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She had pale eyelashes, and pale golden hair, very firmly and
+repressively arranged; she was big and fresh and countrified looking,
+and her eyes were water-green.  She looked like an Icelander or a Finn,
+but I recognised her as the second Chicken Farmer, Dr. Fraser.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I was looking for Anthony," I said, withholding with difficulty an
+apology for intrusion.  "We've got to get away, Andrew&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I was having my fortune told," said Andrew, looking foolish.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I saw your little boy going across the field there, about half an hour
+ago," said Dr. Fraser, looking up at me with eyes of immediate
+understanding.  "The white terrier was with him."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Towards the cliffs?" I said, feeling glad that Philippa was not there.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No, to the right&mdash;towards the tower."  She went to the window.  "There
+was some one with him," she added quickly.  "There he is now&mdash;that man
+in a yachting cap, by the tower&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I don't see anyone," I said, refixing my eye-glass.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss Fraser continued to stare out of the window.  "You're
+short-sighted," she said, without looking at me.  "Perhaps if the
+window were open&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Before I could help her she had opened it, and the west wind rushed in,
+with big drops in it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I must be blind," I said, "I can see no one."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Nor can I&mdash;now," she said, drawing back from the window.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She sat down at the table as if her knees had given way, and her strong
+white hand fell slackly on Philippa's purchase, the old aneroid
+barometer, and rested there.  The other girl looked at her anxiously.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Hold up, Cathie!" she said, as one speaks to a horse when it stumbles.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Her friend's eyes were fixed, and empty of expression, and the fresh
+pervading pink of her face had paled.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Perhaps we had better go and look for that kid," said Andrew, getting
+up, and I knew that he too was aware of something uncomfortable in the
+atmosphere.  Before we could get out of the room, Dr. "Cathie" spoke.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I see tram-lines," she said gropingly, "and water&mdash;I wonder if he's
+asleep&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She sighed.  Andrew and I, standing aghast, saw her colour begin to
+return.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Her friend's eye indicated to us the door.  We closed it behind us, and
+shoved our way through the hall.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I say!" said Andrew, as we got outside, "I thought she was going to
+chuck a fit, or have hysterics, or something.  Didn't you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I did not answer.  Cantillon, the sweep, was hurrying towards me with
+tidings in his face.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Mrs. Yeates is after going to the cliff looking for the young
+gentleman&mdash;but sure what I was saying&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I did not wait to hear what Cantillon's observations had been, because
+I had caught sight of Philippa, away in a field near the edge of the
+cliffs.  She was running, and the boy with the white flannel jacket was
+in front of her.  It seemed ridiculous to hurry, when I knew that
+Anthony had been accompanied by a large man in a yachting cap (in
+itself a guarantee of competency).
+</P>
+
+<P>
+None the less, I ran, with the wind and the heavy raindrops in my face,
+across country, not round by the road, and ran the faster for seeing my
+wife and her companion sinking out of sight over the edge of the cliff,
+as by an oblique path.  My way took me past the tower; there was a
+little plateau there, with a drooping wire fence round it, and I had a
+glimpse of the square black mouth of the disused shaft.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Near the tower," the girl had said; but she had also said there was a
+man with him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I ran on, but fear had sprung out of the shaft and came with me.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A hard-trodden path led from the tower to the cliff; it fell steeper
+and steeper, till, at a hairpin turn, it became rocky steps, slanting
+in sharp-cut zigzags down the face of the cliff.  On the right hand the
+rocks leaned out above my head, yellow and grey and dripping, and
+tufted with sea pinks; on the left there was nothing except the wind.
+A couple of hundred feet below the sea growled and bellowed, plunging
+among broken rocks.  I did not give room to the thought of Anthony's
+light body, tossed about there.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At a corner far below I had a glimpse of Philippa and the boy in the
+white jacket; he was leading her down&mdash;holding her hand&mdash;my poor
+Philippa, whose nightmare is height, who has <I>vertige</I> on a
+step-ladder.  She must have had a sure word that Anthony had gone down
+this dizzy path before her.  A mass of rock rose up between us, and
+they were gone, and in that gusty and treacherous wind it was
+impossible to make better speed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The damnable iteration of the steps continued till my knees shook and
+my brain was half numb.  They ceased at last at the mouth of a tunnel,
+half-way down the vertical face of the cliff; there was a platform
+outside it, over the edge of which two rusty rails projected into space
+above a narrow cove, where yellow foam, far below, churned and blew
+upwards in heavy flakes.  Philippa and her guide had vanished.  I felt
+for my match-box, and plunged into the dark and dripping tunnel.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I pushed ahead, at such speed as is possible for a six-foot man in a
+five-foot passage, splashing in the stream that gurgled between the
+tram-rails, and stumbling over the sleepers.  Soon the last touches of
+daylight glinted in the water, they died, and it was pitch dark.  I
+struck a match, sheltering it with my cap from the drips of the roof,
+and shouted, and stood still, listening.  There was no sound, except
+the muffled roar of the sea outside; the match kindled broad sparkles
+of copper ore in the rock, but other response there was none.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Match by match I got ahead, shouting at intervals, stooping, groping,
+clutching at the greasy baulks of timber that supported the roof and
+sides, till a cold draught blew out my match.  My next revealed a
+cross-gallery, with a broken truck blocking one entrance.  There
+remained two ways to choose between.  It was certain that the
+tram-rails must lead to the shaft, but which way had Philippa gone?
+And Anthony&mdash;I stood in maddening blackness; some darkness is a
+negative thing, this seemed an active, malevolent pressure.  I counted
+my matches, and shouted, and still my voice came back to me, baffled,
+and without a hope in it.  There were not half a dozen matches left.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A faint, paddling sound became audible above the drippings from the
+roof; I struck another of my matches, and something low and brown came
+panting into the circle of light.  It was Minx, coming to me along the
+gallery of the tram-rails.  She paused just short of the cross-ways,
+staring as though I were a stranger, and again a circling wind blew out
+my match.  A fresh light showed her, still motionless; her back was up,
+not in the ordinary ridge, but in patches here and there; she was
+looking at something behind me; she made her mouth as round as a
+shilling, held up her white throat, and howled, thinly and carefully,
+as if she were keening.  I cannot deny that I stiffened as I stood, and
+that second being that inhabits us, the being that is awake when we are
+asleep (and is always afraid), took charge for a moment; the other
+partner, who is, I try to think, my real self, pulled himself together
+with a certain amount of bad language, thrust Minx aside, and went
+ahead along the gallery of the tram-lines.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It needed only a dozen steps, and what Minx had or had not seen became
+a negligible matter.  A white light, that turned the flame of my match
+to orange, began to irradiate the tunnel like moonrise, defining
+theatrically the profiles of rock, and the sagging props and beams.  It
+came from an electric lamp, Anthony's electric lamp, standing on a heap
+of shale.  The boy in the flannel jacket was holding a lighted
+candle-end in his fingers, and bending low over Philippa, who was
+kneeling between the tram-lines in the muddy water, holding Anthony in
+her arms.  He was motionless and limp, and I felt that sickening drop
+of the heart that comes when the thing that seems too bad to think of
+becomes in an instant the thing that is.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Tram-lines and water&mdash;" said a level voice in my brain.  "I wonder if
+he is asleep&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I wondered too.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Philippa looked up, with eyes that accepted me without comment.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Only stunned, I think," she said hoarsely.  "He opened his eyes an
+instant ago."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The timber fell on him," said the country boy.  "Look where he have
+the old prop knocked.  'Twas little but he was dead."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Anthony stirred uneasily.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, mother, you're holding me too tight!" he said fractiously.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+From somewhere ahead vague noises came, rumblings, scrapings, hangings
+like falling stones&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It must be they're putting a ladder down in the shaft," said the boy.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Anthony had broken his collar-bone.  So Dr. Fraser said; she tied him
+up with her knitted scarf by the light of the electric torch; I carried
+him up the ladder, and have an ineffaceable memory of the lavender
+glare of daylight that met us, and of the welcome that was in the
+everyday rain and the wet grass.  In the relief of the upper air I even
+bore with serenity the didactics of Andrew, who assured me that he had
+seen from the first that the shaft was the centre of the position,
+though he had never been in the slightest degree uneasy, because Dr.
+Fraser had seen some one with Anthony.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Dr. Fraser said nothing; no more did I.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"See now," said Cantillon the sweep, who, in common with the rest of
+the auction, was standing round the car to view our departure, "it
+pinched me like death when they told me the Major had that laddher
+bought!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Being at the time sufficiently occupied in preparing to get away, I did
+not enquire why Cantillon should have taken the matter so much to heart.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But after all," he proceeded, having secured the attention of his
+audience by an effective opening, "wasn't it the mercy of God them
+chaps Mr. Knox has at the kennels had it lent to the Mahonys, and them
+that's here took it from the Mahonys in a hurry the time Mr. Harrington
+died!  And through all it was the Major's ladder."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Andrew had the ill-breeding to laugh.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Sure it'd be no blame for a gentleman not to know the like of it,"
+said Cantillon with severity.  "Faith, I mightn't know it meself only
+for the old poker I stuck in it one time at Mr. Knox's when a rung
+broke under me&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is a valuable property of the motor-car that it can, at a moment's
+notice, fill an inconvenient interval with loud noises.  I set the
+engine going and jumped into the car.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Something, covered by a rug, cracked and squashed under my foot.  It
+was the aneroid.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When we reached a point in the road where it skirts the cliff I stopped
+the car, and flung the aneroid, like a quoit, over the edge, through
+the wind and the rain, into oblivion.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap05"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="t3b">
+V
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="t4b">
+THE MAROAN PONY
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It had taken ten minutes to work the car over the bridge at Poundlick,
+so intricate was the crowd of people and carts, so blind and deaf to
+any concerns save their own; a crowd that offered sometimes the
+resistance of the feather bed, sometimes that of the dead wall, an
+intractable mass, competent to reduce the traffic of Piccadilly to
+chaos, and the august Piccadilly police to the point of rushing to the
+nearest lunatic asylum, and saying, "Let us in!  We are mad!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The town of Poundlick is built at so accommodating a tilt that it is
+possible to stand on the bridge at its foot, and observe the life of
+its single street displayed like a poster on the hillside; even to
+compare the degrees of custom enjoyed by its public-houses, and to
+estimate the number of cur dogs to the square yard of pavement.  I
+speak of an ordinary day.  But this hot twentieth of September was far
+from being ordinary.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Poundlick Races are, I believe, an ancient and annual function,
+but, being fifteen miles from anywhere, I had hitherto been content to
+gauge their attractions by their aftermath of cases in the Petty
+Sessions Court next following the fixture.  There is, however, no
+creature more the sport of circumstances than a married man with a
+recent motor; my attendance, and that of the car, at the Poundlick
+Races had been arranged to the last sandwich before I had time to
+collect objections (and this method, after all, saves some wear and
+tear).
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The races are held on the banks of the Arrigadheel River, within hail
+of the town, and are reached&mdash;as everything in Ireland is reached&mdash;by a
+short cut.  We&mdash;that is to say, my wife, her cousin, Captain Andrew
+Larpent, R.E., and I&mdash;were gathered into the jovial crowd that
+straggled, and hustled, and discoursed over the marshy meadows of the
+river, and ploughed through the brown mud in the gaps without a check
+in pace or conversation.  The Committee had indeed "knocked" walls, and
+breached banks, but had not further interfered with the course of
+nature, and we filed at length on to the course across a tributary of
+the river, paying a penny each for the facilities offered by a narrow
+and bounding plank and the muddy elbow of a young man who stood in
+mid-stream; an amenity accepted with suitable yells by the ladies (of
+whom at least ninety per cent. remarked "O God!" in transit).
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The fact that there are but four sound and level fields within a
+ten-mile radius of Poundlick had simplified the labours of the
+Committee in the selection of a course.  Rocky hills rose steeply on
+two sides of the favoured spot, the Arrigadheel laid down the law as to
+its boundaries, and within these limitations an oval course had been
+laid out by the simple expedient of breaking gaps in the banks.  The
+single jump-race on the programme was arranged for by filling the gaps
+with bundles of furze, and there was also a water-jump, more or less
+forced upon the Committee by the intervention of a ditch pertaining to
+one of the fences.  A section of the ditch had been widened and dammed,
+and the shallow trough of pea-soup that resulted had been raised from
+the rank of a puddle by a thin decoration of cut furze-bushes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The races had not begun, but many horses were galloping about and over
+the course, whether engaged in unofficial competitions or in adding a
+final bloom to their training, I am unable to say.  We wandered
+deviously among groups of country people, anchored in conversation, or
+moving, still in conversation, as irresistibly as a bog-slide.  Whether
+we barged into them, or they into us, was a matter of as complete
+indifference to them as it would have been to a drove of their own bony
+cattle.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"These are the sort of people I love," said Philippa, her eyes ranging
+over the tented field and its throngs, and its little red and green
+flags flapping in the sunshine.  "Real Primitives, like a chorus in
+<I>Acis and Galatea</I>!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She straightened her hat with a gasp, as a couple of weighty female
+primitives went through us and passed on.  (In all circumstances and
+fashions, my wife wears a large hat, and thereby adds enormously to the
+difficulties of life.)  Among the stalls of apples and biscuits, and
+adjacent to the drink tent, a roulette table occurred, at which the
+public were invited to stake on various items of the arms of the United
+Kingdom.  The public had accepted the invitation in considerable
+numbers, and I did not fail to point out to Philippa the sophisticated
+ease with which Acis flung his penny upon "Harp," while Galatea,
+planking twopence upon the Prince of Wales' plumes, declared that the
+last races she was at she got the price of her ticket on "Feather."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We passed on, awaking elusive hopes in the bosoms of two neglected
+bookmakers, who had at intervals bellowed listlessly to the elements,
+and now eagerly offered me Rambling Katty at two to one.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Boys, hurry!  There's a man dead, north!" shrieked a boy, leaping from
+the top of a bank.  "Come north till we see him!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A rush of boys went over us; the roulette table was deserted in a
+flash, and its proprietor and the bookmakers exchanged glances
+expressive of the despicable frivolity of the rustics of Poundlick.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We ought to try to find Dr. Fraser," said Philippa, hurrying in the
+wake of the stampede.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I did not know that the Chicken Farmers were to be among the
+attractions," I said to Andrew, realising, not for the first time, that
+I am but an infant crying in the night where matters of the higher
+diplomacy are toward.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Andrew made no reply, as is the simple method of some men when they do
+not propose to give themselves away, and we proceeded in the direction
+of the catastrophe.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The dead man was even less dead than I had expected.  He was leaning
+against a fence, explaining to Dr. Catherine Fraser that he felt all
+the noise of all the wars of all the worlds within in his head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Dr. Fraser, who was holding his wrist, while her friend, Miss Longmuir,
+kept the small boys at bay, replied that she would like a more precise
+description.  The sufferer, whose colour was returning, varied the
+metaphor, and said that the sound was for all the world like the
+quacking of ducks.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You'd better go home and keep quiet," said Dr. Fraser, accepting the
+symptom with professional gravity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I asked my next door neighbour how the accident had occurred.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Danny Lyons here was practising this young mare of Herlihy's for Lyney
+Garrett, that's to ride her in the first race," said my neighbour, a
+serious man with bushy black whiskers, like an old-fashioned French
+waiter, "and sure she's as loose as a hare, and when she saw the flag
+before her on the fence, she went into the sky, and Danny dhruv in the
+spur to keep the balance, and with that then the sterrup broke."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's little blagyarding she'd have if it was Lyney was riding her!"
+said some one else.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Ah, Lyney's a tough dog," said my neighbour; "in the Ring of Ireland
+there isn't a nicer rider."
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-111"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-111.jpg" ALT="&quot;Lyney's a tough dog!&quot;" BORDER="2">
+<H4 CLASS="h4center">
+&quot;Lyney's a tough dog!&quot;
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+"There might be men as good as him in Poundlick!" said an ugly little
+black-muzzled fellow, suddenly and offensively, "and horses too!  As
+good as any <I>he'll</I> throw his leg over!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Dr. Fraser's patient stood up abruptly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, oh, oh!" said the man with the bushy whiskers, placing himself in
+front of the invalid.  "Let you be said by the lady, Danny, and go
+home!  Have behaviour now, Peter Lynch!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The matter hung for a moment; a bell began to ring in the middle of the
+course, and the onlookers flung the situation from them like a squeezed
+lemon, and swept <I>en masse</I> towards the summons, bearing with them the
+invalid.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Off the stage I have never seen people clear out so fast," remarked
+Andrew.  "Now that we've seen Dr. Fraser's Lightning Cure, I suppose we
+may as well go too."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His eyes, by a singular coincidence, met those of Miss Longmuir, which
+were very pretty eyes, dark and soft.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I must go and hunt up our pony," she said, with a very businesslike
+air; "we've entered her for the third race, you know."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She put back her hair as it blew across her forehead, and the gold in
+it glinted in the sun.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"How sporting of you!" we heard Andrew say, as they walked away
+together.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+My wife and Dr. Fraser and I turned as one man, and went in the
+opposite direction.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We steered for an island of furze and grey boulders that had been flung
+into the valley like a vedette from the fortified hill-side, and was
+placed, considerately, at the apex of the oval course.  Half a dozen
+men were already grouped upon the boulders, like cormorants.  We
+clambered to a higher <I>étage</I>, and there spread forth ourselves and our
+belongings upon the warm slabs.  The sun was hot, yet not too hot, the
+smell of trodden turf was pleasant in the air, the river sparkled and
+gurgled beside us; the chimneys of Poundlick sent up languid spires of
+blue smoke; its yellow and pink and white houses became poetic in the
+September haze.  The first delicate pangs of hunger were stealing upon
+us, and I felt reasonably certain that nothing necessary to our welfare
+had been forgotten.  I lit a cigarette and pulled my cap over my eyes,
+and listened to a lark, spiring, like the smoke, into the blue, while
+my wife clattered in the luncheon basket.  It was a moment of entire
+well-being, overshadowed only by the prospect of having to take an
+interest in the racing.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I said as much to Dr. Fraser, who was dismembering a cold chicken with
+almost awful surgical dexterity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You must wake up for our race," she said.  "I'll call you in time."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Must I?  I hope you're going to ride."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Heaven forfend!" replied Dr. Fraser.  "Nothing more spirited than a
+weight-carrying bicycle!  I'm not in the least horsey.  Meg was dying
+to ride, but as we bought the pony from the great Lyney, and he had won
+any number of races on her, he was distinctly indicated."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Quite right too," I said, with dowager-like propriety.  "And I should
+wish it to be clearly understood that if, at the last moment, your
+friend Mr. Lyney should be too drunk to ride, I will not take his
+place."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He doesn't drink," said Dr. Fraser, who has an unsympathetic way of
+keeping to the point.  "He's been a great friend of mine ever since I
+mended a broken finger for him."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was a stir among the cormorants on the lower tier of boulders, a
+shot was fired at the far end of the course, every one began to shout,
+and an irregularly shaped mass was detached from the crowd, and
+resolved itself into a group of seven horses, pounding towards us at a
+lumbering canter.  One of the riders had a green jacket, the others
+were in shirt sleeves, with coloured scarves over their shoulders; all
+were bareheaded.  As they neared the first jump, I found myself on my
+feet on my boulder, with two unknown men hanging on to me to steady
+themselves.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's no throuble to them!" shouted one of my <I>attachés</I>, as each
+horse in turn galloped over or through the barrier of furze in the gap.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Which is Lyney Garrett?" I asked.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's him on the chestnut mare&mdash;the jock that have the dhress on
+him."  He pointed to the wearer of the green jacket.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Ah ha!  Lyney's the boy!  Look at him now, how he'll stoop and leave
+the horse to go for herself!  He'll easy the horse, and he'll easy
+himself!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That Rambling Katty he's riding's a nice loose mare&mdash;she has a good
+fly in her," said another.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Lyney's built for it.  If there's any sort of a spring in a horse at
+all, he'll make him do it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He'd make a donkey plough!" flung in another enthusiast.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As they neared the flags at the turn of the oval&mdash;and an uncommonly
+sharp turn it was&mdash;the pace improved, each man trying to get the inside
+station; I could already see, written on the countenance of a large
+young grey horse, his determination to pursue an undeviating course of
+his own.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Now, Lyney!  Spare him in the angle!" shouted my neighbour, hanging on
+to my sleeve and rocking perilously.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Lyney, a square-shouldered young man, pale and long-jawed, bored
+determinedly on to the first flag, hit it with his right knee, wrenched
+Rambling Katty round the second flag, and got away for the water-jump
+three lengths ahead of anyone else.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Look at that for ye&mdash;how he goes round the corner on one leg!" roared
+his supporter.  "He'd not stop for the Lord Leftenant!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The remaining riders fought their way round the flags, with strange
+tangents and interlacing curves; all, that is to say, save the grey
+horse, who held on unswervingly and made straight for the river.  The
+spectators, seated on the low bank at its edge, left their seats with
+singular unanimity.  The majority fled, a little boy turned a
+somersault backwards into the water, but three or four hardier spirits
+tore off their coats, swung them like flails in front of the grey, and
+threw their caps in his face, with a wealth of objurgation that I have
+rarely heard equalled.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The speed was in him and he couldn't turn," explained one of my
+neighbours, at the top of his voice, as the grey, yielding to public
+opinion, returned to the course and resumed the race.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That horse is no good," said a dapper young priest, who had joined our
+crowd on the rock.  "Look at his great flat feet!  You'd bake a cake on
+each of them!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, that's the case indeed, Father," replied a grizzled old farmer,
+"but he's a fine cool horse, and a great farming horse for ever.  Be
+gance!  He'd plough the rocks!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, he'll get a nice view of the race, anyway," said the young
+priest, "he has it all before him."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They don't seem to be getting any delay with the water-jump," said
+some one else regretfully.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Ah, what's in it but the full of a few tin cans!" said my adherent.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, for all, it knocked a good lep out o' Rambling Katty: she went
+mountains over it!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Look south!  Look south!  They're coming on again, and only five o'
+them in it&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The cheering was hotter this time, and it was entirely characteristic
+that it was the riders who were shouted for and not the horses.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They'll win now this turn&mdash;there's three o' them very thick, that's a
+nice tidy race," said the old farmer.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Good boy, Kenny!  Go on, Kenny!" bellowed some one on a lower ledge.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Who's second, coming up to the flag now?" panted Philippa, who was
+hanging on to the collar of my coat and trying to see over my shoulder.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's Jimmy Kenny," responded the man below, turning a black-muzzled
+face up towards us, his light eyes gleaming between their black lashes
+in the sunshine, like aquamarines.  I recognised Peter Lynch, whom we
+had met earlier in the day.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's young Kenny out of the shop," explained the old farmer to me; "he
+rides very nate."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+No one was found to endorse his opinion.  The horses came on, sweating
+and blowing, the riders, by this time very red in the face, already
+taking to their whips.  By some intricate process of jostling, young
+Kenny got the inside place at the first flag.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Now is he nate!  What was I saying!" exulted the old farmer.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Lyney!  Lyney!" roared the faithful gallery, as the leaders hustled
+round the second flag and went away up the course.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Up, Kenny!" replied the raucous tenor of Peter Lynch in solitary
+defiance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Last of all, the grey horse, who would plough the rocks, came on
+indomitably, and made, as before, a bee-line for the river.  Here,
+however, he was confronted by a demonstration hurriedly arranged by his
+friends, who advanced upon him waving tall furze-bushes, with which
+they beat him in the face.  The grey horse changed his mind with such
+celerity that he burst his girths; some one caught him by the head,
+while his rider hung precariously upon his neck; some one else dragged
+off the saddle, replanted his jockey upon his broad bare back, and
+speeded him on his way by bringing the saddle down upon his
+hind-quarters with an all-embracing thump.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's only the age he wants," said a partisan.  "If they'd keep him up
+to the practice, he'd be a sweeper yet!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Tumult at the end of the course, and a pistol-shot, here announced that
+the race was over.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Lyney have it!" shouted some men, standing on the fence by the
+water-jump.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What happened Kenny?" bawled Peter Lynch.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He was passing the flag and he got clung in the pole, and the next man
+knocked him down out of the pole!" shouted back the Field Telegraph.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh pity!" said the old farmer.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He didn't get fair play!" vociferated Peter Lynch, glowering up at the
+adherents of Lyney with a very green light in his eye.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The young priest made a slight and repressive gesture with his hand.
+"That'll do now, Peter," he said, and turned to the old farmer.  "Well,
+Rambling Katty's a hardy bit of stuff," he went on, brushing the
+rock-lichen from his black coat.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"She is that, Father," responded my late adherent, who, to my
+considerable relief, had now ceased to adhere.  "And nothing in her but
+a fistful of bran!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"She's the dryest horse that came in," said the young priest,
+descending actively from the rock.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With the knowledge that the Committee would allow an hour at least for
+the effects of a race to pass off before launching another, we climbed
+to the summit of the island, and began upon the luncheon basket; and,
+as vultures drop from the blue empyrean, so did Andrew and Miss
+Longmuir arrive from nowhere and settle upon the sandwiches.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, I can't eat our own game, can I?" said the latter, with a slight
+shudder, as I placed the chicken before her.  "No&mdash;really&mdash;not even for
+your sake!"  She regarded me very pleasingly, but I notice that it is
+only since my hair began to turn grey over my ears that these things
+are openly said to me.  "I had to feed four dozen of the brutes before
+we started this morning, and I shall have to do it all over again when
+we get home!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I don't know how you stand it, I should let 'em starve," said Andrew,
+his eyes travelling from her white forehead to her brown hands.  "<I>I</I>
+don't consider it is work for ladies."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You can come and help the ladies if you like," said Miss Longmuir,
+glancing at him as she drove her white teeth into a sandwich.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Do you mean that?" said Andrew in a low voice.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"She's blown him to pieces before he's left the covert," I said to
+myself, and immediately withdrew into blameless conversation with my
+wife and Dr. Fraser.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We had gone pretty well down through the luncheon basket, and had
+arrived at a second and even more balmy&mdash;being well-fed&mdash;period of
+peace, before it occurred to Miss Longmuir to look at her watch, and to
+spoil the best cigarette of the day with agitations concerning the
+non-appearance of her pony.  I suggested that she and Captain Larpent
+should go in search of it, and for a brief interval the disturbing
+element was eliminated.  It returned, with added agitation, in a
+quarter of an hour.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Cathie!  I can't find Nancy anywhere!  We've been all round the
+course," cried Miss Longmuir from below.  "And John Sullivan is nowhere
+to be found either, and I can't get near Lyney, he's riding in the
+Trotting Race."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You'll find the pony is somewhere about all right," I said, with the
+optimism of combined indolence and indifference.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That seems probable," said Andrew, "but the point is, she's somewhere
+where we're not."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The point is, she ought to be here," said Miss Longmuir, with a very
+bright colour in her cheeks as she looked up at us.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Heavens!  They're very angry!" I murmured to Dr. Fraser.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, what do you want us to do?" enquired Dr. Fraser lethargically.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You might take some faint shadow of interest in the fact that Nancy is
+lost," replied Miss Longmuir.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I think we'd better organise a search-party," said Philippa (who does
+not smoke).
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We rose stiffly, descended from our sun-warmed boulders, and took up
+the White Man's Burden.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A sweeping movement was inaugurated, whose objects were to find the
+pony or her attendant, John Sullivan, or Lyney.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Should you know the pony if you saw her?" I said confidentially to Dr.
+Fraser, as she and I set forth together.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We've not had it very long," she replied dubiously.  "Luckily it's an
+easy colour.  John Sullivan calls it maroan&mdash;a sort of mixture of roan
+and maroon."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We advanced from field to field, driving like twin darning-needles
+through the groups of people, but neither John Sullivan nor the maroan
+pony transpired.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Come on, come on!  The Stepping Match is starting!" shouted some one.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Dr. Fraser and I were caught in the tightening mesh of the crowd, as in
+the intricacies of a trammel net; an irregular thumping of hoofs, and a
+row of bare and bobbing heads, passing above the heads of the crowd,
+indicated that the Stepping Match was under way.  Lyney's dour face and
+green jacket were in the lead, and, as before, had he been Diana of the
+Ephesians, he could not have been more passionately called upon.  As it
+was obviously useless for us to do so at this juncture, we climbed on
+to a bank near the winning post, and watched the race.  Lyney was
+riding a long-backed yellow animal with a face as cross as his own, and
+a step as fast as the tick of a watch.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Anny other man than Lyney wouldn't carry that old pony round," said
+one man.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"She has a score o' years surely, but she's as wicked as a bee," said
+another.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Lyney's very knacky; he couldn't be bate," said the first man.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, well, look at Jimmy Kenny and his father, and the two o' them
+riding!" went on the commentator.  "Faith, I'd give the father the
+sway.  Jimmy's riding uneven.  When the nag is rising, he's falling."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Sure he has his two elbows into his ears!  Go on, Lyney boy!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The horses pounded past, splashing through the shallow flood of the
+water-jump, and trampling over such furze-bushes as had withstood the
+vicissitudes of the steeplechase.  They passed from our view, and Dr.
+Fraser and I agreed that we should be justified in staying where we
+were till the finish.  Three times they passed us, enveloped in a
+travelling roar of encouragements, and with each passing the supporters
+of Lyney and Kenny bayed and howled more emulously.  The competitors,
+now, to all practical intent, reduced to the Kennys, <I>père et fils</I>,
+and Lyney, again disappeared on their last round, and the volleys of
+incitement became a dropping fire of criticism.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Kenny's mare is the one, the others is too crippled."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"She'll not bate Lyney!  Divil blast the bate she have in her! she's
+too dropped and too narra!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What horse is first?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I d'know; only one, I think."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Look at young Kenny coming up on the father now!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Ah, there's more in the owld fella, never fear him!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Come on, Lyney!  Come on, Kenny!  Lyney!  Lyney!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Lyney won.  The bee-like wickedness of the yellow mare apparently
+served her as well as youth, and despite the fact that she was but
+little over fourteen hands and was carrying twelve stone, she finished
+a dozen lengths in front.  The interest of the race was at once
+transferred to the struggle for second place between the Kennys.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Come on, Tom!  Come on, Jimmy!  Begor' the father have it!" yelled the
+crowd, as Kenny <I>père</I>, flourishing his whip over his grey head,
+finished half a length in front of his son.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Them two tight wheels at the corner, 'twas there he squeezed the
+advantage on the son."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No, but the father had a drop taken, 'twas that that gave him the
+heart."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Dr. Fraser and I got off our fence and steered for Lyney.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He was in the act of throwing the reins on the pony's neck and himself
+off her back as we arrived.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Here!" he said to the owner, "take your old skin!"&mdash;he tossed his whip
+on to the ground&mdash;"and your old whip too!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The owner took the "old skin" by her drooping and dripping head, and
+picked up the whip, in reverential submission, and the ring of admirers
+evidently accepted this mood of the hero as entirely befitting his
+dignity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Dr. Fraser advanced through them with the effortless impressiveness of
+a big woman, and made her enquiries about the pony.  Lyney dropped the
+hero manner.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I don't at all doubt but John Sullivan's gone up to Lynch's for her,
+Doctor; you needn't be uneasy at all," he said, with a respect that
+must have greatly enhanced our position in the eyes of the crowd.  "I
+told him he shouldn't bring her too soon for fear she'd sour on us.  We
+have an hour yet."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Soothed by this assurance we moved on, and even, in this moment of
+unexpected leisure, dallied with the roulette table.  I had, in fact,
+lost ninepence, when the remainder of the search-party bore down upon
+us at speed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The pony is <I>not</I> here!" said Miss Longmuir, regarding our outspread
+coppers with an eye of burning indignation, "and Sullivan's brother
+doesn't know where he is&mdash;says he went up to the town two hours ago.
+I'm going up to look for him, but of course if you'd rather stay and
+play roulette&mdash;"  Her voice shook.  I need hardly say that we went.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+On our arrival at the town of Poundlick we found it to be exclusively
+inhabited by grandmothers.  Lynch's public-house was garrisoned by a
+very competent member of the force, who emerged from the kitchen with
+an infant in her arms, and another attached to her clothing.  She knew
+nothing of the pony, she knew nothing of John Sullivan.  There was
+certainly a young lad that came in, and he having drink taken, and
+wherever he got it, it wasn't in this house, and what did he do but to
+commence jumping the counter, you'd think he'd jump the house.  She
+paused, and I murmured to Dr. Fraser that she was like a Holbein, and
+Dr. Fraser replied that she did not believe one word she said, which
+was rather my own idea, only more so.  It appeared that her son Peter
+had, an hour ago, expelled the young lad from the house (lest its fair
+fame should be sullied), and as for Peter, the dear knew where he was,
+she didn't see him since.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss Longmuir and Andrew here left the shop, very purposefully; we
+pursued, and saw them open the gate of Lynch's yard and stride in.  The
+yard was a small one, littered with cases of bottles, and congested by
+the outside cars and carts of race-goers; such level spaces as it
+possessed had been dug out of the side of the hill, and slatternly
+stables and outhouses were perched on the different levels.  Through a
+low-browed doorway might be seen the horses of race-goers, standing
+"ready dight," like the steeds of Branksome Hall, with heads hanging,
+in resigned depression, before empty ranks and mangers.  But of the
+maroan pony there was no sign.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Fierce as terriers on a rat-hunt, Miss Longmuir and Andrew dashed in
+and out of the dark sheds and outhouses, till there remained unexplored
+but one hovel, whose open door revealed only semi-darkness, edged with
+fern-litter.  None the less, the leading terrier determined to make
+good the ground.  A sharp yelp told of a find, and Miss Longmuir
+emerged, holding aloft a new check horse-sheet, with the initials
+"M.L." large upon it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They must have taken her down to the race-course, after all&mdash;" I began.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Thoughtless of them to take her without her saddle or bridle," said
+Andrew bitingly.  "Here they are behind the door!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The silence that followed this discovery was broken by Philippa.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I hear some one snoring!" she said in a conspirator's whisper.  "Do
+come away.  I'm sure it's a drunken man."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Quite so," said Andrew, who had been pursuing his researches.  "Allow
+me to introduce Mr. John Sullivan."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the dark corner behind the door lay a stout youth, comfortably
+extended, with his flushed face half hidden in the dry and tawny
+bracken, and his open mouth framing long and quiet snores.  He was
+obviously at peace with all the world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Some heartless assaults on the part of Captain Larpent had no
+appreciable result, so inveterate was the peace, so potent the means by
+which it had been invoked.  The ladies had retired during the
+interview, and, as we rejoined them in the yard, we all became aware of
+muffled and thunderous sounds near at hand; they were suggestive of a
+ponderous and chaotic clog-dance, and proceeded from an outhouse, built
+against the bank that formed the upper side of the yard, with its gable
+askew to the other buildings.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Lots of things is coor'us,' as Anthony said when I told him about
+Jonah and the Whale," remarked Philippa, who, throughout, had not taken
+the affair as seriously as it deserved.  "I suppose the party that John
+Sullivan was at is going on up there."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss Longmuir darted round the gable of the house, a wild and summoning
+cry followed, the call of the terrier who has run his rat to ground.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We found her at the foot of a low flight of irregular stone steps (in
+telling the story I have formed the habit of saying that there were ten
+of them) that led to a doorway in a loft.  In the doorway, with a
+cabbage leaf in her mouth, was the maroan pony, looking down at us with
+an expression of mild surprise.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We all said unanimously, and with equal futility, "How&mdash;on&mdash;earth&mdash;&mdash;?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+After which Andrew, who dislikes miracles, arranged that she had, of
+course, got into the loft from the back, where the ground was high.
+Unfortunately the theory did not work, an inspection of the loft
+revealing nothing but four walls, a large store of dried bracken, and a
+donkey-panier filled with cabbages.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"These mountainy ponies climb like monkeys," said Philippa, with her
+inevitable effort to shelter the discomfited, as Andrew returned with
+the ruins of his theory, "she must have walked up the steps!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss Longmuir, snatching out her watch, said she didn't care how the
+pony got there, the point was to get her down as quickly as possible.
+"If people would only do something and not talk!" she added, under her
+breath.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If she walked up she can walk down," said Andrew firmly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He mounted the steps and took the pony by the halter.  The pony
+immediately backed thunderously out of sight, taking Andrew with her.
+Miss Longmuir flew up the steps to his assistance, and unseen sarabands
+pummelled the floor of the loft.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Go up and help them, you great lazy thing!" said Philippa to me.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There's no room for any one else," I protested.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Here the combatants reappeared in the doorway, gradually, with
+endearments on one side, and suspicious snortings on the other.  The
+steps were broad and not too intimidating; the pony advanced almost to
+the sill, repented in haste, and in her retreat flung Andrew against
+the panier of cabbages.  A donkey's panier is made to resist shocks; in
+this case it apparently gave more than it took; Andrew said nothing,
+but he dragged the basket over the sill and hurled it down the steps
+with considerable emotion.  I joined the party in the loft, and
+Philippa collected the cabbages, and laid them in rows upon the steps
+as if it were a harvest festival, in the hope of luring the pony to the
+descent.  The lure was rejected with indignation, and I proceeded to
+offer a few plain truths.  That the floor would come down before the
+mare did.  That it would take six men, and planks, and cartloads of
+straw, to get her out.  Finally, that her race was due to start in
+twenty minutes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We're done," said Miss Longmuir tragically, addressing Philippa and
+Dr. Fraser from the top of the steps, as if they were a stage mob.
+"These brutes have beaten us!  Don't you remember that Lyney's father
+said, 'Let ye keep out from them lads in Poundlick'?  And after all our
+trouble, and the training, and everything&mdash;"  She turned abruptly away
+from the door.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Dr. Fraser stood still, with her hand to her forehead, as though she
+were trying to remember something.  Then she too came up into the loft.
+The pony had now backed into the pile of bracken; Andrew, whose back
+teeth were evidently set tight, was tugging at her halter, and she was
+responding by throwing her nose in the air and showing the whites of
+her eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Meg," said Dr. Fraser, at the doorway, "I've remembered something that
+I was once told&mdash;"  She peered into the darkness of the loft.  "May I
+try?" she said, advancing quietly to the pony's head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"By all means," said Andrew, as chillingly as was possible for a man
+who was very red in the face and was draped with cobwebs.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Looking back now to the affair, I cannot remember that Dr. Fraser did
+anything in the least remarkable.  She took hold of the halter with one
+hand and with the other patted the pony's neck, high up, near the ears.
+She also spoke to it, the sort of things anyone might say.  For the
+life of me I could not see that she did more than anyone else had done,
+but Nancy lowered her head and put her ears forward.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Dr. Fraser gave the halter a gentle pull, and said, "Come on, old
+girl!" and the pony started forward with a little run.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At the doorway she stopped.  We held our breaths.  Dr. Fraser patted
+her again and placidly descended the first step; the maroan pony placed
+a trembling foot upon the threshold, steadied herself, poked her nose
+forward, and dropped her forefeet on to the second step.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"She'll come down on top of her!" said Andrew, starting forward.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Don't touch her!" exclaimed Miss Longmuir, grasping his arm.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With the tense caution of an old dog, the pony let herself down from
+step to step, planting her little hoofs cunningly on the rough-set
+stones, bracing herself with the skill learned on the rocky staircases
+of her native hills.  Dr. Fraser kept a step in advance of her.  Thus,
+with slow clattering, and in deep gravity, they joined Philippa in the
+yard.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Five people cannot advantageously collaborate in putting a saddle and
+bridle on a pony, but we tried, and in the grim hustle that resulted no
+one asked questions or made comments.  Amongst us the thing was done,
+and there were still seven minutes in hand when Andrew shot out of the
+yard on her back.  Hard on her heels followed Philippa and Miss
+Longmuir, with scarcely inferior velocity.  I returned to the remaining
+member of the party and found that she had seated herself on the steps.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She said she was tired, and she looked it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I daresay getting that beast down the steps was rather a strain?" I
+said, spreading the pony's rug for her to sit on.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, that was nothing.  Please don't wait for me."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I said in my best ironic manner that doctors were of course impervious
+to fatigue, and indeed superior to all human ills.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She laughed.  "I admit that I was rather nervous that the thing
+wouldn't work, or would break down half-way."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What thing?" I demanded.  "The pony?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No.  The secret.  It <I>is</I> a secret, you know.  My grandfather gave
+Rarey thirty pounds for it.  I've never had much to say to horses, but
+I have started a jibbing hansom horse in Oxford Street with it."  She
+laughed again, apologetically.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You needn't believe it unless you like.  I must say I was afraid it
+mightn't include a flight of steps!"  She paused and put back her
+abundant fair hair.  "How hot it was up in that loft!  I wonder if you
+could get me a glass of water?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I told her that I was old enough to believe anything, but added that
+after what she had told me I would get a second glass of water, with
+sal volatile in it, for myself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Holbein grandmother was standing at the back door of the house,
+with the baby still on her arm.  She and the baby fetched the glass of
+water.  She said wasn't the pony a Fright for ever after the way he
+came down them steps, but why wouldn't the lady take him out through
+the other door into the field above?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I made no reply, but while Dr. Fraser was drinking the water, I went up
+into the loft, and cleared away the bracken that had been piled in
+front of the "door into the field above."  I opened the door, and
+walked out into the field, and viewed the small hoof-prints that led to
+the door of the loft.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I returned to Dr. Fraser, and very gently broke the news to her.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent" ALIGN="center">
+<SPAN STYLE="letter-spacing: 4em">*****</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Of course Lyney and the maroan pony won the race.  Had this not been a
+foregone conclusion it is possible that John Sullivan might have scored
+less heavily in the matter of free drinks.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As I was conducting my exhausted but triumphant party off the course,
+the Poundlick Sergeant of Police met me and asked me if I would sign a
+few summonses for him, as he was after taking some parties into custody
+for fighting.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Drunk, I suppose?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Sergeant admitted it, and said the dispute had arisen between the
+Kennys and the Lynches on the one side, and the partisans of Lyney
+Garrett on the other, out of "circumstances connected with the last
+race."  The Sergeant's eye rested for an instant, with what may be
+described as a respectful twinkle, upon Miss Longmuir.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It was mostly heavy offers and small blows, Major," he concluded.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Look here, Sergeant," I said oracularly, "take them all to the
+water-jump.  Build up the furze in front of it.  Make them jump it.
+Anyone that gets over it may be considered sober.  Anyone that falls in
+will be sober enough when he gets out."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I have not, in my judicial career, delivered a judgment that gave more
+satisfaction to the public.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap06"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="t3b">
+VI
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="t4b">
+MAJOR APOLLO RIGGS
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="t4b">
+PART I
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The leave of Captain Andrew Larpent, R.E., was expiring, dying hard,
+"in rings of strenuous flight," (and my motor) on the road between
+Shreelane and Licknavar, which is the home of the Chicken Farmers.
+Philippa, who regards a flirtation with an enthusiasm that is as
+disinterested as it is inexplicable, assured me that the state of
+affairs was perfectly unmistakable.  She further said that the male
+determination to deny and ignore these things was partly sympathetic
+secretiveness, partly the affectation of despising gossip, and mainly
+stupidity.  She took a long breath after all this, and, seeing Andrew
+approaching along the garden path in apparently romantic meditation,
+enjoined me to be nice to the poor thing, and departed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The sun was bright, with the shallow brightness of early October, and
+the Virginian creeper made a conflagration on the weather-slated end of
+the house.  The poor thing deposited himself beside me on the garden
+seat.  I noticed that his eye rested upon a white chicken with a
+brilliant scarlet comb; it was one of several, purchased from the
+Chicken Farmers.  I would not for worlds have admitted it to Philippa,
+but there was undoubtedly sentiment in the glance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I hear they're having beastly weather at the Curragh," he said,
+leaning back and looking gloomily up into the melting blue sky.
+"Stunning that red stuff looks on the house!"  He surveyed it, and
+sighed; then, suddenly, sentiment faded from his glance.  "D'you know,
+old boy, that chimney up there is well out of the perpendicular.  It'll
+be down about your ears some day."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I replied that it had maintained that angle for the seven years of my
+tenancy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It won't do it much longer," returned my guest.  "Look at that crack
+in the plaster!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Which crack?" I said coldly.  (Mr. Flurry Knox is my landlord, and it
+is my misfortune to have a repairing lease.)
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Take your choice," said Andrew, scanning the chimneys with the alert
+and pitiful eye of the Royal Engineer.  "My money's on the northern
+one, under the jackdaw."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, confound you and the jackdaws!" I said pettishly.  "The chimney
+draws all right."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the matter did not end there.  Before luncheon, Andrew and I had
+made a tour of the roof, and he had demonstrated unanswerably, and with
+appalling examples from barracks that he had repaired in Central India,
+and built in Wei-hai-Wei, that nothing but habit and family feeling
+induced any one of the chimney stacks to stand up.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At luncheon he told Philippa that he hoped she would insure the
+children before the next westerly gale.  Philippa replied by asking if
+he, or anyone else, had ever heard of a chimney falling, unless it had
+been struck by lightning, in which case it wouldn't matter if it were
+straight or crooked; and though this was manifestly worthless as an
+argument, neither Andrew nor I could remember an instance in support of
+our case.  That the case had now become mine as well as Andrew's was
+the logical result of illogical opposition, and at Philippa's door I
+deposit the responsibility for a winter of as varied discomforts as it
+has been our lot to endure.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The matter matured rapidly.  In the mellow moment that comes with
+coffee and cigarettes, I began, almost pleasurably, to lay out the
+campaign.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I can't see any point in wasting money on a contractor," said Andrew
+airily.  "Any of your local masons could do it if I explained the job
+to him.  A fortnight ought to see it through."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was at this point that I should have sat heavily upon Andrew.  I was
+not without experience of the local mason and his fortnights; what
+could Andrew know of such?  I had a brief and warning vision of Captain
+Larpent, seated at an office table adorned with sheets of perfect
+ground-plans and elevations, issuing instructions to a tensely
+intelligent Sapper Sergeant.  I saw the Sergeant, supreme in scientific
+skill (and invariably sober), passing on the orders to a scarcely less
+skilled company of prompt subordinates&mdash;but my "worser angel"
+obliterated it.  And that very afternoon, on our way to Aussolas, we
+chanced to meet upon the road the local mason himself, William
+Shanahan, better known to fame as "Walkin' Aisy."  He was progressing
+at a rate of speed that accorded with his sub-title, and, as I
+approached him, a line of half-forgotten verse came back:
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Entreat her not, her eyes are full of dreams."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+Nevertheless, I stopped the car.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-139"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-139.jpg" ALT="&quot;Walkin' Aisy.&quot;" BORDER="2">
+<H4 CLASS="h4center">
+&quot;Walkin' Aisy.&quot;
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+In answer to enquiries, he mused, with his apostolic countenance bent
+upon the ground; after a period of profound meditation, he asked me why
+wouldn't I get one of the big fellas out from the town?  I have never
+known Walkin' Aisy to accept a job without suggesting that some one
+else could do it better than he (in which he was probably quite right).
+This may have been humility, due to the fact that his father had been
+that despised thing, "a dry-wall builder"; it may have been from
+coquetry, but I am inclined to think it was due to a mixture of
+other-worldliness and sloth.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+On pressure he said that he had still a small pieceen of work to
+finish, but he might be able to come down to-morrow to travel the roof
+and see what would be wanting to us, and on Monday week, with the help
+of God, he would come in it.  His blue eyes wavered towards the
+horizon.  The interview closed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Fair and young were they when in hope they began that long journey,'"
+cooed Philippa, as we moved away.  The quotation did not, as I well
+knew, refer to our visit to the Knoxes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At Aussolas I aired my project to my landlord.  Flurry is not a person
+to whom it is agreeable to air a project.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Rebuild the chimneys, is it?  Oh, with all my heart.  Is there
+anything the matter with them?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Andrew explained the imminence of our peril, and Flurry listened to him
+with his inscrutable eye on me.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, it'll be some fun for you during the winter, Major, but be
+careful when you're cutting the ivy!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I was betrayed into asking why.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Because there's only it and the weather-slating keeping the walls
+standing."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If I may presume to contradict one so much younger than myself," said
+old Mrs. Knox, "Shreelane is as well built a house as there is in the
+county."  Her voice was, as ever, reminiscent of a bygone century and
+society; it was also keen-edged, as became a weapon of many wars,
+ancient and modern.  She turned to me.  "In the storm of '39 I remember
+that my father said that if Shreelane fell not a house in Ireland would
+stand.  Every one in the house spent that night in the kitchen."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"May be that was nothing new to them," suggested Flurry.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mrs. Knox regarded her grandson steadfastly and continued her story.
+It has already been noted that when he and she were of the same company
+they considered no other antagonist worthy of their steel.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It was my great-grandfather who built Shreelane in honour of his
+marriage," she went on.  "He married a Riggs of Castle Riggs, a cousin
+of the celebrated Major Apollo&mdash;and thereby hangs a tale!"  She blinked
+her eyes like an old rat, and looked round at each of us in turn.  I
+felt as if I were being regarded through a telescope, from the
+standpoint of a distant century.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They knew how to build in those days," she began again.  "The basement
+story of Shreelane is all vaulted."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I daresay the kitchen would make a nice vault," said Flurry.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His grandmother looked hard at him, and was silent, which seemed to me
+a rather remarkable occurrence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+On the following day, Andrew and Walkin' Aisy "travelled the roof," and
+I accompanied them&mdash;that is to say, I sat on the warm lead, with my
+back against the sunny side of a chimney, and smoked torpidly, while
+Andrew preached, firmly and distinctly, from the top of a ladder.
+Walkin' Aisy stood at the foot of the ladder, submissive, with folded
+hands, and upturned bearded face, looking like an elderly saint in the
+lower corner of a stained-glass window.  At the conclusion of the
+lecture he said that surely the chimneys might fall any minute, but,
+for all, they might stand a hundred years; a criticism almost
+stupefying in its width of outlook.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The following day Captain Larpent departed to the Curragh, and, as is
+often the way of human beings with regard to their guests, we partly
+breathed more freely, and partly regretted him.  On the whole it was
+restful.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A fortnight passed, and I had almost forgotten about the chimneys; I
+was in the act of making an early start for an absence of a couple of
+days at the farther side of my district, when I encountered Walkin'
+Aisy at the hall door.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm here since six o'clock this morning, but I had no one to tend me,"
+he began.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I was familiar with this plaint, and proffered him the yard boy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The young fella's too wake," replied Walkin' Aisy, in his slow and
+dreamy voice, "and they takes him from me."  His mild eyes rested upon
+me in saddened reverie.  "And there should be morthar mixed," he
+resumed slowly, "and there's not a pick of gravel in the yard."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I said, as I pulled on my gloves, that he could have Johnny Brien from
+the garden to minister to him, and that there was no hurry about the
+mortar.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, it's what I was saying to the gardener," returned Walkin' Aisy
+very slowly, "I have no business coming here at all till those chimneys
+is taken down.  The sahmint that's on them is very strong.  It's what
+the gardener said, that quarry-men would be wanting."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why the devil didn't you say this at first?" I demanded, not without
+heat.  "You and Captain Larpent told me that the old cement had no more
+hold than the sugar on a cake."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, the Captain knows best," replied Walkin' Aisy gently, "we should
+do what he says."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, get the chimneys down; I don't care who does it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I drove away, and from the turn of the drive saw Walkin' Aisy, in
+motionless trance, looking after the car as if it were a chariot of
+fire.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The well-known routine followed; the long and airless day in the
+Court-house, the roar of battle of the rival solicitors, the wearisome
+iteration of drunks and trespasses, the intricacies of family feuds;
+the stodgy and solitary dinner at the hotel, followed by the evening in
+the arid smoking-room, the stale politics of its habitués, the stagnant
+pessimism of the proprietor, the same thing over again next day and the
+day after.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was not until the afternoon of the third day that I found myself
+serenely gliding homeward, with the wind behind me, and before me the
+prospect of that idleness that, like the only thirst worth having, has
+been earned.  I was in the straight for the hall door, when I saw my
+wife dart from the house, gesticulating, and waving her handkerchief as
+if to check my approach.  She was followed, at no great interval, by an
+avalanche of rubble and bricks from the roof, that fell like a portent
+from heaven, and joined itself to a considerable heap by the steps.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You never know when it's coming!" she cried breathlessly.  "I've been
+watching for you.  It's impossible to make them hear from below, and I
+can't find any of the men&mdash;they're all on the roof."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The restoration had begun, but that fact might not have occurred to a
+stranger.  Next day, and for many days&mdash;six weeks, to be exact&mdash;the
+house shook as from the blows of a battering-ram, in response to the
+efforts of the quarrymen to remove from the chimneys the cement that
+had no more hold on them than the sugar on a cake, and at frequent and
+uncertain intervals various debris rumbled down the roof and fell
+heavily below.  There were days when it fell in front of the house,
+there were days when it fell in the flower garden; where it fell, there
+it lay, because there was no one to take it away; all were absorbed in
+tending Walkin' Aisy, and the murmurs of their inexhaustible
+conversation came to us down the chimneys like the hoarse cooing of
+wood pigeons.  There were also days when by reason of storms and rain
+nothing was done, and black and evil floods descended into the rooms
+down the ruins of the chimneys, and through the slates, broken by the
+feet of the quarrymen.  At Christmas the kitchen chimney alone remained
+in action, and we ate our Christmas dinner in fur coats and a fireless
+dining-room.  Philippa refrained from any allusion to the quotation
+from Longfellow that she had made after that first interview with
+Walkin' Aisy.  She even denied herself the gratification of adding its
+context:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Faded and old were they when in disappointment it ended," but I knew
+that she was thinking it.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="t4b">
+PART II
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was somewhere towards the end of March that one chimney stack
+re-entered the list of combatants, trim in new cement, and crowned with
+tall and hideous chimney-pots.  They all smoked, a thing that had never
+occurred before, but Walkin' Aisy said that the chimneys were cold, and
+that they wouldn't do it when they'd come to themselves; and (this was
+a little later on) that any chimney would smoke in an east wind.  It
+was true that a period of east wind and drought had set in.  The pump
+in the yard went dry; carts had to be sent half a mile for water, and
+it was reported to me that the masons had as much water put astray,
+mixing mortar and all sorts, as would drown a herring.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Other unpleasant things occurred.  The housemaid gave half-an-hour's
+warning, and married one of the quarry men, and Mrs. Cadogan then
+revealed that it wasn't once nor twice during the winter that she had
+given that particular quarryman the full of the poker, to put him out
+from under her feet when she'd be dishing up the dinner.  Shreelane was
+twice drawn blank by Flurry Knox's hounds, and their master said that
+as long as I had every idle blackguard in the country tending Walkin'
+Aisy, and making short cuts through the covert, how would I have foxes
+there?  I ignored the conundrum, and hoped that the quarryman's yellow
+dog would remain where I had last seen him, in the ashpit, till Flurry
+had left the premises.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was some little time after this that Captain Larpent advanced upon
+us on a week's leave from the Curragh; he wrote to say that I evidently
+wanted a Clerk of the Works, and that he would see if he couldn't get a
+move on Shanahan.  I was away when he arrived, and on my return
+Philippa met me in the hall.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Meg Longmuir is here!" she said, not without a touch of defiance.
+"Doctor Catherine had to go to Scotland, so I asked Meg here for a few
+days.  She'll play duets with Andrew.  She's up on the roof with him
+now."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Better have a string band up there at once," I said, "and open it as a
+public recreation ground."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And the Flurry Knoxes and Bernard Shute are coming to dinner,"
+continued my wife, ignoring this <I>jeu d'esprit</I>; "the smoking-room
+chimney is all right, and we can have the oil stove and some music in
+the drawing-room."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With this agreeable prospect in store, we sat down to dinner.  We were
+too many for general conversation, and the table was round, which is
+unfavourable for <I>tête-à-têtes</I>.  Yet it was not round enough to
+frustrate Miss Meg Longmuir's peculiar gift for duets, and I was
+presently aware that she was unwarrantably devoting herself to Bernard
+Shute, leaving Captain Larpent derelict, and that the latter was, after
+the manner of derelicts, becoming a danger to navigation, and was
+laying down laws and arguing about them acridly with Mr. Knox.  I
+realised too late that there should have been champagne.  Whisky and
+soda is all very well, but it will not warm wet blankets.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Meg Longmuir, however, was doing remarkably well without either; she
+wore something intricate that was either green or blue or both, and
+glittered.  I recognised it as the panoply of war, and knew that the
+tomahawk was concealed in its folds.  So also was Andrew's scalp; I
+don't know why I felt some pleasure in remembering that it had a bald
+patch on it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+After the ladies had gone, Bernard, to whose head Miss Longmuir had
+mounted as effectively as if she had been the missing champagne,
+rejoined the lesser world of men by asking Flurry why he had shut up
+the season so early, and suggested a by-day, if only for the sake of
+giving the horses something to do.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Flurry put the end of his cigarette into his finger-glass, and lit
+another at the flaming tongue of my tame Chinese dragon.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I didn't know you had one that would carry a lady?" he said.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh rot!" said Bernard helplessly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I haven't one that will carry myself," went on Flurry.  "There's five
+lame legs among three of them this minute.  Anyway the hounds are in
+sulphur."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The discussion progressed with the prolixity proper to such themes; I
+think it was Andrew who suggested the paper-chase.  He had, he said,
+ridden in paper-chases in Egypt, and he gave us details of the stark
+mud walls and fathomless water-courses that were common-places of these
+events.  We were left with the impression that none of us had ever seen
+obstacles so intimidating, and, more than that, if we had seen them we
+should have gone home in tears.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I think we'd better make a hare of <I>you</I>," said Flurry, fixing
+expressionless eyes upon Captain Larpent.  "It mightn't be hard."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The double edge of this suggestion was lost upon Andrew, who accepted
+it as a tribute, but said he was afraid he didn't know the country well
+enough.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's your Egyptian darkness," said Flurry with unexpected erudition.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Andrew glanced sideways and suspiciously at him over the bridge of his
+sunburnt nose, and said rather defiantly that if he could get hold of a
+decent horse he wouldn't mind having a try.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I suppose you ride about 11.6?" asked Flurry, after a moment or two of
+silence.  His manner had softened; I thought I knew what was coming.
+"I've a little horse that I was thinking of parting..." he began.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A yell, sharp and sudden as a flash of lightning, was uttered outside
+the door, followed by a sliding crash of crockery, and more yells.  We
+plunged into the hall, and saw Julia, the elderly parlourmaid,
+struggling on the floor amid ruins of coffee cups and their adjuncts.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The rat!  He went in under me foot!" she shrieked.  "He's in under me
+this minute!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Here the rat emerged from the ruins.  Simultaneously the drawing-room
+door burst open, and the streaming shrieks of Minx and her son and
+daughter were added to those of the still prostrate Julia.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The chase swept down the passage to the kitchen stairs, the pack
+augmented by Bob, the red setter, and closely followed by the dinner
+party.  A rat is a poor performer on a staircase, and, at the door
+leading into the turf-house, the dogs seemed to be on top of him.  The
+bolt-hole under the door, that his own teeth had prepared, gave him an
+instant of advantage; Flurry had the door open in a second, someone
+snatched the passage lamp from the wall, but it was obviously six to
+four on the rat.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The turf-house was a large space at the very root of the house, vaulted
+and mysterious, bearing Shreelane on its back like the tortoise that
+supports the world.  Barrels draped with cobwebs stood along one wall,
+but the rat was not behind them, and Minx and her family drove like
+hawks into a corner, in which, beneath a chaotic heap of broken
+furniture and household debris, the rat had gone to ground.  We
+followed, treading softly in the turf-mould of unnumbered winters.  We
+tore out the furniture, which yielded itself in fragments; the delirium
+of the terriers mounting with each crash, and being, if possible,
+enhanced by the well-meant but intolerable efforts of the red setter to
+assist them.  Finally we worked down to an old door, lying on its face
+on something that raised it a few inches from the ground.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Now!  Mind yourselves!" said Flurry, heaving up the door and flinging
+it back against the wall.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The rat bolted gallantly, and darted into an old box, of singular
+shape, that lay, half open, among the debris, and there, in a storm of
+tattered paper, met his fate.  Minx jumped out of the box very
+deliberately, with the rat across her jaws, and a scarlet bite in her
+white muzzle.  With frozen calm, and a menacing eye directed at the red
+setter, she laid it on the turf mould, and stiffly withdrew.  Her son
+and daughter advanced in turn, smelt it respectfully and retired.
+There was no swagger; all complied with the ritual of fox-terrier form
+laid down for such occasions.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I was then for the first time aware that the ladies, in all the glitter
+and glory of their evening dresses, had each mounted herself upon a
+barrel; in the theatrical gloom of the vaulted turf-house, they
+suggested the resurrection of Ali Baba's Forty Thieves.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Look where he had his nest in among the old letters!" said Flurry to
+Philippa, as she descended from her barrel to felicitate Minx and to
+condole with the rat.  "That box came out of the rumble of an old
+coach, the Lord knows when!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There's some sort of a ring in the floor here," said Andrew, who was
+rooting with a rusty crowbar in the turf-mould where the door had lain.
+"Bring the light, someone&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The lamp revealed a large iron ring which was fixed in a flat stone; we
+scraped away the turf-mould and found that the stone was fastened down
+with an iron bar, passing through a staple at either end, and padlocked.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"As long as I'm in this place," said Flurry, "I never saw this outfit
+before."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There's a seal over the keyhole," said Andrew, turning over the
+padlock.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That means it was not intended it should be opened," said Meg Longmuir
+quickly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I looked round, and, bad as the light was, I thought her face looked
+pale.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Andrew did not answer her.  He poised the crowbar scientifically, and
+drove it at the padlock.  It broke at the second blow, releasing the
+bar.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No trouble about that!" he said, addressing himself to the gallery,
+and not looking at Miss Longmuir.  "Now, then, shall we have the flag
+up?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There were only two dissentients; one was Flurry, who put his hands in
+his pockets, and said he wasn't going to destroy his best evening
+pants; the other was Miss Longmuir, who said that to break an old seal
+like that was to break luck.  She also looked at Andrew in a way that
+should have gone far to redress the injuries inflicted during dinner.
+Apparently it did not suffice.  Captain Larpent firmly inserted the end
+of the bar under the edge of the flag.  Bernard Shute took hold of the
+ring.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"All together!" said Andrew.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was a moment of effort, the flag came up abruptly, and, as
+abruptly, Bernard sat down in the turf-mould with the flag between his
+legs.  The crowbar slipped forward, and vanished with a hollow-sounding
+splash down a black chasm; Andrew, thrown off his balance, also slipped
+forward, and would have followed it, head first, had not Flurry and I
+caught him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The chasm was a well, nearly full; the water twinkled at us,
+impenetrably black; it made me think of the ink in the hollowed palm of
+a native who had told my fortune, up at Peshawur.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That was about as near as makes no difference!" said Bernard.  "You've
+cut your cheek, Larpent."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Have I?" said Andrew vaguely, putting up a rather shaky hand to his
+face.  "I think my head took the edge of the well."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We covered the hole with the old door, and Andrew was taken away to
+have his wound attended to.  It was not a severe wound, but the process
+was lengthy, and involved the collaboration of all the ladies.  It
+seemed to the three neglected males, waiting for a fourth to play
+bridge, that this mobilisation of ministering angels was somewhat
+overdone.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Andrew came down to breakfast next morning with a headache, and said he
+had slept badly.  Had he discovered the source of the Nile in the
+turf-house the night before, my wife and Miss Longmuir could not have
+been more adulatory and sympathetic, nor could the projects, based upon
+the discovery, have been more ambitious.  I went forth to my work and
+to my labour without so much as a dog to wave me farewell; all were in
+the turf-house, surrounded by visionary force-pumps, bath-rooms, and
+even by miraged fountains in the garden.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When I drove the car into the yard on my return that afternoon, I was
+confronted by a long chestnut face with a white blaze, looking at me
+out of the spare loose-box&mdash;the face, in fact, of "the little horse" of
+whom Flurry had spoken to Andrew.  There was also, added to the more
+familiar heaps of mortar, gravel, and stones, a considerable deposit of
+black and evil-smelling sludge.  It seemed, as was not uncommonly the
+case, that a good many things had been happening during my absence.
+The stone floor of the hall was stencilled with an intricate pattern of
+black paw-marks, and was further decorated with scraps of torn paper; a
+cold stench pervaded the smoking-room (which was situated above the
+turf-house); far away, a sound as of a gramophone in the next world
+indicated that Captain Andrew's <I>affaire de coeur</I> was finding an
+outlet in song.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I followed the sounds to the drawing-room, and found Andrew and Miss
+Longmuir at the piano, in a harmony obviously world-forgetting, though
+not likely to be by the world forgot.  Philippa was sitting by the oil
+stove, and was, I hope, deriving some satisfaction from inhaling its
+fumes, its effect upon the temperature being negligible.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Andrew's song was a Hungarian ditty, truculent and amorous, and very
+loud; under cover of it my wife told me that he, assisted by Walkin'
+Aisy and the quarrymen, and attended by Miss Longmuir, had baled out
+the newly discovered well, and that the quarrymen had exacted whisky to
+sustain them during the later stages of the process, and that the
+sludge would be ideal for the roses.  They believed the well was
+filling again beautifully, but they had to leave it because Flurry came
+over with the horse for Andrew for the paper-chase, and Andrew and Meg
+went out schooling.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What paper-chase?" I interpolated coldly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, they've got one up for Monday," said Philippa airily.  "The
+children have been tearing up paper all day.  I found&mdash;rather with
+horror&mdash;that Flurry had given them those old letters out of the
+turf-house to tear up&mdash;I said you and I would ride, of course"&mdash;she
+looked at me with apprehension veiled by defiance, and I said it was
+thoughtful of her.&mdash;"But I want to tell you about old Mrs. Knox," she
+said, hurrying on.  "She told Flurry that the well had never been used
+since the time of the Famine, when they got up a soup-kitchen here, and
+the day after they opened the well she said the servants flew in a body
+out of the house, like wild geese!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I don't wonder, if it smelt as it does now," I said.  "Was that why
+they flew?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Flurry said he didn't know what lifted them.  But Flurry never says he
+doesn't know unless he <I>does</I> know and doesn't want to tell!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The following day was Saturday, and for the first time for many weeks a
+Sabbath stillness prevailed on the roof.  Walkin' Aisy was absent; no
+explanation was forthcoming, and I diagnosed a funeral in the
+neighbourhood.  It was on Sunday afternoon that I was roused from my
+usual meditation&mdash;consequent upon Sunday roast beef&mdash;by the
+intelligence that Mrs. William Shanahan wanted to speak to me.  Mrs.
+Shanahan was a fair freckled woman, with a loud voice and a red face
+and the reputation of ruling Walkin' Aisy with a rod of iron.  It
+appeared that Walkin' Aisy was confined to his bed; that he had had a
+reel in his head after getting home on Friday, and that whatever work
+it was that young gentleman gave him to do, he wasn't the better of it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And he was as wake in himself and as troubled in his mind as that he
+couldn't walk to Mass.  I told him he should mind the chickens while
+I'd be out, and when I came in the dog had three of me chickens dead on
+the floor, and where was himself, only back in the room, and he
+kneeling there with the two hands up, sayin' his prayers!  'What ails
+ye?' says I, 'ye old gommoch, that ye'd let the dog kill me chickens?'
+'Sure, I was sayin' me prayers,' says he; 'That the Lord mightn't hear
+your prayers!' says I.  God forgive me, I had to say it!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I recalled her to the question of the chimneys, pointing out that the
+gable chimney was half down, and could not be left as it was.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To this Mrs. Walkin' Aisy replied at great length that William's father
+had given him an advice not to go in it, and that the father was dark
+these scores of years, and it was what he blamed for it was the work he
+done in Shreelane House in the time of the Famine.  It was after that
+the sight went bandy with him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She declined to offer any opinion as to when Walkin' Aisy would return
+to work, and withdrew, leaving me to consider my position under the
+Employers' Liability Act in the event of her husband's demise, and to
+wish, not for the first time, that Andrew (now strolling at his ease
+with Miss Longmuir, reviewing a course for the paper-chase), had been
+at Jericho, or any other resort of the superfluous, before he
+interfered with the tranquil progress of the chimneys towards
+dissolution.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There were strange lapses at dinner,&mdash;delays, omissions, disasters, and
+Julia the parlourmaid had a trembling hand and a general suggestion of
+nerve-storm.  After dinner it was reported to Philippa that Anthony was
+not well, and after a prolonged absence she returned with the
+information that he had had a nightmare, and that there was a rumour in
+the house that all the servants were going to give warning the
+following morning.  Their reason for this was obscure, but was somehow
+connected with Mrs. Walkin' Aisy's visit, and the fact that the
+swing-door leading to the turf-house had opened and shut twice, of its
+own volition.  We did not mention these matters to our guests, and
+retired to rest in perturbation.  I admit that at some time during the
+night, which was a still one, I heard the turf-house door groan on its
+hinges, and slam.  I went downstairs and found nothing; it was
+certainly unusual, however, that Bob, the red setter, had abandoned his
+lair in the smoking-room, and was spending the night on the mat outside
+my dressing-room door.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Next morning Philippa, considering that a thrust was better than a
+parry, held a court of enquiry in the lower regions, and, according to
+her own report, spoke seriously on the grave responsibility incurred by
+those who frightened other people about nonsense.  Julia's version of
+the proceedings, I heard at a later date.  She said that "the Misthress
+spoke to us lovely, and the Priest couldn't speak better than her.  She
+told us that the divils in hell wasn't worse than us."
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="t4b">
+PART III
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It has been said of Ireland that the inevitable never happens, and that
+the impossible invariably occurs.  When on Monday morning I learned
+that Flurry was to be one of the hares, and beheld him mounted on his
+best horse, as covered with bags as a postman on Christmas Day, I
+recalled the epigram.  Another confirmation of the law of the
+unexpected was the fact that Meg Longmuir, on the "maroan" pony, was
+his fellow hare, very smart, much elated, and quite unaware that she
+had been substituted for Sally Knox at the last moment, in order that
+she might be as a millstone hung round the neck of Flurry.  That this
+arrangement was not what Captain Larpent had desired was sufficiently
+apparent to the naked eye: why Flurry submitted to it was less obvious.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+About a dozen riders had been whipped up to take part in this
+preposterous affair, and were standing about on the grass in front of
+Shreelane, cutting up the turf as much as the hardness of the ground
+would permit, and making as much noise as a pack of hounds at feeding
+time.  The April sun glared hot, the better part of a north-easterly
+gale was blowing, the horses had over-eaten themselves with the bread
+of idleness, and were fat and frisky.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Is he any good?" said Flurry to me in a low voice, with his eye on
+Andrew, who was sitting, shrouded in gloom and remoteness, on the
+chestnut horse.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Ask Miss Longmuir," I said.  "She was schooling with him on Saturday."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'll have plenty to do minding her, without asking her questions that
+she couldn't answer," returned Flurry.  He resumed his survey of
+Andrew.  "I wonder will he be able to hold that horse in a snaffle?  He
+catches hold an odd time."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Stand by!" said Doctor Hickey, his watch in his hand.  "Fifteen
+seconds more before the hares start!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, if Larpent goes as big as he talks, he'll do," said Flurry,
+gathering up his reins.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The ten minutes of grace ebbed slowly away, and preposterous though I
+still held the affair to be, I do not deny that I was aware of an
+inward simmering of impatience.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'll have the face worn off my watch looking at it if you don't let us
+start soon!" said Miss Larkie McRory to Hickey.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She was mounted on a long-legged animal that had been summarised by
+Flurry as "the latter end of a car-horse," and was certainly in need of
+all the time it could get.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Don't excite yourself now, or I'll be having to order you a cooling
+draught!" returned the Doctor, but I perceived that he, in common with
+everyone else, was edging his horse towards the point of departure.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Go!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the riot of the break-away, I was able to think of nothing but of
+keeping Daniel from bucking me over his head, but during the hustle at
+the avenue gates I observed Andrew riding off Bernard, and getting to
+the front with pale and ferocious determination.  The "scent" took us
+along the road; we followed it over a stony bank and across two fields,
+at steeplechase pace, and then it ceased.  By this time any lingering
+sense of absurdity had ceased also.  We cast ourselves feverishly, like
+hounds; we galloped great circles; someone found the paper again, and
+yelled like a maniac.  We all yelled in response, a variety of yells,
+from "Tally Ho" to "Cooee," as, like Bedlam let loose, we rushed to the
+discoverer.  We were up on high land now, and the wind was whirling in
+our ears, snatching our voices away to infinity, and blowing up the
+temperatures of horses and riders like a bellows.  It had caught away
+the torn paper and flung it to leeward, into furze brakes, against the
+sides of the banks, and checks were many, and the horses, convinced
+that the hounds were somewhere ahead, pulled double.  In the bare
+fields, with their scanty April grass, everything showed up; we were
+deceived by white stones, by daisies, by dandelion puff-balls, by
+goose-feathers; most of all we were deceived by country-people, whom, I
+have no doubt, Flurry had instructed to mislead us.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We had had a long check, consequent on a false trail, when, three
+fields away, Andrew held up his hat.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Look at him now, running mute!" giggled Sally Knox in my ear, as we
+battered down a road.  "He's too cross to shout.  He's frantic because
+he's not the hare, and Meg Longmuir was sent with Flurry!  And poor
+Flurry, who's going such a nice safe line!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I suppose we may thank Miss Longmuir for the safe line?" I responded
+with some difficulty, because Daniel was enjoying himself on the road,
+according to the idiotic manner of horses.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No!  You may thank the chestnut horse!" ejaculated Flurry Knox's wife,
+as she hoisted out of the road over a loose wall.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Remembering that Andrew was intended to buy the chestnut horse, the
+deduction was a simple one.  It was also quite clear that,
+disappointing as it might be, and contrary to the most cherished
+convention, Andrew was going as big as he talked, and even bigger.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Them that's in love is like no one'!" I quoted to Mrs. Flurry, as
+Captain Larpent, taking the shortest way to a drift of paper on a
+hillside, charged a tall, furze-tufted fence, and got over with a
+scramble.  We followed, less heroically, by a gap, and ascended the
+hill, with the torn paper scurrying in front of us in the gusty wind.
+We had now been going for thirty-five minutes, and were all, horses and
+riders, something blown; Miss Larkie's car-horse could have been heard
+down-wind for half a mile, and I would have backed Daniel to out-roar
+any lion in the den.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Nothing but the checks held us together.  Doctor Hickey, and Irving,
+the District Inspector, were taking the matter seriously, and were
+riding hard to catch Andrew, for the honour of the country.  Bernard
+Shute and two or three other heavy-weights were afoot, dragging their
+dripping horses over a bank with an up-hill take off; Miss McRory and
+the car-horse were making an extremely gradual progress in the rear,
+and Philippa had pulled back to give her leads, with an unselfishness
+that was not only futile, but was also a reproach to me and my
+fellow-men.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We had been going in a big ring, and from the top of the hill we could
+again see Shreelane, below us among its trees.  It was there also that
+we caught the first sight of the hares, now heading for home and
+safety.  The wind had strengthened to half a gale, and the wild and
+composite yell with which the hounds viewed their quarry was blown back
+into their throats.  The maroan pony had fulfilled her mission as a
+handicap; twice we saw Flurry dismount and pull down a gap; once, at a
+bank, he got behind her and whipped her over like a peg-top.  Another
+field took them to the high road.  A puff of white paper fluttered out,
+and Miss Longmuir looked back and flourished a defiant whip; they
+turned, and galloped in a cloud of dust along the road for Shreelane.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was not a nice hill to get down in a hurry, and I should think the
+chestnut horse dreams of it now, somewhere in the level English
+Midlands, after he has over-eaten himself on fat English oats.  For my
+part, I remembered a humble but useful path, that links a little group
+of cottages with the rest of the world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The paper lay thick on the road in the shelter of the fences; everyone
+began to ride for a finish, and after a quarter of a mile of pounding
+in the dust at the heel of the hunt, I considered that Daniel and I had
+satisfied the demands of honour, and ignobly turned in at the back way
+to the stable yard, permitting the chase to sweep on to the front gates
+without me.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the stable yard I found several objects of interest.  The hares were
+there, dismounted, very hot, and uncaptured; Mrs. Knox was there,
+seated in her phaeton; there was a cluster of servants at the back
+door; there were McRorys, leaning on bicycles; there was Cecilia Shute,
+in her motor, with unknown rank and fashion billowing in motor veils
+beside her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+All were gazing at a mass of sooty bricks and shattered chimney-pots
+that lay, scattered wide, in and about the black dredgings of the
+turf-house well.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's the gable chimney," said Flurry coolly; "it got tired of
+waiting for Walkin' Aisy.  We heard the roar of it as we came in the
+front gate!"  He turned his mail-bag upside down so that its ultimate
+dregs were blown far and wide.  "How did the chestnut horse go
+with&mdash;&mdash;?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As if in reply, hoofs clattered outside the yard, and the white nose of
+the chestnut shot into the opening of the yard gate.  He plunged past
+me, with Andrew lying back and tugging at the snaffle.  The Shreelane
+yard was fairly spacious, but I began to think that the thing wasn't as
+funny as it looked.  The horse swerved at Mrs. Knox's phaeton, swerved
+again as Flurry turned him from his stable door with a flourish of the
+mail-bag.  Andrew wrenched his head straight for the open back gate,
+and might have got him out without disaster, had not the widespread
+ruin of the chimney intervened.  The chestnut once more tried to
+swerve, his legs went from under him, and he fell, striking fire from
+the cobble stones of the yard.  Andrew stuck to him to the last
+instant, but was shot clear, and was flung, head first, into the heap
+of stones and black mud.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It seemed long, long hours between this catastrophe, and a sufficient
+subsidence of things in general, for me to be able, without inhumanity,
+to envisage a whisky and soda.  Old Mrs. Knox watched me with approval.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm tired of looking at young men drinking tea," she commented.  (It
+was Mrs. Knox's pleasing idiosyncrasy to look upon me as a young man.)
+"They were like a pack of curates at a school-feast!  Not that I was
+ever at a school-feast, thank God!" she added, with an abandoned
+chuckle.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We were sitting in a corner of the dining-room, surrounded by empty
+cups and crumby plates; tides of tea and of talkers had ebbed and
+flowed, but Mrs. Knox had sat on&mdash;to hear my personal report of Andrew,
+she said.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Upon my honour, he escaped very well!  A dislocated shoulder is
+nothing, and the young lady is there to 'tend the wounded Deloraine!'"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She paused, and put her head on one side, as if waiting for the
+prompter.  "How does it go?  'She thought some spirit of the sky had
+done the bold mosstrooper wrong!'"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She paused again, and looked at me; the evening light shone on her
+spectacles, and made them impenetrable.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Now I'm going to give you a piece of advice; "'And I'll not take it!'
+says Major Yeates, R.M.!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I protested that I had said nothing of the kind.  She prodded me in the
+knee with a goblin finger.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"<I>Close that well</I>!  Put on the flagstone, and seal it down again!"
+She fumbled in her shawls, and pulled out a thin old gold chain.
+"Here's the seal, the same one that my father sealed it with at the
+time of the Famine!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I said that I was ready to do anything that she told me, but it would
+be interesting to know why.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mrs. Knox detached the seal from her chain, to which it was knotted by
+something that I darkly suspected to be a bit of bootlace.  It was a
+cornelian seal, made in the grand manner; massively wrought, the gold
+smooth from age.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I daresay you never heard of Major Apollo Riggs?  He drove up to this
+house one fine day in a coach-and-four.  Next day the coach-and-four
+drove away, but Major Apollo Riggs was not in it!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He found himself a success at Shreelane?" I suggested.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Not so much with his host as his hostess!" returned Mrs. Knox
+portentously.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"A duel?" I asked.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He was never seen again, my dear!" replied Mrs. Knox.  (There are
+moments, in Ireland, when this term of affection is used not so much
+affectionately as confidentially.)
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At this point the door opened.  Mrs. Knox put the goblin finger on her
+lips, as Philippa, still in her habit, slid into the room.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The patient and Meg are extremely self-sufficing," she said, dropping
+into a chair.  "His face is turning all colours of the rainbow, and one
+eye has disappeared, but the other is full of expression and is fixed
+on Meg!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There's not much colour about <I>you</I>," I said.  "You ought to have a
+whisky and soda."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Nonsense!" said Philippa, waving me away; "we've got most of the black
+stuff out of his hair; even his waistcoat pocket was full of it!  And
+bits of the torn paper had stuck to it, like confetti."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That suggests a wedding," I observed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Quite," said Philippa.  "But the absurd thing was that one of the
+confetti&mdash;obviously a bit of those old letters that the children tore
+up&mdash;had the word 'Apollo' on it!  It was stuck on to him like a label."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mrs. Knox clasped her hands, and lay back in her chair.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I said it was, of course, a tribute to his beauty, but Meg was not at
+all amused.  She thought it was 'lèse majesté.'"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"She'll get over that in time," I said, putting the seal in my pocket.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap07"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="t3b">
+VII
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="t4b">
+WHEN I FIRST MET DR. HICKEY
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was a wonderful chandelier in the hotel dining-room.  Fine bronze
+it was made of, with mermaids, and Tritons, and dolphins flourishing
+their tails up towards the dingy ceiling-paper, and beaked galleys, on
+whose prows sat six small lamps, with white china receptacles for
+paraffin, and smoky brown chimneys.  Gone were the brave days when each
+prow had borne a galaxy of tall wax candles; the chandelier might
+consider itself lucky in that it had even the paraffin lamps to justify
+its existence, and that it still hung from a ceiling, instead of
+sharing the last resting-place of its twin brother, in the bed of the
+tidal river under the hotel windows.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+James, the hotel waiter, knew the family history of the chandelier, as
+he knew that of most people and things in the county.  I commented upon
+it to a young gentleman with a pointed beard, who sat next to me at
+dinner, and said that it looked to me like Renaissance.  The young
+gentleman suggested, alternatively, that it looked more like bronze.  I
+did not dispute the point, but I think he found the subject precarious,
+as he turned to the young lady on his left, and I heard him embark upon
+a new theme.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-171"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-171.jpg" ALT="James." BORDER="2">
+<H4 CLASS="h4center">
+James.
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+"I was half dead with the toothache all day," he observed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The young lady replied sympathetically that toothache was a fright.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, indeed, that's true," said James, smoothly entering the
+conversation from behind my chair.  "I got my own share of it.  Sure
+there was one time I used to be roaring like a Banshee all night with
+it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Were you so?" said the gentleman, with a wink at me.  "That must have
+been a long time ago, James."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, indeed, it is too, Doctor," replied James meditatively, "going
+on forty years, I daresay.  I went to Dublin, and I went to a great
+dentist that was in it that time, and he pulled all the teeth I had,
+and he gave me a new set entirely."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, my!" said the young lady, "that must have been very expensive."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It was so," said James, not without pride.  "Twenty pounds I gave him."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That was awful," said the young lady, feelingly; "it was well to be
+you that had it to spend."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, it wasn't all out so bad," said James; "sure I only wore them a
+few times&mdash;I wouldn't be bothered with them, and a doctor that was a
+friend of mine gave me ten pounds for them."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I suppose they were a fit for a patient of his?" said the doctor.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They were a bad fit for me, anyway," returned James, glancing over his
+shoulder at the clattering operations of his two female subordinates,
+with the eye of the sergeant-major&mdash;the eye that always contains a
+grievance.  "I was a footman with the old Lord Garretmore that time.
+Sure that was where the chandelier came from.  A grand house it was,
+too&mdash;big slobs of marble on the tables, and gold legs under them, and
+ye'd bog to the knees in the carpets.  Well, it was the first night
+after me getting the teeth, there was a gentleman stayed for dinner,
+and he was to go away by the night train.  Forty horses were in the
+stables, and there wasn't one but was out at grass, and I had to go out
+beating the bushes for an old mare that was round the house always,
+herself and her foal, to put her under the side car.  'Prua!  Prua!'
+says I, calling the mare in the dark, and with that the teeth lepped
+out of my mouth, with respects to you!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, fie!" said the mother of the young lady.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What did you do then, James?" inquired the Doctor.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I took the white tie off me, and I tied it to the bush that was next
+me, for a token, and 'twas that way I got them again the next morning,
+thanks be to God."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Having concluded his story, James started on a perfunctory tour of the
+table with the wine card.  He stopped to pull the turf fire together,
+and, with a furtive eye at the glass over the chimney-piece, he
+rearranged the long lock of hair that draped his bald pate.  It was
+dyed, of that peculiar shade of chestnut that disdains subterfuge, and
+the fact and its suggestions were distressing where an old servant was
+concerned; so also was the manner in which he hobbled on his heels.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"His walk's full of corns," said the young doctor, eyeing him not
+without sympathy.  "He's a great old character.  I believe they keep
+him here to talk to the tourists."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is a melancholy fact that in Ireland, in these later days,
+"characters" have become aware of their position, and palpably live up
+to their reputation.  But James was in a class of his own.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I said didactically, even combatively, that "characters" were free and
+easy, but that James was easy without being free.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'll bet he's not easy in his feet, anyhow!" said the Doctor brutally.
+"Have you any more soup there, James?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The mother of the young lady, who had hitherto preserved a silence,
+broken only by the audible assimilation of her soup, here laid down her
+spoon and said in cryptic disparagement:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Tin!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, I'd say it was the best we had yet," said the Doctor.  "I'd
+undertake to pull a puppy through distemper with it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's the soup she has always for th'assizes," said James.  "Grand
+soup it is, and I declare to ye, she makes it out of egg shells and
+every old rubbish!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The young lady's mother emitted a short laugh, but her empty soup-plate
+told heavily against her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The meal wore slowly on.  A sea fish, of a genus unknown to me, and
+amazingly endowed with bones, was consumed in distracted silence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I hear you have a fish shop opened in Ballinagar, Mrs. M'Evoy,"
+remarked the Doctor, taking his last fish bone out of action with
+professional adroitness, and addressing the mother of the young lady,
+"That's very up-to-date.  There wasn't one I met from Ballinagar but
+was bragging of it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It was the Hoolahanes that had it," said Mrs. M'Evoy.  "It's closed."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh dear, why so?" said the Doctor.  "Why did they do that, I wonder?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They said that morning, noon, and night people were bothering them for
+fish," returned Mrs. M'Evoy, to whom this triumph of the artistic
+temperament presented no exceptional feature.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Unless it might be on a fast day, I'd never ask to taste a bit of
+fish," remarked James, giving a helping hand to the conversation.
+"There was a man I knew from this place got his death in Liverpool from
+a bit of fish.  It stuck to the upper gum.  'Bill,' says he to the one
+that was with him, 'so help me God,' says he, 'I'm dyin',' says he; and
+sure that's how he met his death!  It was in some grand hotel he was,
+and he was too shy to give the puff to send out the bit."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'd like to send that to the 'B.M.J.'," said the Doctor gravely.
+"Maybe you could give me the man's name, James?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There was them that could swear to it," said James, depositing a
+syphon on the table in a determined manner, "but they were before your
+day, Doctor Hickey."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"How young he is!" said Miss M'Evoy archly.  "Don't be flattering him,
+James."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Indeed I'll not flatter him," returned James, "there's plenty doing
+that."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was at about this point that a dish containing three roast ducks was
+placed in front of me.  Circumstances had decreed that I sat at the end
+of the table; it was my task to deal with the ducks, and during the
+breathless and steamy struggle that ensued, I passed out of the
+conversation, which, indeed, had resolved itself into a more personal
+affair between Dr. Hickey and Miss M'Evoy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was somewhere in the reposeful period that came with the cheese,
+that Dr. Hickey ordered a bottle of port, of which he very handsomely
+invited the ladies and me to partake.  He leaned back in his chair.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Was this in the cellar the time of the flood?" he said, putting down
+his glass.  "I don't mean Noah's flood, James; you mightn't remember
+that; but the time the river came up in the town here."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If it was Noah's flood itself," said James, instantly accepting
+combat, "it couldn't get into our cellars.  But, faith, it was up in
+this room you're sitting in, and I had to get up on the table from it,
+and it ruz to the table, and I had to hang out of the chandelier, and a
+boat came into the room then and took me out.  Sure that was the time
+that the porpoise came up the river, with the dint of the flood, and
+she was in it for a week, in front of the hotel."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"In compliment to the visitors, I suppose?" said the Doctor.  "And what
+happened her, James?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"She was in it till a whale came up the river," replied James, with the
+simplicity of Holy Writ, "and b'Jove he banished her!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's a wonder you'd let him treat a lady that way, James," said Dr.
+Hickey.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was still twilight when we left the dining-room, and strayed to the
+open hall door, and out into the September evening.  In the east a
+rose-pink moon was rising in lavender haze, and a faint wind blew from
+it; the subtle east wind of September, warmed by its journey across the
+cornfields, turf-scented by the bogs.  There was a narrow garden
+between the hotel and the river, a place where were new and
+already-neglected flower-beds, and paths heavy with coarse river
+gravel, and grass that had been cut, not too recently, with a scythe.
+A thatched summer-house completed the spasmodic effort of the hotel to
+rise to smartness.  The West of Ireland cannot be smart, nor should any
+right-minded person desire that it should be so.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Dr. Hickey and I sat and smoked on the parapet wall above the river,
+while the slated and whitewashed town darkened into mystery.  Little
+lights came slowly out, and behind the town the grey shape of Dreelish
+mountain lowered in uncompromising abruptness, a brooding presence,
+felt rather than seen.  In the summer-house James was lighting a
+Chinese lantern, of a somewhat crumpled and rheumatic outline.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, now, that's a great notion!" said Dr. Hickey, with the lethargic
+and pessimistic humour of his type.  "That'll be in the
+prospectus&mdash;'Hotel grounds illuminated every night.'  I wonder did they
+buy that at the Jumble Sale after the Fancy Fair in the Town Hall?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We sat there, and the moon and the round red Chinese lantern looked at
+each other across the evening, and had a certain resemblance, and I
+reflected on the fact that an Irishman is always the critic in the
+stalls, and is also, in spirit, behind the scenes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Look at James now," said the Doctor.  "He's inviting the ladies out to
+have coffee in the summer-house.  That's very fashionable.  I suppose
+we should go there too."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We sat with Mrs. and Miss M'Evoy in the summer-house, and drank
+something that was unearthly black in the red light, and was singularly
+unsuggestive of coffee.  The seats were what is known as "rustic," and
+had aggressive knobs in unexpected places; the floor held the
+invincible dampness of the West, yet the situation was not
+disagreeable.  At the other side of the river men were sitting on a
+wall, and talking, quietly, inexhaustibly; now and then a shout of
+laughter broke from one of them, like a flame from a smouldering fire.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"These lads are waiting to go back on the night mail," said the Doctor;
+"you wouldn't think they're up since maybe three this morning to come
+in to the fair."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Here a railway whistle made a thin bar of sound somewhere out under the
+low moon, that had now lifted herself clear of the haze.  A voice
+called from the hill-side:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Hora-thu!  Tommeen!  Let yee be coming on!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The men tumbled on to the road, and hurried, heavy-footed, in the
+direction of the station.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Sure, they've half an hour yet, the creatures," said Mrs. M'Evoy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They have, and maybe an hour before they have the pigs shunted," said
+James, re-entering with a plate of biscuits, adorned with pink and
+white sugar.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Ah! what signifies half an hour here or there on this line!" said Dr.
+Hickey.  "I'm told there was a lady travelling on it last week, and she
+had a canary in a cage, and the canary got loose and flew out of the
+window, and by George, the lady pulled the communication cord, and
+stopped the train!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, now, she showed her sense," said Mrs. M'Evoy, with an utterance
+slightly muffled in pink biscuit.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"She and the guard went then trying to catch the canary," continued Dr.
+Hickey, "and he'd sit till they'd get near him, and then he'd fly on
+another piece.  Everyone that was in the train was hanging out of it,
+and betting on it, from one carriage to another, and some would back
+the lady and some would back the bird, and everyone telling them what
+to do."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's a pity <I>you</I> weren't in it," said Miss M'Evoy, "they'd have been
+all right then."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It was that bare bit of bog near Bohirmeen," pursued Dr. Hickey,
+without a stagger, "not a tree in it.  'If he have a fly left in him at
+all,' says a chap out of a Third Smoker, 'ye'll get him in Mike
+Doogan's bush.'  That was the only bush in the country."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Twas true for him," said James.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, they got him in the bush," proceeded Dr. Hickey, "singing away
+for himself; but they had some trouble crossing the drains.  I'm told
+the guard said the lady lepped like a horse!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You had it right, all to the singing," commented Mrs. M'Evoy,
+advancing as it were to the footlights.  "I have the little bird
+upstairs this minute, and she never sang a note yet!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mrs. M'Evoy here permitted herself to subside into fat and deep-seated
+chuckles, and Miss M'Evoy, James, and I gave way suitably to our
+feelings.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, now, I thought it was a nice idea, the canary to be singing,"
+said Dr. Hickey, emerging from the situation as from a football
+scrimmage, in which he had retained possession of the ball.  "The next
+time I tell the story, I'll leave that out, and I can say that the lady
+that lepped like a horse was Mrs. M'Evoy.  They'll believe me then."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why wouldn't you say the canary was an eagle?" said Miss M'Evoy.
+"There used to be plenty eagles in these mountains back here."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, indeed, I might too," said Dr. Hickey.  "I remember it was
+somewhere in these parts that an uncle of mine was staying one time,
+and a man came to the hotel with an eagle to sell to the tourists.  My
+uncle was like Mrs. M'Evoy here, he was very fond of birds; and the man
+said the eagle'd be a lovely pet.  Whatever way it was, he bought it."
+He paused to light a cigarette, and James pretended to collect the
+coffee cups.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He gave the eagle to the Boots to mind for him," resumed the Doctor,
+"and the Boots put it into an empty bedroom.  It wasn't more than seven
+o'clock next morning when my uncle was wakened up, and the waiter came
+in.  'There's a man in the kitchen, your honour,' says he, 'and he has
+a great fighting aigle, and he says he'll fight your honour's aigle in
+the passage.'  They had a grand fight between the two o' them in the
+spare room, and in the end my uncle's eagle went up the chimney, and
+the man's eagle went out through the glass in the window.  My uncle had
+a nice bill to pay for all that was broken in the room, and in the end
+he gave the eagle to the Zoo."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Faith, he did not!" shouted James suddenly.  "He left him stuck in the
+chimbley!  And sure it was I that got him out, and meself that sold him
+to a gentleman that was going to Ameriky.  Sure, I was the waiter!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Dr. Hickey threw himself back in his rustic chair.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Holy smoke!  This is no place for me," he said; "every story I have is
+true in spite of me."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Soon afterwards the ladies went to bed, and Dr. Hickey and I smoked on
+for a time.  He explained to me that he was here as "locum" for a
+friend of his; it wasn't much of a catch, but he was only just after
+passing for his Medical, and you'd nearly go as locum for a tinker's
+dog after you had three years' grinding in Dublin put in.  This was a
+God-forsaken sort of a hole, not a hound within fifty miles, nor anyone
+that would know a hound if they saw one, but the fishing was middling
+good.  From this point the conversation flowed smoothly into channels
+of sport, and the dual goals of Dr. Hickey's ambition were divulged to
+me.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There was a chap I was at school with&mdash;Knox his name was&mdash;that has a
+little pack of foxhounds down in the South, and he's as good as
+promised me I'm to whip in to him if I can get the Skebawn Dispensary
+that's vacant now, and I might have as good a chance of it as another."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+My own ambitions were also, at the moment, dual, being matrimonial,
+with a Resident Magistracy attached, but I did not feel it necessary to
+reveal them.  I mentioned that I was having a day's fishing here on my
+way to Donegal to shoot grouse, but did not add that Philippa, to whom
+I was newly engaged, was implicated in the grouse party, still less
+that it was my intention to meet her the next afternoon at Carrow Cross
+Junction, an hour away, and proceed with her to the home of her uncle,
+an hour or so further on.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You might have three hours, or maybe four, to wait at Carrow Cross,"
+said Dr. Hickey, as if tracking my thought; "why wouldn't you drive out
+to the Sports at Carrow Bay?  It's only four miles, and there's a
+Regatta there to-morrow, and when the tide goes out they have races on
+the sands.  I believe there's a trotting-match too, and an exhibition
+of crochet."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It did not seem to me that I wanted to go to Carrow Bay, but it was not
+necessary to say so.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Trucks at the station were banging into their neighbours, with much
+comment from the engine; I thought of Tommeen and his comrades, up
+since 3 A.M., and still waiting to get home, and it suggested the
+privileges of those who could go to bed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was over a whisky and soda in the heavily reminiscent atmosphere of
+the smoking-room that Dr. Hickey told me he was going to take the
+ladies to the Sports, and mentioned that there would be a train at
+eleven, and a spare seat on the car from Carrow Cross.  It required no
+special effort to see the position that I was to occupy in relation to
+Mrs. M'Evoy; I followed the diplomatic method of my country; I looked
+sympathetic, and knew certainly that I should not be there.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I leaned out of my window that night, to look at the river, with the
+moon on it, hustling over the shallows, and thought of the porpoise,
+who had been so unchivalrously banished by the whale.  I also wondered
+when the English post got in.  I was presently aware of a head
+projecting from a window just below, and a female voice said, as if in
+continuance of a conversation:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We should coax James for the cold duck to take with us."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's a good idea," replied the rotund voice of Mrs. M'Evoy; "we'll
+get nothing out there that a Christian could eat, and there might be
+that gentleman too."  (That gentleman closed one eye.)  "Come in now,
+Ally!  There's an east wind coming in that would perish the crows."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The guillotine slam of the sash followed.  The river warbled and washed
+through the stillness; its current was not colder, more clear, than
+"that gentleman's" resolve that he would not grace the luncheon party
+at Carrow Bay Sports.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I breakfasted late and in solitude, ministered to by one of the female
+underlings of James; the voice of James himself, I heard distantly, in
+war and slaughtering, somewhere behind the scenes.  The letter that I
+wanted had not failed me, and I smoked a very honeyed cigarette over it
+in the garden afterwards.  A glimpse of Dr. Hickey at the hotel door in
+a palpably new tie, and of Mrs. and Miss M'Evoy in splendour in the
+hall, broke into my peace.  I quietly but unhesitatingly got over the
+wall of the garden, and withdrew by way of the river bank.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When the 11 o'clock train had left I returned to the halcyon stillness
+of the hotel; my own train left at 1.30; it was a time favourable, and
+almost attractive, for letter writing.  As I wrote, I heard the voice
+of James demanding in thunder where was Festus O'Flaherty, and why
+hadn't he the chickens plucked.  A small female voice replied that the
+Doctor and the ladies had left their lunch after them, and that Festus
+had run up to the station to try would he overtake them with it, and
+the thrain was gone.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And if it was themselves they left after them," retorted James, still
+in thunder, "what was that to him?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To this conundrum no answer was attempted; I bestowed upon Mrs. M'Evoy
+some transient compassion, and she and her company departed, hull down,
+below the horizon of my thoughts.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A few hours afterwards, I trod the solitudes of Carrow Cross Junction,
+and saw the train that had brought me there bend like a caterpillar
+round a spur of hill, and disappear.  When I looked round again the
+little bookstall was shuttered up, and the bookstall lady was vanishing
+down a flight of steps; the porter had entrenched himself in the goods
+store; the stationmaster was withdrawn from human ken with the
+completeness only achievable by his kind.  I was suspended in space for
+three hours, and the indifference of my fellow-creatures was
+unconcealed.  A long walk to nowhere and back again was the obvious
+resource of the destitute.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The town of Carrow Cross lay in a hollow below the station, with the
+blue turf smoke stagnant above its muddle of slate and thatched roofs;
+I skirted it, and struck out into the country.  I did not find it
+attractive.  Potato fields in September are not looking their best;
+there were no trees, and loose, crooked walls overran the landscape.
+The peak of Dreelish mountain was visible, but the dingy green country
+rose high between me and it, like the cope on the neck of a priest.  I
+walked for an hour; I sat on a wall and read Philippa's letter again,
+and found, with a shock, that I had only one cigarette left.  A fatuous
+fear of missing the train turned me back in the direction of the
+station, slightly hungry, and profoundly bored.  I came into the town
+by a convent, and saw the nuns walking flowingly in twos, under
+chestnut trees; asceticism in its most pictorial aspect, with the
+orange leaves and the blue September haze, and the black robes and
+white headgear.  I wondered how they managed to go on walking neatly to
+nowhere and back again with such purpose, and if they felt as jaded as
+I, and as little enlivened by the environs of Carrow Cross.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The town was an unprepossessing affair of two or three streets,
+whitewash and thatch squeezed between green and gold pubs, like old
+country-women among fashionable daughters.  Everything was closed; as I
+looked along the empty street an outside car drawn by a dun pony turned
+into it at high speed, the pony forging with a double click-clack.  As
+the car swung towards me some one flourished a stick, some one else a
+red parasol.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We got a bit tired waiting for the sports," Dr. Hickey said, as he
+assisted Mrs. M'Evoy to alight at a house labelled Lynch's Railway
+Hotel, in royal blue; "it seemed that the tide wasn't going out as fast
+as the Committee expected.  It might be another hour or more before the
+race-course would be above water, and we thought we might as well come
+on here and get something to eat at the Hotel."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It has the appearance of being closed," said Mrs. M'Evoy, in a voice
+thinned by famine.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That might be a fashion it has in the afternoon, when themselves does
+be at their dinner," said the car-driver.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The front door was certainly closed, and there was neither knocker nor
+bell, nothing but a large well-thumbed keyhole.  Dr. Hickey hammered
+with his stick; nothing happened.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They're gone to the races so," said the car-driver.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the silence that followed it seemed that I could hear the flagging
+beat of Mrs. M'Evoy's heart.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Wait awhile," said Dr. Hickey; "the window isn't bolted!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The sill was no more than two feet from the ground, the sash yielded to
+pressure and went up; Dr. Hickey dived in, and we presently heard him
+assail the front door from inside.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was locked, and its key had apparently gone to the races.  I
+followed Dr. Hickey by way of the window, so did Miss M'Evoy; we pooled
+our forces, and drew her mamma after us through the opening of two foot
+by three, steadily, as the great god Pan drew the pith from the reed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We found ourselves in a small sitting-room, almost filled by a table;
+there was a mature smell of cabbage, but there was nothing else to
+suggest the presence of food.  We proceeded to the nether regions,
+which were like a chapter in a modern realistic novel, and found a
+sickly kitchen fire, the horrid remains of the Lynch family breakfast,
+an empty larder, and some of the home attire of the race-goers, lying,
+as the tree lies, where it fell.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There's a sort of a butcher in the town," said Dr. Hickey, when the
+search-parties had converged on each other, empty-handed, "maybe we
+could cook something&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If it was even a bit of salt pork&mdash;" said Mrs. M'Evoy, seizing the
+poker and attacking the sleepy fire.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Let you get some water, and I'll wash the plates," said Miss M'Evoy to
+Dr. Hickey.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I looked at my watch, saw that I had still an hour and a half to play
+with, and departed to look for the butcher.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Neither by sign-board nor by shop front did the Carrow Cross butcher
+reveal himself.  I was finally investigating a side street, where the
+houses were one-storeyed, and thatched, and wholly unpromising, when a
+heavy running step, that might have been a horse's, thundered behind
+me, and a cumbrous pale woman, with the face of a fugitive, plunged
+past me, and burst in at a cottage door like a mighty blast of wind.  A
+little girl, in tears, thudded barefooted after her.  The big woman
+turned in the doorway, and shrieked to me.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Thim's madmen, from th' Asylum!  Come inside from them, for God's
+sake!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I looked behind me up the street, and saw a small, decorous party of
+men, flanked by a couple of stalwart keepers in uniform.  One of the
+men, a white-faced being in seedy black, headed them, playing an
+imaginary fiddle on his left arm, and smiling secretly to himself.
+Whether the lady had invited me to her house as a protector, or as a
+refugee, I did not know: she herself had vanished, but through the
+still open door I saw, miraculously, a fragment or two of meat, hanging
+in the interior.  I had apparently chanced upon the home of the Carrow
+Cross butcher.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A greasy counter and a chopping-block put the matter beyond doubt; I
+beat upon an inner door: a wail of terror responded, and then a muffled
+voice:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Come in under the bed to me, Chrissie, before they'd ketch ye!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was nothing for it but to take from a hook a grey and white
+fragment that looked like bacon, place half-a-crown on the counter, and
+depart swiftly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I gave a few of the Asylum patients leave to go to the Sports," said
+Dr. Hickey, a little later, when we were seated between the large bare
+table and the wall of the little sitting-room, with slices of fried
+pork weltering on our plates.  "I saw the fellow waltzing down the
+street.  Ah! he's fairly harmless, and they've a couple o' keepers with
+them anyway."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The only pity was that you left the half-crown," said Mrs. M'Evoy; "a
+shilling was too much for it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mrs. M'Evoy was considerably flushed, and had an effective black smear
+on her forehead, but her voice had recovered its timbre.  There was a
+tin of biscuits on the table, there was a war-worn brown teapot, and
+some bottles of porter; it was now four hours since I had eaten
+anything; in spite of the cold and clear resolve of the night before, I
+was feeding, grossly yet enjoyably, with Dr. Hickey and his friends.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"This is a Temperance Hotel for the past year," remarked Dr. Hickey,
+delicately knocking off the head of a porter bottle with the
+sitting-room poker.  "That's why it was upstairs I found the porter.  I
+suppose they took the corkscrew to the Sports with them."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"How did they lose the license at all?" said Mrs. M'Evoy; "I thought
+there wasn't a house in Carrow Cross but had one."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It was taken from them over some little mistake about selling
+potheen," replied Dr. Hickey, courteously applying the broken neck of
+the bottle to Mrs. M'Evoy's tumbler.  "The police came to search the
+house, and old Lynch, that was in bed upstairs, heard them, and threw a
+two-gallon jar of potheen out of the top back window, to break it.  The
+unlucky thing was that there was a goose in the yard, and it was on the
+goose it fell."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The creature!" said Miss M'Evoy, "was she killed?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Killed to the bone, as they say," replied the Doctor; "but the trouble
+was, that on account of falling on the goose the jar wasn't broken, so
+the bobbies got the potheen."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Supposing they summons you now for the porter!" said Mrs. M'Evoy,
+facetiously, casting her eye through the open window into the bare
+sunshiny street.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They'll have summonses enough at Carrow Bay to keep them out of
+mischief," returned Dr. Hickey.  "It's a pity now, Major, you didn't
+patronise the Sports.  They might have put you on judging the cakes
+with Mrs. M'Evoy."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why then, the one they put on with me was the man they had judging the
+vegetables," said Mrs. M'Evoy, after a comfortable pull at the
+contraband porter.  "'That's a fine weighty cake,' says me lad,
+weighing a sponge-cake on his hand.  'We'll give that one the prize.'"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I wish you brought it here with you," said her daughter, "as weighty
+as it was."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They put <I>me</I> judging the row-boats," said Dr. Hickey, "but after the
+third race I had to give up, and put five stitches in one of the men
+that was in the mark-boat."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I said that the mark-boat ought to have been a fairly safe place.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Safe!" said Dr. Hickey.  "It was the hottest corner in the course.  I
+thought they were sunk twice, but they might have been all right if
+they hadn't out-oars and joined in the race on the second round.  They
+got in first, as it happened, and it was in the course of the protest
+that I had to put in the stitches.  It was a good day's sport, as far
+as it went."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Ah, there's no life in a Regatta without a band," said Miss M'Evoy
+languidly, with her elbows on the table and her cup in her hand.  "Now
+Ringsend Regatta's sweet!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm afraid Miss M'Evoy didn't enjoy herself to-day," said Dr. Hickey.
+"Of course she's used to so much attention in Dublin&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's kind of you to say that," said Miss M'Evoy; "I'm sure you're
+quite an authority on Dublin young ladies."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Is it me?" said Dr. Hickey; "I'd be afraid to say Boo to a goose.  But
+I've a brother that could tell you all about them.  He's not as shy as
+I am."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He must be a great help and comfort to you," returned Miss M'Evoy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He's very romantic," said Dr. Hickey, "and poetical.  He was greatly
+struck with two young ladies he met at the Ringsend Regatta last month.
+He mistook their address, someway, and when he couldn't find them, what
+did he do but put a poem in the papers&mdash;the Agony Column, y'know&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We'd like to hear that," said Mrs. M'Evoy, putting her knife into the
+salt with unhurried dexterity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I forget it all, only the last verse," said Dr. Hickey, "it went this
+way:
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+'You are indeed a charming creature,<BR>
+Perfect alike in form and feature,<BR>
+I love you and none other.<BR>
+Oh, Letitia&mdash;Here's your Mother!'"<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+As Dr. Hickey, his eyes modestly on his plate, concluded the ode, I
+certainly intercepted a peculiar glance between the ladies.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I call that very impident," said Mrs. M'Evoy, winking at me.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It was worth paying a good deal to put that in print!" commented Miss
+M'Evoy unkindly.  "But that was a lovely Regatta," she continued, "and
+the music and the fireworks were grand, but the society's very mixed.
+Do you remember, M'ma, what happened to Mary and me that evening, the
+time we missed you in the dark?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Indeed'n I do," said Mrs. M'Evoy, her eyes still communing with her
+daughter's, "and I remember telling you it was the last evening I'd let
+you out of my sight."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It was a gentleman that picked up my umbrella," began Miss M'Evoy
+artlessly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Dr. Hickey dropped his knife on the floor, and took some time to pick
+it up.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And he passed the remark to me that it was a nice evening," went on
+Miss M'Evoy.  "'It is,' said I.  Now, M'ma, why wouldn't I give him a
+civil answer?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's according to taste," said Mrs. M'Evoy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well indeed I didn't fancy his looks at all.  It was pitch dark only
+for the fireworks, but I thought he had a nasty kind of a foreign look,
+and a little pointed beard on him too.  If you saw the roll of his eye
+when the green fire fell out of the rockets you'd think of
+Mephistopheles&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There's no doubt Mephistopheles was one of Shakespeare's grandest
+creations," said Dr. Hickey hurriedly.  His eyes besought my aid.  It
+struck me that this literary digression was an attempt to change the
+conversation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss M'Evoy resumed her narrative.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'That's a pretty flower you have in your button-hole,' said he.  'It
+is,' said I."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You didn't tell him a great deal he didn't know," said her mother.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Maybe you might give it to me?' said he.  'Maybe I might not!' said
+I.  'And where do you live?' said he.  'Percy Place,' says Mary, before
+you could wink.  Anyone would have to believe her.  'Upon my soul,'
+said he, 'I'll have the pleasure of calling upon you.  Might I ask what
+your name is?'  'O'Rooney,' says Mary, 'and this is my cousin, Miss
+Letitia Gollagher.'  Well, when Mary said 'Gollagher,' I <I>burst!</I>"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss M'Evoy here put down her cup, and to some slight extent repeated
+the operation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I suppose the foreign gentleman told you his own name then?" said Dr.
+Hickey, whose complexion had warmed up remarkably.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He did not," said Miss M'Evoy; "but perhaps that was because he wasn't
+asked, and it was then M'ma came up.  I can tell you he didn't wait to
+be introduced!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I have a sister-in-law living in Percy Place," said Mrs. M'Evoy,
+passing her handkerchief over her brow, and addressing no one in
+particular, "and it was some day last month she was telling me of a
+young man that was knocking at all the doors down the street, and she
+thought he was a Collector of some sort.  He came to her house too, and
+he told the girl he was looking for some ladies of the name of
+Gollagher or O'Rooney."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She paused, and regarded Dr. Hickey.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I wonder did he find them?" asked Dr. Hickey, who was obviously being
+forced on to the ropes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I thought you might be able to tell us that!" said Mrs. M'Evoy,
+delivering her knock-out blow with the suddenness that belongs to the
+highest walks of the art.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss M'Evoy, with equal suddenness, uttered a long and strident yell,
+and lay back in her place, grasping my arm as she did so, in what I am
+convinced was wholly unconscious sympathy.  She and I were side by
+side, facing the window, and through the window, which, as I have
+mentioned, was wide open, I was aware of a new element in the situation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was a figure in blue in the street outside; a soft and familiar
+blue, and it bore a parasol of the same colour.  The figure was at a
+standstill; and very blue, the burning blue of tropical heavens, were
+the eyes that met mine beneath the canopy of the parasol.  Even before
+my own had time to blink I foreknew that never, in time or in eternity,
+should I be able to make Philippa accept thoroughly my explanation.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Philippa's explanation was extremely brief, and was addressed rather to
+the empty street of Carrow Cross than to me, as I crawled by her side.
+There had been, she said, half an hour to wait, and as I was not at the
+station&mdash;the blue eyes met mine for a steely moment&mdash;she had gone for a
+little walk.  She had met some horrid drunken men, and turned into
+another street to avoid them, and then&mdash;&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A brimming silence followed.  We turned up the road that led to the
+station.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There are those men again!" exclaimed Philippa, coming a little nearer
+to me.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In front of us, deviously ascending the long slope, was the Asylum
+party; the keepers, exceedingly drunk, being assisted to the station by
+the Lunatics.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap08"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="t3b">
+VIII
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="t4b">
+THE BOSOM OF THE McRORYS
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Since the day when fate had shipwrecked us at the end of the Temple
+Braney shrubbery, and flung us, dripping, into the bosoms of the
+McRorys, we had been the victims of an indissoluble friendship with the
+family.  This fulfilled itself in many ways.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Gratitude, what is known as Common Gratitude (which is merely a hollow
+compliance with the voice of conscience), impelled us to lunch Mr. and
+Mrs. McRory, heavily and elaborately (but without any one to meet
+them); to invite the whole family to a lawn-tennis party (and the whole
+family came); and, at other people's tennis parties, to fawn upon them
+(when it was no longer possible to elude them).  It was a despicable
+position, and had I at all foreseen, when the picnic sank at Temple
+Braney pier, that the result would have been dinner-parties, I should
+unhesitatingly have left Philippa to drown.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The intimacies imposed by Common Gratitude had, under the healing hand
+of time, become less acute, and might, indeed, have ceased to affect
+us, had not fate again intervened, and cemented the family friendship
+in the most public way possible.  There befell a Harvest Festival in
+Skebawn Church, with a Bishop, and an Anthem, and a special collection.
+To it the McRorys, forsaking their own place of worship, came in power,
+and my wife, very superfluously, indicated to Mrs. McRory a seat in our
+pew.  The pew is a front one, and Mrs. McRory became at once a
+figure-head to the rest of the congregation&mdash;a buxom figure-head,
+upholstered tightly in royal blue satin, that paled the ineffectual
+fires of the pulpit dahlias, and shouted in a terrible major chord with
+the sunflowers in the east window.  She creaked mysteriously and
+rhythmically with every breath; a large gold butterfly, poised on an
+invisible spring, quivered and glittered above her bonnet.  It was
+while waiting for the service to begin that Philippa was inspired to
+whisper to Mrs McRory some information, quite immaterial, connected
+with the hymns.  The next moment I perceived that Mrs. McRory's
+butterfly had fixed its antennæ into some adjunct of my wife's hat that
+was at once diaphanous and sinewy, with the result that the heads of
+the two ladies were locked together.  A silent struggle ensued; the
+butterfly's grappling-irons held, so also did the hat-trimming, and
+Philippa and Mrs. McRory remained brow to brow in what seemed to be a
+prolonged embrace.  At this point Philippa showed signs of collapse;
+she said that Mrs. McRory's nose, glowing like a ruby within two inches
+of her own, made her hysterical.  I affected unconsciousness, while my
+soul thirsted for an axe with which to decapitate one or both of the
+combatants, and subsequently to run amok among the congregation, now,
+as the poet says, "abashlessly abandoned to delight."  The butterfly's
+vitals slowly uncoiled, and were drawn out into a single yet
+indomitable strand of gold wire; the Bishop was imminent, when a female
+McRory in the pew behind (known to the Fancy as "Larkie") intervened
+with what were, I believe, a pair of manicure scissors, and the
+incident closed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was clear that our blood-brotherhood with the McRorys was
+foreordained and predestined.  We evaded two invitations to dinner, but
+a third was inescapable, even though an alarming intimacy was
+foreshadowed by the request that we should come "in a very quiet way."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Do they expect us to creep in in tennis shoes?" I demanded.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I think it only means a black tie," said Philippa, with the idea that
+she was soothing me.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If I have to go to a McRory Free-and-Easy, I shall not act as such," I
+returned, slamming myself into my dressing-room, and dragging forth
+ceremonial attire.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As, with a docility that I was far from feeling, I followed my wife
+into the drawing-room at Temple Braney, and surveyed the semicircle of
+McRorys and unknown notabilities (summarised as "Friends from Dublin")
+that silently awaited us, I felt that neither freedom nor ease would be
+my lot.  But few things in life are quite as bad as one expects them to
+be&mdash;always excepting sea-sickness.  In its dreary circuit of the room,
+my eye met that of my old friend Miss Bobby Bennett, of the Curranhilty
+Hunt, niece of its Master, and consultant and referee in all its
+affairs.  My friendship with Miss Bennett was of an ideal nature; when
+we met, which was seldom, we were delighted to see one another; in the
+intervals we forgot one another with, I felt sure, an equal
+completeness.  Her social orbit was incalculable; she resembled a fox
+of whom I heard an earth-stopper say that you "couldn't tell any
+certain place where he wouldn't puck out."  Whether it was at
+Punchestown, or at a Skebawn Parish tea, or judging cakes and crochet
+at an Agricultural Show, wherever she appeared it was with the same air
+of being on top of the situation and of extracting the utmost from it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To me befell the onerous task of taking the Lady of the House in to
+dinner, but upon my other hand sat Miss Bennett (squired by a Friend
+from Dublin of apparently negligible quality), and before I had
+recovered from the soup&mdash;a hell-broth of liquid mustard that called
+itself mulligatawny&mdash;I found that to concentrate upon her was no more
+than was expected of me by both ladies.  Mrs. McRory's energies were
+indeed fully engrossed by the marshalling of a drove of heated females,
+who hurried stertorously and spasmodically round the table, driven as
+leaves before the wind by fierce signals from their trainer.  Opposite
+to me sat that daughter of the house whose manicure scissors had
+terminated the painful episode of the butterfly.  I had always
+maintained that she was the prettiest of the McRorys, and it was
+evident that Irving, the new District Inspector of R.I.C., who sat
+beside her, shared my opinion.  He was a serious, lanky young man, and
+at such moments as he found himself deprived of Miss McRory's exclusive
+attention, he accepted no alternative, and devoted himself austerely to
+his food.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss Bennett's intention was, I presently discovered, to hunt with
+Flurry Knox's hounds on the following day: she had brought over a
+horse, and it became clear to me that her secondary intention was to
+return without it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Larkie McRory's going to take up hunting," she said in her low swift
+voice.  "The new D.I. hunts, you know."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss Bennett's astute grey eyes rested upon the young lady in question,
+and returned to me laden with inference.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He's got a horse from a farmer for her to ride to-morrow&mdash;goodness
+knows what sort of a brute it is!&mdash;I hope she won't break her neck.
+She's the best of the lot.  If the old man had sense he'd buy my mare
+for her&mdash;he's full of money&mdash;and I'd let her go cheap, too, as I have a
+young one coming on."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is worthy of mention that I have never known Miss Bennett's stable
+composed of anything save old ones to go cheap and young ones coming
+on.  I asked her what she would give me if I didn't tell Mr. McRory
+that her mare was touched in the wind.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'll give you in charge for defamation of character," replied Miss
+Bennett, with speed comparable only to the dart of an ant-eater's
+tongue.  "Anything else you'd like to know?  But look at Larkie now, I
+ask of you!  Quick!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I did as desired, and was fortunate enough to see Miss McRory in the
+act of putting a spoonful of salt in Mr. Irving's champagne, what time
+he was engaged in repulsing one of Mrs. McRory's band of flaming
+ministers, who, with head averted in consultation with a collaborator,
+was continuously offering him melted butter, regardless of the fact
+that he had, at the moment, nothing in front of him but the tablecloth.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There's Miss Larkie's Dublin manners for you," said Miss Bennett, and
+passed on to other themes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I should say theme, because, speaking broadly, Miss Bennett had but
+one, and all roads sooner or later led to it.  During the slow progress
+of the meal I was brought up to date in the inner gossip of the
+Curranhilty country.  I learned that Mrs. Albert Dougherty had taken to
+riding astride because she thought it was smart, and it was nothing but
+the grab she got of the noseband that saved her from coming off every
+time she came down a drop.  I asked for that Mr. Tomsy Flood whose
+career had twice, at vital points, been intersected by me.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Ah, poor Tomsy!  He took to this, y'know," Miss Bennett slightly
+jerked her little finger, "and he wouldn't ride a donkey over a sod of
+turf.  They sent him out to South Africa, to an ostrich farm, and when
+the people found he couldn't ride they put him to bed with a setting of
+ostrich eggs to keep them warm, and he did that grand, till some one
+gave him a bottle of whisky, and he got rather lively and broke all the
+eggs.  They say it's a lay-preacher he's going to be now!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Across a dish of potatoes, thrust at me for the fourth time, I told
+Miss Bennett that it was all her fault, and that she had been very
+unkind to Tomsy Flood.  Miss Bennett gave me a look that showed me what
+she still could do if she liked, and replied that she supposed I was
+sorry that she hadn't gone to South Africa with him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I suppose we'll all be going there soon," she went on.  "Uncle says if
+Home Rule comes there won't be a fox or a Protestant left in Ireland in
+ten years' time; and he said, what's more, that if <I>he</I> had to choose
+it mightn't be the Protestants he'd keep!  But that was because the
+Dissenting Minister's wife sent in a claim of five pounds to the Fowl
+Fund, and said she'd put down poison if she didn't get it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Not thus did Philippa and old McRory, at their end of the table, fleet
+the time away.  Old McRory, as far as I could judge, spoke not at all,
+but played tunes with his fingers on the tablecloth, or preoccupied
+himself with what seemed to be an endeavour to plait his beard into a
+point.  On my wife's other hand was an unknown gentleman, with rosy
+cheeks, a raven moustache, and a bald head, who was kind enough to
+solace her isolation with facetious stories, garnished with free and
+varied gestures with his knife, suggestive of sword-practice, all
+concluding alike in convulsive tenor laughter.  I was aware, not
+unpleasantly, that Philippa was bearing the brunt of the McRory
+bean-feast.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When at length my wife's release was earned, and the ladies had rustled
+from the room in her wake, with all the conscious majesty of the Mantle
+Department, I attempted some conversation with my host, but found that
+it was more considerate to leave him to devour unmolested the
+crystallised fruits and chocolates that were not, I felt quite sure,
+provided by Mrs. McRory for the Master of the House.  I retired upon
+the D.I., my opinion of whom had risen since I saw him swallow his
+salted champagne without a change of countenance.  That he addressed me
+as "Sir" was painful, but at about my age these shocks have to be
+expected, and are in the same category as lumbago, and what my dentist
+delicately alludes to as "dentures."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The young District Inspector of Irish Constabulary has wisdom beyond
+his years: we talked profoundly of the state of the country until the
+small voice of old McRory interrupted us.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Major," it said, "if you have enough drink taken we might join the
+ladies."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Most of the other gallants had already preceded us, and as I crossed
+the hall I heard the measured pounding of a waltz on the piano: it
+created an impulse, almost as uncontrollable as that of Spurius Lartius
+and Herminius, to dart back to the dining-room.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's the way with them every night," said old McRory
+dispassionately.  "They mightn't go to bed now at all."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Old McRory had a shadowy and imperceptible quality that is not unusual
+in small fathers of large families; it always struck me that he
+understood very thoroughly the privileges of the neglected, and pursued
+an unnoticed, peaceful, and observant path of his own in the
+background.  I watched him creep away in his furtive, stupefied manner,
+like a partly-chloroformed ferret.  "'Oh, well is thee, thou art
+asleep!'&mdash;or soon will be," I said to myself, as I turned my back on
+him and faced the music.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I was immediately gratified by the spectacle of Philippa, clasped to
+the heart of the gentleman who had been kind to her at dinner, and
+moving with him in slow and crab-like sidlings round the carpet.  Her
+eyes met mine with passionate appeal; they reminded me of those of her
+own fox-terrier, Minx, when compelled to waltz with my younger son.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The furniture and the elder ladies had been piled up in corners, and
+the dancing element had been reinforced by a gang of lesser McRorys and
+their congeners, beings who had not been deemed worthy of a place at
+the high table.  Immured behind the upright piano sat Mrs. McRory,
+thumping out the time-honoured "Blue Danube" with the plodding rhythm
+of the omnibus horse.  I furtively looked at my watch; we had dined at
+7.30, and it was now but a quarter to ten o'clock.  Not for half an
+hour could we in decency withdraw, and, finding myself at the moment
+beside Miss Larkie McRory, it seemed to me that I could do no less than
+invite her to take the carpet with me.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I am aware that my dancing is that of ten years ago, which places it in
+the same scrap-heap class as a battleship of that date, but Miss McRory
+told me that she preferred it, and that it exactly suited her step.  It
+would be as easy to describe the way of a bird in the air as to define
+Miss McRory's step; scrap-heap or no, it made me feel that I walked the
+carpet like a thing of life.  We were occasionally wrecked upon reefs
+of huddled furniture, and we sustained a collision or two of first-rate
+magnitude: after these episodes my partner imperceptibly steered me to
+a corner, in which I leaned heavily against whatever was most stable,
+and tried to ignore the fact that the floor was rocking and the walls
+were waving, and that it was at least two years since I had exceeded in
+this way.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was in one of these intervals that Miss McRory told me that she was
+going hunting next day, and that he&mdash;her long hazel-grey eyes indicated
+Mr. Irving, now slowly and showily moving a partner about the room&mdash;had
+got a horse for her to ride, and she had never hunted before.  She
+hoped to goodness she wouldn't fall off, and (here she dealt me the
+fraction of a glance) she hoped I'd pick her up now and again.  I said
+that the two wishes were incompatible, to which she replied that she
+didn't know what incompatible meant; and I told her to ask Mr. Irving
+whether he had found that salt and champagne were compatible.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I thought you only wore that old eyeglass for show," replied Miss
+McRory softly, and again looked up at me from under her upcurled Irish
+eyelashes; "it was out of spite he drank it!  A girl did that to my
+brother Curly at a dance, and he poured it down her back."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I think Mr. Irving treated you better than you deserved," I replied
+paternally, adventuring once more into the tide of dancers.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When, some five minutes afterwards, I resigned my partner to Irving
+D.I., I felt that honour had been satisfied, and that it was now
+possible to leave the revel.  But in this I found that I had reckoned,
+not so much without my host, as without my fellow-guest.  Philippa, to
+my just indignation, had blossomed into the success of the evening.
+Having disposed of the kind-hearted gentleman (with the pink cheeks and
+the black moustache), she was immediately claimed by Mr. De Lacey
+McRory, the eldest son of the house, and with him exhibited a
+proficiency in the latest variant of the waltz that she had hitherto
+concealed from me.  The music, like the unseen orchestra of a
+merry-go-round, was practically continuous.  Scuffles took place at
+intervals behind the upright piano, during which music-books fell
+heavily upon the keys, and one gathered that a change of artist was
+taking place, but the fundamental banging of the bass was maintained,
+and the dancing ceased not.  The efforts of the musicians were
+presently reinforced by a young lady in blue, who supplied a shrill and
+gibbering <I>obligato</I> upon a beribboned mandoline, and even, at some
+passionate moments, added her voice to the <I>ensemble</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Will this go on much longer?" I asked of Miss Bennett, with whom I had
+withdrawn to the asylum of a bow window.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"D'ye mean Miss Cooney O'Rattigan and her mandoline?" replied Miss
+Bennett.  "I can tell you it was twice worse this afternoon when she
+was singing Italian to it.  I never stayed here before, and please
+goodness I never will again; the wardrobe in my room is crammed with
+Mrs. McRory's summer clothes, and the chest of drawers is full of
+apples!  Ah, but after all," went on Miss Bennett largely, "what can
+you expect from a cob but a kick?  Didn't Tomsy Flood find a collection
+of empty soda-water bottles in his bed the time he stayed here for the
+wedding, when you found him stitched up in the feather bed!"
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-214"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-214.jpg" ALT="Miss Cooney O'Rattigan." BORDER="2">
+<H4 CLASS="h4center">
+Miss Cooney O'Rattigan.
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+I said that the soda-water bottles had probably prepared him for the
+ostrich eggs, and Miss Bennett asked me if it were true that I had once
+found a nest of young mice in the foot of my bed at Aussolas, because
+that was the story she had heard.  I was able to assure her that, on
+the contrary, it had been kittens, and passing from these pleasing
+reminiscences I asked her to come forth and smoke a cigarette in the
+hall with me, as a preliminary to a farther advance in the direction of
+the motor.  I have a sincere regard for Miss Bennett, but her dancing
+is a serious matter, with a Cromwellian quality in it, suggestive of
+jack boots and the march of great events.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The cigarettes were consolatory, and the two basket-chairs by the fire
+in the back-hall were sufficiently comfortable; but the prospect of
+home burned like a beacon before me.  The clock struck eleven.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They're only beginning now!" said Miss Bennett, interpreting without
+resentment my glance at it.  "Last night it was near one o'clock in the
+morning when they had high tea, and then they took to singing songs,
+and playing 'Are you there, Mike?' and cock-fighting."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I rose hastily, and began to search for my overcoat and cap, prepared
+to plunge into the frosty night, when Miss Bennett offered to show me a
+short way through the house to the stableyard, where I had left the car.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I slipped out that way after dinner," she said, picking up a fur-lined
+cloak and wrapping it about her.  "I wanted to make sure the mare had a
+second rug on her this cold night."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I followed Miss Bennett through a wheezy swing-door; a flagged passage
+stretched like a tunnel before us, lighted by a solitary candle planted
+in its own grease in a window.  A long battle-line of bicycles occupied
+one side of the passage; there were doors, padlocked and cobwebbed, on
+the other.  A ragged baize door at the end of the tunnel opened into
+darkness that smelt of rat-holes, and was patched by a square or two of
+moonlight.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"This is a sort of a lobby," said Miss Bennett.  "Mind!  There's a
+mangle there&mdash;and there are oars on the floor somewhere&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As she spoke I was aware of a distant humming noise, like bees in a
+chimney.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That sounds uncommonly like a motor," I said.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's only the boiler," replied Miss Bennett; "we're at the back of
+the kitchen here."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She advanced with confidence, and flung open a door.  A most startling
+vista was revealed, of a lighted room with several beds in it.
+Children's faces, swelled and scarlet, loomed at us from the pillows,
+and an old woman, with bare feet and a shawl over her head, stood
+transfixed, with a kettle in one hand and a tumbler in the other.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss Bennett swiftly closed the door upon the vision.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"My gracious heavens!" she whispered, "what on earth children are
+those?  I'm sure it's mumps they have, whoever they are.  And how
+secret the McRorys kept it!&mdash;and did you see it was punch the old woman
+was giving them?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We might have asked her the way to the yard," I said, inwardly
+resolving to tell Philippa it was scarlatina; "and she might have given
+us a light."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It was this door I should have tried," said my guide, opening another
+with considerable circumspection.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Sounds of hilarity immediately travelled to us along a passage; I
+followed Miss Bennett, feeling much as if I were being led by a
+detective into Chinatown, San Francisco.  A square of light in the wall
+indicated one of those inner windows that are supposed to give light
+mutually to room and passage, and are, as a matter of fact, an
+architect's confession of defeat.  Farther on a door was open, and
+screams of laughter and singing proceeded from it.  I admit, without
+hesitation, that we looked in at the window, and thus obtained a full
+and sufficient view of the <I>vie intime</I> of the Temple Braney kitchen.
+A fat female, obviously the cook, was seated in the midst of a
+remarkably lively crowd of fellow-retainers and camp-followers,
+thumping with massive knuckles on a frying-pan, as though it were a
+banjo, and squalling to it something in an unknown tongue.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"She's taking off Miss Cooney O'Rattigan!" hissed Miss Bennett, in
+ecstasy.  "She's singing Italian, by way of!  And look at those two
+brats of boys, Vincent and Harold, that should have been in their beds
+two hours ago!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Masters Vincent and Harold McRory were having the time of their lives.
+One of them, seated on the table, was shovelling tipsy-cake into his
+ample mouth with a kitchen spoon; the other was smoking a cigarette,
+and capering to the squalls of the cook.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As noiselessly as two bats Miss Bennett and I flitted past the open
+door, but a silence fell with a unanimity that would have done credit
+to any orchestra.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They saw us," said Miss Bennett, scudding on, "but we'll not tell on
+them&mdash;the creatures!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+An icy draught apprised us of an open door, and through it we escaped
+at length from the nightmare purlieus of the house into the yard, an
+immense quadrangle, where moonlight and black shadows opposed one
+another in a silence that was as severe as they.  Temple Braney House
+and its yard dated from what may be called the Stone Age in Ireland,
+about the middle of the eighteenth century, when money was plenty and
+labour cheap, and the Barons of Temple Braney, now existent only in
+guidebooks, built, as they lived, on the generous scale.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We crossed the yard to the coach-house in which I had left my motor:
+its tall arched doorway was like the mouth of a cave, and I struck a
+match.  It illuminated a mowing-machine, a motor-bicycle, and a flying
+cat.  But not my car.  The first moment of bewilderment was closed by
+the burning of my fingers by the match.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Are you sure it was here you left it?" said Miss Bennett, with a
+fatuity of which I had not believed her capable.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The presence of a lady was no doubt a salutary restraint, but as I went
+forth into the yard again, I felt as though the things I had to leave
+unsaid would break out all over me like prickly heat.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's the medical student one," said Miss Bennett with certainty, "the
+one that owns the motor-bike."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The yard and the moonlight did not receive this statement with a more
+profound silence than I.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm sure he won't do it any harm," she went on, making the elementary
+mistake of applying superficial salves to a wound whose depths she was
+incapable of estimating.  "He's very good about machinery&mdash;maybe it's
+only round to the front door he took it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As Miss Bennett offered these consolations I saw two small figures
+creep from the shadows of the house.  Their white collars shone in the
+moonlight, and, recognising them as the youngest members of the
+inveterate clan of McRory, I hailed them in a roar that revealed very
+effectively the extent of my indignation.  It did not surprise me that
+the pair, in response to this, darted out of the yard gate with the
+speed of a pair of minnows in a stream.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I pursued, not with any hope of overtaking them, but because they were
+the only clue available, and in my wake, over the frosty ground, in her
+satin shoes, followed that sound sportswoman, Miss Bennett.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The route from the stable-yard to the front of Temple Braney House is a
+long and circuitous one, that skirts a plantation of evergreens.  At
+the first bend the moonlight displayed the track of a tyre in the
+grass; at the next bend, where the edge was higher, a similar economy
+of curve had been effected, and that the incident had been of a fairly
+momentous nature was suggested by the circumstance that the tail lamp
+was lying in the middle of the drive.  It was as I picked it up that I
+heard a familiar humming in the vicinity of the hall door.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He didn't go so far, after all," said Miss Bennett, somewhat blown,
+but holding her own, in spite of the satin shoes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I turned the last corner at a high rate of speed, and saw the dignified
+Georgian façade of the house, pale and placid in the moonlight; through
+the open hall door a shaft of yellow light fell on the ground.  The car
+was nowhere to be seen, yet somewhere, close at hand, the engine
+throbbed and drummed to me,&mdash;a <I>cri de coeur</I>, as I felt it, calling to
+me through the accursed jingle of the piano that proceeded from the
+open door.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Where the devil&mdash;&mdash;?" I began.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Even as I spoke I descried the car.  It was engaged, apparently, in
+forcing its way into the shrubbery that screened one end of the house.
+The bonnet was buried in a holly bush, the engine was working, slowly
+but industriously.  The lamps were not lighted, and there was no one in
+it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Those two imps made good use of their legs, never fear them!" puffed
+Miss Bennett; "the 'cuteness of them&mdash;cutting away to warn the brother!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What's this confounded thing?" I said fiercely, snatching at something
+that was caught in the handle of the brake.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss Bennett snatched it in her turn, and held it up in the moonlight,
+while I stilled the fever of the engine.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Dublin for ever!" she exclaimed.  "What is it but the streamers of
+Miss Cooney's mandoline!  There's the spoils of war for you!  And it's
+all the spoils you'll get&mdash;the whole pack of them's hid in the house by
+now!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+From an unlighted window over the hall door a voice added itself to the
+conversation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"God help the house that holds them!" it said, addressing the universe.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The window was closed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's old McRory!" said Miss Bennett in a horrified whisper.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Again I thought of Chinatown, sleepless, incalculable, with its
+infinite capacity for sheltering the criminal.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"&mdash;But, darling," said Philippa, some quarter of an hour later, as we
+proceeded down the avenue in the vaulted darkness of the beech-trees
+(and I at once realised that she had undertaken the case for the
+defence), "you've no reason to suppose that they took the car any
+farther than the hall door."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It is the last time that it will be taken to <I>that</I> hall door," I
+replied, going dead slow, with my head over the side of the car,
+listening to unfamiliar sounds in its interior&mdash;sounds that did not
+suggest health.  "I should like to know how many of your young friends
+went on the trip&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"My dear boy," said Philippa pityingly, "I ask you if it is likely that
+there would have been more than two, when one of them was the lady with
+the mandoline!  And," she proceeded with cat-like sweetness, "I did not
+perceive that you took a party with you when you retired to the hall
+with your old friend Miss Bennett, and left me to cope single-handed
+with the mob for about an hour!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Whether there were two or twenty-two of them in the car," I said,
+treating this red herring with suitable contempt, "I've done with your
+McRorys."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I was, very appropriately, in the act of passing through the Temple
+Braney entrance gates as I made this pronouncement, and it was the
+climax of many outrages that the steering-gear, shaken by heaven knows
+what impacts and brutalities, should suddenly have played me false.
+The car swerved in her course&mdash;fortunately a slow one&mdash;and laid her
+bonnet impulsively against the Temple Braney gate pillar, as against a
+loved one's shoulder.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As we regained our composure, two tall forms appeared in the light of
+the head lamps, and one of them held up his hand.  I recognised a
+police patrol.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's the car right enough," said one of them.  He advanced to my
+side.  "I want your name, please.  I summons you for furious driving on
+the high road, without lights, a while ago, and refusing to stop when
+called on to do so.  Go round and take the number, M'Caffery."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+When, a few days later, the story flowed over and ran about the
+country, some things that were both new and interesting came to my ears.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Flurry Knox said that Bobby Bennett had sold me her old mare by
+moonlight in the Temple Braney yard, and it was a great credit to old
+McRory's champagne.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mrs. Knox, of Aussolas, was told that I had taken Mrs. McRory for a run
+in the car at one o'clock in the morning, and on hearing it said "De
+gustibus non est disputandum."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Some one, unknown, repeated this to Mrs. McRory, and told her that it
+meant "You cannot touch pitch without being disgusted."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mrs. Cadogan, my cook, reported to Philippa that the boy who drove the
+bread-cart said that it was what the people on the roads were saying
+that the Major was to be fined ten pounds; to which Mrs. Cadogan had
+replied that it was a pity the Major ever stood in Temple Braney, but
+she supposed that was laid out for him by the Lord.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap09"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="t3b">
+IX
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="t4b">
+PUT DOWN ONE AND CARRY TWO
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The promise of that still and moonlit December night, wherein we had
+bean-feasted with the McRorys, was shamelessly broken.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The weather next morning was a welter of wind and mist, with rain flung
+in at intervals.  The golden fox on the stable weathercock was not at
+peace for a moment, facing all the southern points of the compass as if
+they were hounds that held it at bay.  For my part, I do not know why
+people go out hunting on such days, unless it be for the reason that
+many people go to church, to set an example to others.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Philippa said she went because she had done her hair for riding before
+she could see out of the window&mdash;a fiction beneath the notice of any
+intelligent husband.  I went because I had told my new groom, Wilson
+(an English disciplinarian), that I was going, and I was therefore
+caught in the cogs of the inexorable wheel of stable routine.  I also
+went because I nourished a faint hope that I might be able to place
+before the general public, and especially before Flurry Knox, an
+authentic first version of the McRory episode.  Moreover, I had a
+headache; but this I was not going to mention, knowing that the sun
+never sets upon the jests consecrated to after-dinner headaches.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As we rode away from Shreelane, and felt the thick small rain in our
+faces, and saw the spray blown off the puddles by the wind, and heard
+the sea-gulls, five miles inland, squealing in the mist overhead, I
+said that it was preposterous to think of hunting at Lonen Hill in such
+weather, and that I was going home.  Philippa said that we might as
+well go on to the meet, to exercise the horses, and that we could then
+come straight home.  (I have a sister who has said that I am a lath
+painted to look like iron, and that Philippa is iron painted to look
+like a lath.)
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The meet was in shelter, the generous shelter of Lonen Hill, which
+interposed itself between us and the weather.  There is just space for
+the road, between the shore of Lough Lonen and the southern face of the
+hill, that runs precipitously up into the sky for some six hundred
+feet, dark with fir-trees, and heather, and furze, fortified with
+rock&mdash;a place renowned as a fastness for foxes and woodcock (whose
+fancies as to desirable winter residences generally coincide).  One
+would have thought that only a pack of monkeys could deal with such a
+covert, but hounds went through it, and so did beaters&mdash;or said they
+did.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We found the hounds waiting in an old quarry under the side of the
+hill, and, a little farther on, a very small and select company of
+waterproofs was huddled under the branches of a fir-tree that hung over
+the road.  As we neared them I recognised Miss Bennett's firm and
+capable back: she was riding the black mare that she had come over to
+"pass on" to old McRory.  It was Philippa who pointed out that she was
+accompanied by Miss Larkie McRory, seated on a stout and shaggy animal,
+whose grey hindquarters were draped by the folds of its rider's
+voluminous black macintosh, in a manner that recalled the historic
+statue of the Iron Duke.  Farther on, Mrs. Flurry and her mother, the
+redoubtable Lady Knox, were getting out of a motor and getting
+themselves on to their horses.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There's room under the umbrella for Mrs. Yeates!" called out Miss
+Bennett hospitably, "but the Major must find one for himself, and a
+very big one, too!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We could make room for him here," said Miss Larkie McRory, "if he
+liked to come."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I maintained, I hope, an imperturbable demeanour, and passed on.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Who is that?" said Lady Knox, approaching me, on her large and
+competent iron grey.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I informed her, briefly, and without prejudice.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, one of that crew," said Lady Knox, without further comment.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Lady Knox is not noted for receptive sympathy, yet this simple
+statement indicated so pleasingly our oneness of soul in the matter of
+the McRorys, that I was on the verge of flinging overboard the
+gentlemanlike scruples proper to a guest, and giving her the full
+details of last night's revel.  At this moment, however, her son-in-law
+came forth from the quarry with his hounds, and his coadjutors, Dr.
+Hickey and Michael, and moved past us.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yeates!" he called out, "I'd be obliged to you if you'd take that
+point up on the hill, on the down-wind side, where he often breaks."
+He looked at me with a serious, friendly face.  "He won't break <I>down</I>,
+you know&mdash;it's only motors do that."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This witticism, concocted, no doubt, in the seclusion of the quarry,
+called for no reply on my part&mdash;(or, to be accurate, no suitable reply
+presented itself).  There was an undoubted titter among the
+waterproofs; I moved away upon my mission at a dignified trot: a trot
+is seldom dignified, but Daniel has dignity enough for himself and his
+rider.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Daniel stands sixteen hands two inches in his stockings, of which he
+wears one white one, the rest of his enormous body being of that
+unlovely bluish-dun colour to which a dark bay horse turns when
+clipped.  His best friend could not deny that he "made a noise"; his
+worst enemy was fain to admit that he was glad to hear it in front of
+him at a nasty place.  Some one said that he was like a Settled
+Religious Faith, and no lesser simile conveys the restful certainty
+imparted by him.  It was annoying, no doubt, to hear people say, after
+I had accomplished feats of considerable valour, that that horse
+couldn't make a mistake, and a baby could ride him; but these were mere
+chastenings, negligible to the possessor of a Settled Religious Faith.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I trotted on through the rain, up a steep road seamed with
+watercourses, with Lonen Hill towering on my left, and a lesser hill on
+my right.  Looking back, I saw Flurry dismount, give his horse to a
+boy, and clamber on to the wall of the road: he dropped into the wood,
+and the hounds swarmed over after him, looking like midgets beside the
+tremendous citadel that they were to attack.  Hickey and Michael,
+equally dwarfed by the immensities of the position, were already
+betaking themselves through the mist to their allotted outposts in
+space.  Five-and-twenty couple of hounds would have been little enough
+for that great hill-side; Flurry had fifteen, and with them he began
+his tough struggle through the covert, a solitary spot of red among
+pine-stems, and heather, and rocks, cheering his fifteen couple with
+horn and voice, while he climbed up and up by devious ways, seemingly
+as marvellously endowed with wind as the day itself.  I cantered on
+till, at the point where the wood ended, it became my melancholy duty
+to leave the road and enter upon the assault of the hill.  I turned in
+at a gap beside the guardian thorn-bush of a holy well, on whose
+branches votive rags fluttered in the wind, and addressed Daniel to his
+task of carrying thirteen stone up an incline approximating to a rise
+of one in three.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A path with the angles of a flash of lightning indicated the views of
+the local cow as to the best method of dealing with the situation.
+Daniel and I accepted this, as we had done more than once before, and
+we laboured upwards, parallel with the covert, while the wind, heavy
+with mist, came down to meet us, and shoved against us like a living
+thing.  We gained at length a shelf on the hill-side, and halting there
+in the shelter of a furzy hummock, I applied myself to my job.  From
+the shelf I commanded a long stretch of the boundary wall of the wood,
+including a certain gap which was always worthy of special attention,
+and for a quarter of an hour I bent a zealous and travelling gaze upon
+the wall, with the concentration of a professor of a Higher Thought
+Society.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As is not unusual in such cases, nothing happened.  At rare intervals a
+hint of the cry of hounds was carried in the wind, evanescent as a
+whiff from a summer garden.  Once or twice it seemed to swing towards
+me, and at such moments the concentration of my eyeglass upon the gap
+was of such intensity that had the fox appeared I am confident that he
+would instantly have fallen into a hypnotic trance.  As time wore on I
+arrived at the stage of obsession, when the music of the hounds and the
+touches of the horn seemed to be in everything, the wind, the streams,
+the tree branches, and I could almost have sworn hounds were away and
+running hard, until some vagrant voice in the wood would dispel the
+mirage of sound.  This was followed by the reactionary period of
+pessimism, when I seemed to myself merely an imbecile, sitting in heavy
+rain, staring at a stone wall.  Half an hour, or more, passed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm going out of this," I said to myself defiantly; "there's reason in
+the roasting of eggs."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It seemed, however, my duty to go up rather than down, and I coerced
+Daniel into the bed of a stream, as offering the best going available.
+It led me into a cleft between the hill-side and the wall of the
+covert, which latter was, like a thing in a fairy tale, changing very
+gradually from a wall into a bank.  I ascended the cleft, and presently
+found that it, too, was changing its nature, and becoming a flight of
+stairs.  Daniel clattered slowly and carefully up them, basing his
+feet, like Sir Bedivere, on "juts of slippery crag that rang
+sharp-smitten with the dint of arméd heels."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We had reached the top in safety when I heard a thin and wavering
+squeal behind me, and looking back saw Miss Larkie McRory ascending the
+rocky staircase on the grey cob, at a speed that had obviously, and
+legitimately, drawn forth the squeal.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, gracious!  The brute!  I can't stop him!" she cried as she rushed
+upon me.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The grey cob here bumped into Daniel's massive stern, rebounded, and
+subsided, for the excellent reason that no other course was open to it.
+Miss McRory's reins were clutched in a looped confusion, that summoned
+from some corner of my brain a memory of the Sultan's cipher on the
+Order of the Medjidie: her hat was hanging down her back, and there was
+a picturesqueness about her hair that promised disaster later on.  Her
+hazel eyes shone, and her complexion glowed like a rose in rain.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Mr. Irving's fit to be tied!" she continued.  "His horse jumped about
+like a mad thing when he saw those awful steps&mdash;&mdash;!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Sounds of conflict and clattering came from below.  I splashed onwards
+in the trough between the hill and the fence, and had emerged into a
+comparatively open space with my closely attendant McRory, when the
+impassioned face of Mr. Irving's Meath mare shot into view at the top
+of the steps.  The water in the trough was apparently for her the limit
+of what should or could be endured.  She made a crooked spring at the
+hill-side, slipped, and, recognising the bank as the one civilised
+feature in a barbarous country, bounced sideways on to the top of it,
+pivoted there, and sat down backwards into a thicket of young ash and
+hazel trees.  A succession of short yells from Miss McRory acclaimed
+each phase of the incident; Mr. Irving's face, as he settled down
+amongst the branches, was as a book where men might read strange
+matters, not of an improving nature.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was probably the reception accorded to the bay mare by the branches
+and briars in which she had seated herself that caused her to return to
+the top of the bank in a kangaroo-bound, as active as it was
+unexpected.  Horses can do these things when they choose, but they
+seldom choose.  From the top of the bank she dropped into the trough,
+and joined us, with her nerves still in a state of acute indignation,
+and less of her rider in the saddle than is conventional, but a dinge
+in his pot-hat appeared to be the extent of the damage.  Miss McRory's
+eye travelled from it to me, but she abstained from comment.  It was
+the eye of a villain and a conspirator.  I had by no means forgotten
+the injuries inflicted on me by her brothers, nor did I forget that
+Flurry had said that there wasn't one of the family but was as clever
+as the devil and four times as unscrupulous.  Yet, taken in conjunction
+with the genuineness of her complexion, and with the fact that Irving
+was probably twenty years my junior, "I couldn't"&mdash;as the song
+says&mdash;"help smiling at McRory O'More" (behind the back of young Mr.
+Irving, D.I.).
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It transpired that Irving, from some point of vantage below, shared, it
+would appear, with Miss McRory, had seen the hounds running out of the
+top of the wood, and had elected to follow me.  He did not know where
+any one was, had not heard a sound of the horn, and gave it as his
+opinion that Flurry was dead, and that trying to hunt in this country
+was simply farcical.  He bellowed these things at me in his
+consequential voice as we struggled up the hill against the immense
+weight of wind, in all the fuss, anxiety, and uncertainty out of which
+the joys of hunting are born.  It was as we topped the ultimate ridge
+that, through the deafening declamations of the wind, I heard, faint as
+a bar of fairy music, distant harmonies as of hounds running.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The wind blew a hole in the mist, and we had a bird's-eye view of a few
+pale-green fields far below: across one of them some pigmy forms were
+moving; they passed over a dark line that represented a fence, and
+proceeded into the heart of a cloud.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's about the limit," shouted Irving, dragging at his mare's mouth,
+as she swerved from a hole in the track.  "It's only in this
+God-forsaken country that a fox'd go away in the teeth of a storm like
+this!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To justify to Mr. Irving the disregard of the Lonen Hill foxes for the
+laws of the game was not my affair.  It seemed to me that in piloting
+him and Miss McRory I was doing rather more than humanity had any right
+to expect.  I have descended Lonen Hill on various occasions, none of
+them agreeable, but never before with an avalanche travelling hard on
+my heels&mdash;a composite avalanche that slid, and rushed, and dropped its
+hind-legs over the edge at bad corners, and was throughout vocal with
+squeals, exclamations, inquiries as to facts of which Providence could
+alone be cognisant, and thunderous with objurgations.  The hill-side
+merged at length into upland pasture, strange little fields, composed
+partly of velvet patches, like putting-greens, predominantly of
+nightmare bunkers of rocks and furze.  We rushed downwards through
+these, at a pace much accelerated by the prevalence of cattle gaps; the
+bay mare, with her head in the air, zigzagging in bounds as
+incalculable as those of a grasshopper; the grey cob, taking sole
+charge of Miss McRory, tobogganing with her hind feet, propping with
+her fore, and tempering her enthusiasm with profound understanding of
+the matter.  Finally, a telegraph-post loomed through the fog upon us,
+and a gate discovered itself, through which we banged in a bunch on to
+the high road.  A cottage faced us, with a couple of women and an old
+man standing outside it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To them we put the usual question, with the usual vehemence (always
+suggestive of the King's Troopers in romance, hotly demanding
+information about a flying rebel).
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I didn't see a fox this long while," replied the old man deliberately,
+"but there was a few jocks went west the road a while ago."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The King's Troopers, not specially enlightened, turned their steeds and
+went in pursuit of the jocks.  A stone gap, flung in ruins among black
+hoof-marks, soon gave a more precise indication, and we left the road,
+with profound dubiety on my part as to where we were going and how we
+were going to get there.  The first fence decided the matter for
+Irving, D.I.  It was a bank on which slices of slatey stone had been
+laid, much as in Germany slabs of cold sausage are laid upon bread.
+The Meath mare looked at it but once, and fled from it at a tangent;
+the grey pony, without looking at it, followed her.  Daniel selected an
+interval between the slabs, and took me over without comment.  Filled
+by a radiant hope that I had shaken off both my companions, I was
+advancing in the line of the hoof-tracks, when once more I heard behind
+me on the wind cries as of a storm-driven sea-gull, and the grey cob
+came up under my stirrup, like a runaway steam pinnace laying itself
+beside a man-o'-war.  Miss McRory was still in the saddle, but minus
+reins and stirrup; the wind had again removed her hat, which was
+following her at full stretch of its string, like a kite.  Had it not
+been for her cries I should have said, judging by her face, that she
+was thoroughly enjoying herself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Having achieved Daniel's society the cob pulled up, and her rider, not
+without assistance from me, restored her hat, reins, and stirrup to
+their proper spheres.  I looked back, and saw Irving's mare, still on
+the farther side of the fence, her nose pointing to the sky, as if
+invoking the protection of heaven, and I knew that for better for worse
+Miss McRory was mine until we reached the high road.  No doubt the
+thing was to be: as one of our own poets has sung of Emer and
+Cuchulain, "all who read my name in Erin's story would find its loving
+letters linked with" those of McRory.  The paraphrase even
+rhymed&mdash;another finger-mark of Fate.  Yet it was hard that, out of all
+the possible, and doubtless eager, squires of the hunting-field I
+should have been chosen.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The hoof-tracks bent through a long succession of open gaps to a
+farmyard, and there were swallowed in the mire of a lane.  I worked the
+lane out for every inch it was worth, with the misty rain pricking my
+face as it were with needles, and the intention to go home at the
+earliest possible opportunity perfecting itself in my heart.  But the
+lane, instead of conducting us to the high road, melted disastrously
+into a turf bog.  I pulled up, and the long steady booming of the sea
+upon the rocks made a deep undertone to the wind.  There was no voice
+of hound or horn, and I was on the point of returning to the farmhouse
+when the mist, in its stagey, purposeful way, again lifted, and laid
+bare the sky-line of a low hill on our left.  A riderless horse was
+limping very slowly along it, led by something that seemed no higher
+than a toadstool.  Obviously we were on the line of the hunt, and
+obviously, also, it was my duty to enquire into the matter of the
+horse.  I turned aside over a low bank, hotly followed by the grey cob,
+and the wail to which I was now becoming inured.  As Miss McRory
+arrived abruptly at my side, she cried that she would have been off
+that time only for the grab she got of his hair.  (By which I believe
+she meant the mare's mane.)
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Fortune favoured us with broken-down fences; we overtook the horse, and
+found it was Flurry Knox's brown mare, hobbling meekly in tow of a very
+small boy.  In one of her hind fetlocks there was a clean, sharp cut
+that might have been done with a knife.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In answer to my questions the small boy pointed ahead.  I polished my
+eyeglass, and, with eyes narrowed against the wind, looked into the
+south-west, and there saw, unexpectedly, even awfully near, the
+Atlantic Ocean, dingy and angry, with a long line, as of battle-smoke,
+marking its assault upon the cliffs.  Between the cliffs and the hill
+on which we were standing a dark plateau, striped with pale grey walls,
+stretched away into the mist.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There's the huntsman for ye," squeaked the little boy, who looked
+about six years old.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I descried at a distance of perhaps a quarter of a mile a figure in a
+red coat, on foot, in the act of surmounting one of the walls,
+accompanied by a hovering flock of country boys.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The dogs is out before him," pursued the little boy at the full pitch
+of his lungs.  "I seen the fox, too.  I'll go bail he has himself
+housed in the Coosheen Grohogue by now."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Gracious!" said Miss McRory.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I said he probably had a simpler telegraphic address, and that, no
+matter where he was, it was now my duty to overtake Mr. Knox and offer
+him my horse; "and you," I added, "had better get this little boy to
+show you the way to the road."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss McRory replied confidently that she'd sooner stay with me.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I said, as well as I remember, that her preference was highly
+flattering, but that she might live to regret it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss McRory answered that she wished I wouldn't be spying at her
+through that old glass of mine; she knew well enough she was a show,
+and her hair was coming down, and she'd as soon trust herself to the
+cat as to that little urchin.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As I made my way downwards over the knife-edged ridges of rock and
+along their intervening boggy furrows, I should myself have been
+grateful for the guidance of the cat.  Even the grey cob accepted the
+matter as serious, and kept the brake hard on, accomplishing the last
+horrid incident of the descent&mdash;a leap from the slant of the hill on to
+the summit of a heathery bank&mdash;without frivolity, even with anxiety.
+We had now arrived at the plateau above the cliffs&mdash;a place of brown,
+low-growing ling, complicated by boggy runnels, and heavily sprinkled
+with round stones.  The mist was blowing in thicker than ever, Flurry
+and his retinue were lost as though they had never been, and the near
+thunder of the breakers, combined with the wind, made an impenetrable
+din round me and Miss McRory.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+After perhaps a mile, in the course of which I got off several times to
+pull down loose walls for the benefit of my companion, I discovered the
+rudiments of a lane, which gradually developed into a narrow but
+indubitable road.  The rain had gone down the back of my neck and into
+my boots: I determined that if Flurry had to finish the run on
+all-fours, I would stick to the lane until it took me to a road.  What
+it took me to was, as might have been foreseen in any County Cork
+bohireen, a pole jammed across it from wall to wall and reinforced by
+furze-bushes&mdash;not a very high pole, but not one easy to remove.  I
+pulled up and looked dubiously from it to Miss McRory.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"D'ye dare me?" she said.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I bet you sixpence you take a toss if you do," I replied firmly,
+preparing to dismount.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Done with you!" said Miss McRory, suddenly smiting the grey cob with a
+venomous little cutting whip (one that probably dated from the sixties,
+and had for a handle an ivory greyhound's head with a plaited silver
+collar round its neck).
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I have seldom seen a pole better and more liberally dealt with, as far
+as the grey cob's share of the transaction went, and seldom, indeed,
+have I seen a rider sail more freely from a saddle than Miss McRory
+sailed.  She alighted on her hands and knees, and the cob, with the
+sting of the whip still enlivening her movements, galloped on up the
+lane and was lost in the mist.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, you won your sixpence," said Miss McRory dauntlessly, as I
+joined her.  "I suppose you're delighted."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I assured her with entire sincerity that I was very much the reverse,
+and proceeded at high speed in pursuit of the cob.  The result of this
+excursion&mdash;a fairly prolonged one&mdash;was the discovery that the lane led
+into a road, and that it was impossible to decide in which direction
+the fugitive had gone.  I returned in profound gloom to my young lady,
+and found her rubbing herself down with a bunch of heather.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"So you couldn't ketch her!" she called out as I approached.  "What'll
+we do now?"  She was evidently highly amused.  "I'll tell the Peeler it
+was your fault.  You dared me!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+My reply need not be recorded: I only know it was by no means up to the
+standard to which Miss McRory was accustomed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I took what seemed to be the only possible course, and established her
+seated sideways on my saddle, with her foot&mdash;and it is but fair to say,
+a very small foot&mdash;in the leather instead of the stirrup, and her right
+hand knotted in Daniel's mane.  I held the off stirrup, and splashed
+beside her in the ruts and mud.  The mist was thicker than ever, the
+wind was pushing it in from the sea in great masses, and Miss McRory
+and I progressed onward in a magic circle of some twenty yards in
+diameter, occupied only by herself and me, with Daniel thrown in as
+chaperon.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+On arriving at the road I relied on the wind for guidance, and turning
+to the right, let it blow us in what was, I trusted, our course.  It
+was by this time past three o'clock, we were at least nine or ten miles
+from home, and one of my boots had begun to rub my heel.  There was
+nothing for it but to keep on as we were going, until we met something,
+or some one, or died.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is worthy of record that in these afflicting circumstances Miss
+Larkie McRory showed a staying power, attained, probably, in the long
+and hungry bicycle picnics of her tribe, that was altogether
+commendable.  Not for an instant did she fail to maintain in me the
+belief that she found me one of the most agreeable people she had ever
+met, a little older, perhaps, than Irving, D.I., but on that very
+account the more to be confided in.  It was not until the pangs of
+hunger recalled to me the existence of my sandwiches that I discovered
+she had no food with her, nor, as far as could be gathered, had she had
+any breakfast.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Sure they were all snoring asleep when I started.  I just got a cup o'
+tea in the kitchen&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This, I suppose, was a point at which I might suitably have said
+something incisive about the feats of her brethren on the previous
+night, but with deplorable weakness I merely offered her my sandwiches.
+Miss McRory replied that she'd fall off in a minute if she were to let
+go the mane, and why wouldn't I eat them myself?  I said if there were
+any shelter left in Ireland I would wait till I got there, and we could
+then decide who should eat them.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Æons of mist and solitude ensued.  I must have walked for an hour or
+more, without meeting anyone except one old woman, who could only speak
+Irish, and I had begun to feel as if my spur were inside my boot
+instead of outside, when I became aware of something familiar about the
+look of the fences.  It was not, however, until I felt shelter rising
+blessedly about us, and saw the thorn bush with the rags hanging from
+it, that I realised that our luck had turned, and we had blundered our
+way back to the holy well under the side of Lonen Hill.  The well was
+like a tiny dripping cave, about as big as a beehive, with a few inches
+of water in it; a great boulder stood guard over it, and above it
+stooped the ancient and twisted thorn bush.  It seemed indicated as a
+place of rest, none the less that my heel was by this time considerably
+galled by my boot.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss McRory glissaded from my saddle into my arms, and was assisted by
+me to deposit herself on a flat stone beside the well, stiff, wet, but
+still undefeated.  We shared my sandwiches, we drank whisky mixed with
+the water of the holy well, and Miss McRory dried her face with her
+handkerchief, and her complexion looked better than ever.  Daniel,
+slowly and deliberately, ate the rags off the thorn bush.  I have been
+at many picnics that I have enjoyed less.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+By the time we had got to the gingerbread biscuits I had discovered
+that Mr. Irving thought she had talked too much to me after dinner last
+night, and that it was a wonder to her how men could be so cross about
+nothing.  I said I was sorry she called it nothing, at which she looked
+up at me and down again at the gingerbread, and did not reply.  After
+this I felt emboldened to ask her why she had been called so
+inappropriate a name as "Larkie."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss McRory agreed that it was indeed a silly old name, and that it was
+a friend of one of her brothers, a Mr. Mulcahy, who had said that she
+and her sisters were "'Lorky little gurls with lorge dork eyes.'  He
+had that way of speaking," she added, "because he thought it was grand,
+and he always kept his watch at English time.  He said he ran over to
+London so often it wasn't worth while to change it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She herself had never been out of Ireland, and she supposed she'd never
+get the chance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I said that when she married Mr. Mulcahy she could keep her watch at
+Irish time, so as to equalise things.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss McRory suggested that I should give her a watch as a wedding
+present, and that, English or Irish time, it would be all hours of the
+night before we were home.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I realised with a slight shock that the position had indeed become
+inverted when one of the House of McRory had to remind me, after about
+four hours in her undiluted society, of the flight of time.  It was now
+past four, which was bad enough, and a still greater shock awaited me
+in the discovery that I was dead lame, the interval of repose having
+been fatal to my damaged heel.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I have always asserted, and shall continue to do so to my dying day,
+that the way out of the difficulty was suggested by Miss McRory.  I
+mounted Daniel, Miss McRory ascended the boulder by the holy well,
+announcing that she was as stiff as fifty crutches, and that once she
+got up she'd be there for life.  The thing was done somehow, thanks to
+the incomparable forbearance of Daniel, and with Miss McRory seated
+behind me on his broad back, and her arms clasped round my waist, I
+once more, and very cautiously, took the road.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Daniel continued to conduct himself like a gentleman, but considering
+how precarious was the position of Miss McRory, it was unnerving to
+feel her shaken by silent and secret laughter.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You'll fall off," I warned her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She replied by a further paroxysm, and asked me what size I took in
+stays&mdash;she supposed about forty inches.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Dusk was now an accomplished fact: thickened with fog and rain, it was
+even turning to darkness as we descended the long hill.  But, humanly
+speaking, the end was in sight.  There was, I knew, a public-house a
+couple of miles farther on, where a car might be hired, and there I
+proposed to bid a long farewell to Miss Larkie McRory, and to send her
+home by herself, to have rheumatic fever, as I assured her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We moved on and on, at a careful foot-pace: we were out in the wind
+again, and it was very cold.  It was also quite dark.  Silence fell
+upon us, and, after a time, the sustained pressure of Miss McRory's
+hat-brim against my shoulder suggested that it was the silence of
+exhaustion, if not of sleep.  I thought of her with compassion.  I
+believe I formulated her to myself as a poor little girl, and found
+myself asserting with defiance to imaginary detractors that no one
+could say she hadn't pluck, and that, in spite of her family, she
+really had a soul to be saved.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Again we found ourselves in shelter, and a greater darkness in the
+darkness told that we were in the lee of a wooded hill.  I knew where I
+was now, and I said to Miss McRory that the pub was just round the
+corner, and she replied at once that that was where they always were,
+in Dublin anyway.  She also said she thought she heard horses' hoofs
+coming up behind us.  I pushed on.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We turned the corner, and were immediately struck blind by the twin
+glare of the lamps of a motor, that lay motionless, as in ambush, at
+the side of the road.  Even the equanimity of Daniel was shattered; he
+swung to one side, he drifted like a blown leaf, and Miss McRory clung
+to me like a knapsack.  As we curveted in the full glare of the
+limelight, I was aware of a figure in a pot-hat and a vast fur coat
+standing near the motor.  Even as I recognised Lady Knox three or four
+muddy hounds trailed wearily into the glare, and a voice behind me
+shouted, "'Ware horse!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Flurry came on into the light: there was just room in me for a
+sub-conscious recognition of the fact that he was riding the missing
+grey cob, and that this was a typical thing, and one that might have
+been expected.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+At the hunt dinner that took place soon afterwards some one sang a
+song, one that I have ceased to find amusing.  The first verse runs as
+follows:
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Throttin' to the Fair,<BR>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Me and Moll Moloney,<BR>
+Sittin', I declare,<BR>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;On a single pony&mdash;&mdash;"<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+By a singular coincidence, the faces of all those present turned
+towards me.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap10"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="t3b">
+X
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="t4b">
+THE COMTE DE PRALINES
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I had forgotten how nice London is!" purred Philippa, as we moved
+beautifully across the threshold of Bill Cunningham's club, and were
+conducted to the lift with a tender deference that was no more than was
+due to our best clothes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Ladies' Tea-room at Bill's club was a pleasant place, looking
+forth, high above the noise, upon trees that were yellow in the hazy
+October afternoon.  In a very agreeable bow-window were Lady Derryclare
+and the tea-table, and with her were her son, and a small and
+ornamental young man, who was introduced to us as Mr. Simpson-Hodges.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Front name John, known to a large circle of admirers as 'Mossoo,'"
+supplemented Bill, whose hands were so clean that I found it difficult
+to recognise him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"So called because of the incredible circumstance that he can speak
+French, in spite of the best Public School education," said Lady
+Derryclare.  "When I think of the money that has been wasted on you!
+You good for nothing creature!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's more his looks," pursued Bill, "his dark foreign beauty&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"These humorists!" said Mr. Simpson-Hodges indulgently, showing a set
+of white teeth under a diminutive black moustache.  "Please, Lady
+Derryclare, let's talk of something pleasant."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Ask him about the chickens you made him get from the Chicken Farmers
+for the dance his regiment gave," said Bill to his mother.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, that was rather a bad business," said Mr. Simpson-Hodges
+apologetically, with an eye on Philippa, who, in a new hat, was looking
+about five-and-twenty.  "I'm sure no one wants to hear about it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Mossoo ran the supper and he ordered three brace," said Bill, "but
+they never turned up till the week after the show!  The postman was
+viewed coming up to the Mess towing something after him on a long
+painter.  The painter was superfluous.  The chickens would have
+followed him at a trot if he had been kind to them.  They kept them for
+the drag, I believe.  Didn't you, Mossoo?  He's one of the Whips, you
+know."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They'd have been quite useful," admitted Mr. Simpson-Hodges.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"How interesting to be a Whip!" said Philippa, looking at him with
+egregious respect.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Rather too interesting, sometimes," replied Simpson-Hodges, expanding
+to the glance in a way not unfamiliar to me.  "Last time we were out
+the fellow with the drag started from the cross-roads where we were
+going to meet, and was asinine enough to take it a bit down the road
+before he went into the country, and, as it happened, we were bringing
+the hounds up to the meet by that particular road.  They simply put
+down their heads and ran it heel for all they were worth!  The First
+Whip and I galloped our best, but we couldn't get to their heads, and
+we all charged into the middle of the meet full-cry!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh!  I wish I had been there!" said Philippa ardently.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We wished we were anywhere else," replied Mr. Simpson-Hodges; "the
+Brigadier was there, and everybody.  We heard all about it afterwards,
+I can tell you!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That ought to have happened in Mr. Knox's country, Major Yeates!" said
+Lady Derryclare, whose interest in fox-hunting was more sympathetic
+than technical.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We don't run drags, Lady Derryclare," I said reproachfully, but Lady
+Derryclare had already entered upon another topic.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Simpson-Hodges, however, did not end there.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A week afterwards Philippa and I crept home, third class, with full
+trunks and empty pockets, sustained only by the aphorism, evolved by my
+wife, that economies, and not extravagances, are what one really
+regrets.  It was approaching the end of November before we next heard
+of Simpson-Hodges.  The Derryclares had come down for their first
+woodcock shoot, and Bill swooped over one morning in the big Daimler
+and whirled us back with him over the forty intervening miles of bog
+and mountain, to shoot, and to dance on the carpet after dinner, and to
+act charades; to further, in short, the various devices for exercising
+and disciplining a house party.  Mr. John Simpson-Hodges was there, no
+less ornamental than in London, and as useful as he was ornamental.  He
+shot well, he danced beautifully, and he made of the part of a French
+Count in a charade so surprising a work of art that people said&mdash;as is
+the habit of people&mdash;that he ought to be making a hundred a week on the
+stage.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Before we left the Derryclares Philippa told me that she had arranged
+with "those boys"&mdash;by which she referred to Mr. Cunningham and the
+French Count&mdash;to come over next week and have a hunt with Flurry Knox's
+hounds.  Something whispered to me that there was more in this than met
+the eye, but as they were to provide their own mounts the position was
+unassailable, and I contented myself with telling her that a
+predilection for the society of the young was one of the surest signs
+of old age.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was not till we were all seated at breakfast on the morning of the
+meet (which was to be at Castle Knox), that it was suggested, with all
+the spontaneity of a happy thought, by Bill, that "Mossoo" should be
+introduced to the members of the Hunt as a Frenchman who was unable to
+speak English.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Call him the Comte de Pralines," said Philippa, with suspicious
+promptitude.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You can call him Napoleon Buonaparte if you like," I said defiantly,
+"<I>I</I> shall stay at home!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"All the Curranhilty people will be there," said Philippa softly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The thought of introducing the Comte de Pralines to Miss Bobbie Bennett
+was certainly attractive.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I refuse to introduce him to Lady Knox," I said with determination,
+and knew that I had yielded.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A meet at Castle Knox always brought out a crowd; there were generally
+foxes, and always luncheon, and there was a touch of the G.O.C. about
+Lady Knox that added a pleasing edge of anxiety, and raised the meet to
+something of the nature of a full-dress parade.  I held to my point
+about Lady Knox, and did nothing more compromising than tremble in the
+background, while Bill Cunningham presented the Comte de Pralines to
+the lady of the house, supplementing the presentation with the
+statements that this was his first visit to Ireland, and that he spoke
+no English.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Comte de Pralines, in the newest of pink coats, and the whitest of
+breeches, and the most glittering of boots and spurs, stood on the step
+below Lady Knox, with the bridle of his hireling over his arm, and his
+shining silk hat in his hand.  Still with his hat in his hand, and
+looking, as Miss Larkie McRory whispered to me, "as pretty as a
+Christmas card," the Count rippled forth a stream of mellifluous
+French, commenting upon the beauty of the day, of the place, of the
+scene.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Lady Knox's face deepened to so apoplectic a crimson, and her eyes
+became so fixed that I, watching the scene apprehensively, doubted if
+it were not my duty to rush at her and cut open her hunting-stock.
+When the Count ceased, having, as far as I could gather, enquired as to
+when she had last been to Auteuil, and if she had ever hunted in
+France, Lady Knox paused, and said very slowly:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Er&mdash;<I>j'espère que nous aurons un bon jour aujourdhui</I>."  Then,
+rapidly, to me, "Take your friend in for a drink, Major Yeates."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+My heart bled for her, and also quaked for myself, but I was into it
+now, up to my chin.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+During the next ten minutes Bill Cunningham, feebly abetted by me,
+played the game remorselessly, sparing neither age nor sex.  In the
+hall, amidst the sloe-gins and the whiskies and sodas (to which the
+Count, for a foreigner, took remarkably kindly), introductions slipped
+between cup and lip, poisoning the former and paralysing the latter.
+The victims took it variously; some sought refuge in bright smiles and
+large foreign gestures; some, in complete mental overthrow, replied in
+broken English to Mossoo's sugared periods; all were alike in one
+point, they moved as swiftly as might be, and as far as possible, out
+of the immediate neighbourhood of the Comte de Pralines.  Philippa,
+who, without any solid attainment, can put up a very good bluff in
+French, joined spasmodically in these encounters, alternately goading
+Mossoo to fresh outrages, and backing out when the situation became too
+acute.  I found her, affecting to put her sandwiches into the case on
+her saddle, and giving way to her feelings, with her face pressed
+against her mare's shoulder.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I introduced him to Bobbie Bennett," she said brokenly; "and he asked
+her if she spoke French.  She looked at me as if she were drowning, and
+said, '<I>Seulement très petit</I>'!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I said, repressively, that Lady Knox could see her, and that people
+would think, firstly, that she was crying, and secondly, that she was
+mad.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But I am mad, darling!" replied my wife, turning a streaming face to
+me.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I informed her of my contempt for her, and, removing myself from her
+vicinity, collected myself for the introduction of the Count to Flurry
+Knox and Dr. Hickey.  By this time most of the Field were mounted, and
+the Comte de Pralines bent to his horse's mane as he uncovered with
+grave courtesy on his presentation to the Master and the First Whip,
+and proceeded to express the profundity of his gratification at meeting
+an Irish Master of Hounds.  The objects of the attention were palpably
+discomposed by it; Flurry put a finger to his cap, with a look at me
+expressive of No Surrender; Dr. Hickey, in unconscious imitation of the
+Count, bowed low, but forgot about his cap.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He has no English, I'm told," said Flurry, eyeing the Count
+suspiciously.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I stopped myself on the verge of bowing assent, so infectious was the
+grace of the Pralines manner.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Is he come to buy horses for the German Army?" went on Flurry.  (It
+need hardly be said that this occurred before the War.)
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I explained that he was French.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You wouldn't know what these foreigners might be up to," returned Mr.
+Knox, quite unconvinced.  "I'm going on now&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He too moved expeditiously out of the danger zone.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Field straggled down the avenue, and progressed over tracts of
+tussocky grass in the wake of the hounds, towards the plantation that
+was the first draw.  The Keeper was outside the wood, with the
+assurance that there was a score of foxes in it, and that they had the
+country ate.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Maybe they'll eat the hounds, so," said Flurry.  "Let you all stay
+outside.  You can be talking French now for a bit&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I looked round to see who were availing themselves of this permission.
+The Count had by this time been introduced to Miss Larkie McRory;
+Philippa was apparently acting as interpreter, and Miss McRory was
+showing no disposition to close the interview.  The Field had
+withdrawn, and had formed itself into a committee-meeting on the Count.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-259"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-259.jpg" ALT="Miss Larkie McRory." BORDER="2">
+<H4 CLASS="h4center">
+Miss Larkie McRory.
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+It was warm and sunny in the shelter of the wood.  Although the time
+was November there were still green leaves on some of the trees; it was
+a steamy day after a wet night, and I thought to myself that if the
+hounds <I>did</I> run&mdash;Here came a challenge from the wood, answered
+multitudinously, and the next minute they were driving through the
+laurels towards the entrance gates, with a cry that stimulated even the
+many-wintered Daniel to capers quite unbefitting his time of life, or
+mine.  The Castle Knox demesne is a large one, and being surrounded by
+a prohibitively high and coped wall, it is easier to find a fox there
+than to get away with one.  Mighty galloping on the avenues followed,
+with interludes in the big demesne fields, where every gate had been
+considerately left open, and in which every horse with any pretensions
+to <I>savoir faire</I> stiffened his neck, and put up his back, and pulled.
+The hounds, a choir invisible, carried their music on through the
+plantations, with whimpering, scurrying pauses, with strophe and
+anti-strophe of soprano and bass.  Sometimes the cry bore away to the
+demesne wall, and some one would shout "They're away!" and the question
+of the Front Gate versus the Western Gate would divide us like a sword.
+Twice, in the undergrowth, above the sunk fence that separated us from
+the wood, the quick, composed face of the fox showed itself; at last,
+when things were getting too hot in the covert, he sprang like a cat
+over the ditch, and flitted across the park with that gliding gait that
+dissimulates its own speed, while I and my fellows offered a painful
+example of the discordance of the human voice when compared with that
+of the hound, and five or six couple pitched themselves out of the wood
+and stretched away over the grass.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was fortunate for the Comte de Pralines that his entirely British
+view-holloa was projected for the most part into my ear (the drum of
+which it nearly split) and was merged in the general enthusiasm as we
+let ourselves go.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"For God's sake, Major Yeates!" said Michael, the Second Whip,
+thundering up beside me as we neared the covert on the further side of
+the park, "come into the wood with me and turn them hounds!  Mr.
+Flurry's back on another fox with the body of the pack, and he's very
+near his curse!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I followed Michael into the covert, and was myself followed by a
+section of the Field, who might, with great advantage, have remained
+outside.  In the twinkling of an eye Michael was absorbed into the
+depths of the wood; so also were the six couple, but not so my retinue,
+who pursued me like sleuth-hounds, as I traversed the covert at such
+speed as the narrow rides permitted.  I made at length the negative
+discovery that it contained nothing save myself and my followers, a
+select party, consisting of the Comte de Pralines, Miss McRory, Miss
+Bobbie Bennett, Lady Knox's coachman on a three-year-old, and a little
+boy in knickerbockers, on a midget pony with the bearing of a war-horse
+and a soul to match.  We had come to a baffled pause at the cross-ways,
+when faint and far away, an indisputable holloa was borne to us.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They've gone out the West Gate," said the coachman, from among the
+tree-trunks into which he had considerately manoeuvred the kicking end
+of the three-year-old.  "It must be they ran him straight out into the
+country&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We made for the West Gate, reached it without sight or sound of Flurry
+or anyone else, and, on the farm road outside it, pulled up to listen.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The holloa was repeated; half a mile ahead a gesticulating figure
+signalled to us to come on.  I wish to put it on record that I said I
+could not hear the hounds.  The Comte de Pralines (excitable, like all
+Frenchmen) spurred his hireling at the opposite bank, saying, as he
+shot past me:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's no damned use humbugging here any longer!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As I turned Daniel to follow him, my eyes met those of Miss Larkie
+McRory, alight with infernal intelligence; they challenged, but at the
+same time they offered confederacy.  I jumped into the field after the
+Count; Miss McRory followed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'll tell Lady Knox on you!" she murmured, as she pounded beside me on
+the long-legged spectre, who, it may be remembered, had been described
+as "the latther end of a car-horse."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The holloa had come to us from the side of a smooth green hill, and
+between us and it was a shallow valley, neatly fenced with banks that
+did credit to Sir Valentine Knox's farming.  The horses were fresh, the
+valley smiled in the conventional way, and spread sleek pastures before
+us; we took the down grade at a cheerful pace, and the banks a shade
+faster than was orthodox, and the coachman's three-year-old made up in
+enthusiasm what he lacked in skill, and the pony, who from the first
+was running away, got over everything by methods known only to itself.
+The Comte de Pralines held an undeviating line for the spot whence the
+holloa had proceeded; when we reached it there was no one to be seen,
+but there was another holloa further on.  The pursuit of this took us
+on to a road, and here the Castle Knox coachman, who had scouted on
+ahead, yelled something to the effect that he saw a rider out before
+him, accompanying the statement by an application of the spurs to the
+dripping but undaunted three-year-old.  A stretching gallop up the road
+ensued, headed by the little boy and the coachman, who had both secured
+a commanding lead.  The pace held for about a hundred yards, when the
+road bent sharply to the left, more sharply indeed than was anticipated
+by the leaders, who, as their mounts skidded as it were on one wheel
+round the corner, sailed from their saddles with singular unanimity and
+landed in the ditch.  At the same moment the rider we had been
+following came into view; he was a priest, in immaculate black coat and
+top-hat, seated on a tall chestnut horse, and proceeding at a tranquil
+footpace on his own affairs.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He had seen the fox, he admitted (I am inclined to think he had headed
+him), and he had heard a man shouting, but no hounds had come his way.
+He was entirely sympathetic, and, warm as I was at the moment, a chill
+apprehension warned me that we might presently need sympathy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's my belief," said Miss Bennett, voicing that which I had not put
+into words, "we've been riding after the fox, and the hounds didn't
+leave the covert at all!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+An elaborate French oath from the Count fell, theatrical as a
+drop-scene, on the close of the first act.  Miss Larkie McRory looked
+at him admiringly, and allowed just the last rays of her glance to
+include me.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was when we had retraced our steps to the bend of the road that we
+had a full view of the Castle Knox coverts, crowning in gold and brown
+those pleasant green slopes, easy as the descent to Avernus, down which
+we had galloped with such generous ardour some fifteen minutes ago.
+Outside the West Gate, through which we had emerged from the demesne,
+were three motionless figures in scarlet; Lady Knox and her grey horse
+were also recognisable; a few hounds were straying undecidedly in the
+first of the grass fields that we had traversed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A note of the horn leaped to us across the valley, an angry and
+peremptory note.  One of the scarlet figures started at a canter and
+turned the hounds.  Another and longer blast followed.  As if in
+obedience to its summoning, the coachman's three-year-old came ramping,
+riderless, down the road; he passed us with his head high in air and
+his flashing eye fixed upon the distant group, and, with a long shrill
+neigh, put his tail over his back and directed his flight for his owner
+and her grey horse.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"God help poor Tierney!" said Miss Bennett, in a stricken voice, "and
+ourselves too!  I believe they saw us all the time, and we galloping
+away on the line of the fox!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm going home," I said.  "Will you kindly make my apologies to the
+Master?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'll kindly do no such thing," replied Miss Bennett.  "I'll let Flurry
+Knox cool off a bit before I meet him again, and that won't be this
+side of Christmas, if <I>I</I> can help it!  Good-bye, dear friends!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She turned her mare, and set her face for her own country.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There now remained only the Count, Miss McRory, and myself, and to
+remove ourselves from the field of vision of the party at the gate was
+our first care.  We had, no doubt, been thoroughly identified,
+nevertheless the immediate sensation of getting a furzy hill between us
+and Flurry was akin to that of escaping from the rays of a
+burning-glass.  In shelter we paused and surveyed each other.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Comte de Pralines, with his shiny hat very much on the back of his
+head, put down his reins, shoved his crop under his knee, and got out
+his cigarette case.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well," he began philosophically, striking a match, "our luck ain't
+in&mdash;&mdash;!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He broke off, the match went out, and a lively glow suffused his
+unsheltered countenance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"<I>Vous voyez mon cher&mdash;</I>" he resumed, very rapidly.  "<I>J'ai appris
+quelques petits mots&mdash;&mdash;</I>"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What a lovely English accent he has!" interrupted Miss McRory
+rapturously; "it's a lot nicer than his French one.  To look at him
+you'd never think he was so clever.  It's a pity he wouldn't try to
+pick up a little more."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Now, that's hitting a man when he's down," said the Comte de Pralines.
+"I want some one to be kind to me.  I've had a poor day of it; no one
+would talk to me.  I stampeded them wherever I went."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I didn't notice Miss McRory stampeding to any great extent," I said.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Wait awhile!" rejoined Miss McRory.  "Maybe the stampeding will be
+going the other way when you and he meet Lady Knox!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I shan't wait an instant," said the Comte de Pralines, "you and Major
+Yeates will explain."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+The horses had been moving on, and the covert was again in sight, about
+a quarter of a mile away on our left.  There was nothing to be seen,
+but hounds were hunting again in the demesne; their cry drove on
+through the woods inside the grey demesne wall; they were hunting in a
+body, and they were hunting hard.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At each moment the cry was becoming more remote, but it was still
+travelling on inside the wall.  The fear of Flurry fell from us as a
+garment, and the only question that presented itself was whether to
+return to the West Gate or to hold on outside.  It was a long-accepted
+theory at Castle Knox that the demesne wall was not negotiable, and
+that the foxes always used the gates, like Christians; bearing this in
+mind, I counselled the Front Gate and the outside of the wall.  A
+couple of lanes favoured us; we presently found ourselves in a series
+of marshy fields, moving along abreast of the invisible hounds in the
+wood.  They were in the thickest and least accessible part of it, and
+Flurry's voice and horn came faintly as from a distance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I explained that it was impossible to ride that part of the wood, but
+that, if they held on as they were going, the Front Gate would make it
+all right for us, and of course Flurry would&mdash;&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh! look, look, look!" shrieked Miss McRory, snatching at my arm and
+pointing with her whip.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A short way ahead of us a huge elm tree had fallen upon the wall; the
+greenish-yellow leaves still clinging to its branches showed that the
+catastrophe was recent.  It had broken down the wall to within five or
+six feet of the ground, and was reclining in the breach that it had
+made, with its branches sprawling in the field.  I followed the line of
+Miss Larkie's whip, and was just in time to see a fox float like a red
+leaf from one of these to the ground, and glide straight across our
+front.  He passed out of sight over a bank, and the Count stood up in
+his stirrups, put his finger in his ear, and screamed in a way that
+must have been heard in the next county.  I contributed a not
+ineffective bellow, and Miss McRory decorated the occasion with long
+thin squeals.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The hounds, inside the wall, answered in an agony that was only allayed
+by the discovery that the trunk of the tree formed as handy a bridge
+for them as for the fox.  They came dropping like ripe fruit through
+the branches, and, under our rejoicing eyes, swarmed to the fox's line,
+and flung on, in the fullest of full-cry, over the bank on which we had
+last seen him.  I have not failed to assure Flurry Knox that anything
+less suggestive of "sneaking away with the hounds" than the manner of
+our departure could hardly be conceived, but Mr. Knox has not withdrawn
+the phrase.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It may be conceded that Flurry had grounds for annoyance.  Had I had
+the fox in one hand and the Ordnance Map in the other, I could hardly
+have improved on the course steered by our pilot.  Up hill for a bit,
+when the horses were fresh, with gradients just steep enough to temper
+Daniel's well-sustained tug of war, yet not so steep as to make a
+three-foot bank look like a house, or to guarantee a big knee at each
+"stone gap."  Then high and dry country, with sheep huddled in
+defensive positions in the corners of the fields, and grass like a
+series of putting-greens, minus the holes, and fat, comely banks, and
+thin walls, from which the small round stones rattled harmlessly as
+Miss McRory's car-horse swept through them.  Down into a long valley,
+with little sky-blue lakes, set in yellow sedge; and there was a
+helpful bog road there, that nicked nicely with the bending line of the
+hounds through the accompanying bog, and allayed a spasm of acute
+anxiety as to whether we should ever get near them again.  Then upwards
+once more, deviously, through rougher going, with patches of
+low-growing furze sprouting from blackened tracts where the hillside
+had been set on fire, with the hounds coming to their noses among
+brakes of briars and bracken; finally, in the wind and sun of the
+hill-top, a well-timed check.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We looked back for the first time, half in fear that we might find
+Flurry hot on our track, half in hope that he and his horn were coming
+to our help; but neither in the green country nor in the brown valley
+was there any sign or sound of him.  There was nothing to be seen but a
+couple of men standing on a fence to watch us, nothing to be heard
+except cur dogs vociferating at every cottage.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Fifteen couple on," said the Count professionally.  "How many does
+Knox usually have out?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"All he's got," I said, mopping my brow.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I don't see the two that have no hair on their backs," said Miss
+McRory, whose eyes, much enhanced by the radiant carmine of her cheeks,
+beamed at us through wisps and loops of hair.  "I know them, they're
+always scratching, the poor things!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That Miss McRory and her steed kept, as they did, their place in what
+is known to history as the Great Castle Knox Run, is a matter that I do
+not pretend to explain.  Some antiquarian has unearthed the fact that
+the car-horse had three strains of breeding, and had twice been second
+in a Point-to-Point; but I maintain that credit must be ascribed to
+Miss Larkie, about whom there is something inevitable; some street-boy
+quality of being in the movement.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We were now on a heathery table-land, with patches of splashy, rushy
+ground, from which the snipe flickered out as the hounds cast
+themselves through it.  Presently, on the top of a hard, peaty bank, a
+hound spoke, hesitatingly, yet hopefully, and plunged down on the other
+side; the pack crowded over, and drove on through the heather.  Daniel
+changed feet on a mat of ling with a large stone in it, and therefrom
+ramped carefully out over a deep cut in the peat, unforeseen, and
+masked by tufts of heather.  The hireling of the Comte de Pralines had,
+up to this, done his work blamelessly, if without originality; he had
+an anxiousness to oblige that had been matured during a dread winter
+when he had been the joint property of three subalterns, but he
+reserved to himself a determination to drop economically off his banks,
+and boggy slits were not in his list of possibilities.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+How the matter occurred I do not know, but, when I looked round, his
+head alone was visible, and the Count was standing on his in the
+heather.  Miss McRory's car-horse, who had pulled up in the act of
+following the Count, with a suddenness acquired, no doubt, in the
+shafts of a Cork covered-car, was viewing the scene with horror from
+the summit of the bank.  The hounds were by this time clear of the
+heather, and were beginning to run hard; it was not until I was on the
+further side of the next bank that I cast another fleeting look back;
+this time the Count was standing on his feet, but the hireling was
+still engulfed, and Miss McRory was still on the wrong side of the
+slit.  After that I forgot them, wholly and heartlessly, as is
+invariable in such cases.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As a matter of fact, I had no attention to spare for anyone but myself,
+even though we went, for the first twenty minutes or so, as on rubber
+tyres, through bland dairy farms wherein the sweet influences of the
+dairy-cow had induced gaps in every fence, and gates into every road.
+The scent, mercifully for Daniel, was not quite what it had been; the
+fox had run through cattle, and also through goats (a small and odorous
+party, on whose behalf, indeed, some slight intervention on my part was
+required), and it was here, when crossing a road, that a donkey and her
+foal, moved by some mysterious attraction akin to love at first sight,
+attached themselves to me.  Undeterred by the fact that the mother's
+foreleg was fettered to her hind, the pair sped from field to field in
+my wake; at the checks, which just then were frequent, they brayed
+enthusiastically.  I thought to elude them at a steep drop into a road,
+but they toboganned down it without an effort; when they overtook me
+the fetter-chain was broken, and clanked from the mother's hind-leg as
+if she were a family ghost.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There came at length a moment, outside a farm-house, when it seemed as
+if the fox had beaten us.  Here, on the farther side of Castle Knox, I
+was well out of my own country, and what the fox's point might be was
+represented by the letter X.  Nevertheless it was here that I lifted
+the hounds and brought off the cast of a life-time; I am inclined to
+think that he had lain down under a hayrick and was warned of our
+approach by the voices of my attendant jackasses; my cast was probably
+not much more of a fluke than such inspirations usually are, but the
+luck was with me.  Old Playboy, sole relic of my deputy Mastership,
+lifted his white head and endorsed my suggestion with a single bass
+note; Rally, Philippa's prize puppy, uttered a soprano cadenza, and the
+pack suddenly slid away over the pasture fields, with the smoothness
+and unanimity of the <I>Petits Chevaux</I> over their green cloth.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was now becoming for Daniel and me something of an effort to keep
+our proud and lonely place in or about the next field to the hounds.
+The fields were coming smaller, the gaps fewer; Daniel had no intention
+of chucking it, but he gave me to understand that he meant to take the
+hills on the second speed.  And, unfortunately, the hills were coming.
+The hounds, by this time three fences ahead, flung over a bank on the
+upgrade, a bank that would give pause for reflection at the beginning
+of a run.  I tried back, scrambled into a lane, followed it up the
+hill, with the cry of the hounds coming fainter each minute, dragged a
+cart wheel and a furze bush out of a gap with my crop, found myself in
+a boggy patch of turnips, surrounded by towering fuchsia hedges, and
+realised that the pack had passed in music out of sight.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I stood still and looked at my watch.  It was already an hour and
+twenty minutes from the word "Go!" and the hounds were not only gone
+but were still going.  A man who has lost hounds inevitably follows the
+line of least resistance.  I retired from the turnip field, and
+abandoned myself to the lane, which seemed not disinclined to follow
+the direction in which the hounds had been heading.  Since the hayrick
+episode they had been running right-handed, and the lane bent
+right-handed over the end of the hill, and presently deposited me on a
+road.  It was one of the moments when the greatness of the world is
+borne in upon the wayfarer.  There was a spacious view from the
+hill-side; three parishes, at least, offered themselves for my
+selection, and I surveyed them, solitary and remote as the evening
+star, and with no more reason than it for favouring one more than
+another.  A harrowing, and, by this time, but too familiar cry, broke
+on my ear, an undulating cry as of a thing that galloped as it roared.
+My admirers were still on my trail; I gave Daniel a touch of the spurs
+and trotted on to the right.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+No human being was visible, but some way ahead there was a slated house
+at a cross-roads; there, at all events, I could get my bearings.  There
+were porter-barrels outside it, and from some distance I heard two
+voices, male and female, engaged in loud and ferocious argument; I had
+no difficulty in diagnosing a public-house.  When Daniel and I darkened
+the doorway the shouting ceased abruptly, and I saw a farmer, in his
+Sunday clothes, making an unsteady retreat through a door at the back
+of the shop.  The other disputant, a large, middle-aged woman, remained
+entrenched behind the counter, and regarded me with a tranquil and
+commanding eye.  She informed me, as from a pulpit, that I was six
+miles from Castle Knox, and with dignity, as though leaving a pulpit,
+she moved from behind the counter, and advanced to the door to indicate
+my road.  I asked her if she had seen anything of the hounds.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There was one of your dogs looked in the door to me a while ago," she
+replied, "but he got a couple of boxes from the cat that have kittens;
+I d'no what way he went.  Indeed I was bothered at the time with that
+poor man that came in to thank me for the compliment I paid him in
+going to his sister's funeral."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I said that he certainly seemed to feel it very much.  At which she
+looked hard at me and said that he was on his way to a wedding, and
+that it might be he had a drop taken to rise his heart.  "He was after
+getting a half a crown from a gentleman&mdash;a huntsman like yourself," she
+added, "that was striving to get his horse out of a ditch."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Was there a lady with him?" I asked.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There was, faith!  And the two o' them legged it away then through the
+country, and they galloping like the deer!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+So, in all love, we parted; before I reached the next turning renewed
+sounds of battle told me that the compliment was still being pressed
+home.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+My road, bending ever to the right, strolled through an untidy
+nondescript country, with little bits of bog, and little lumps of hill,
+and little rags of fields.  I had jogged a mile or so when I saw a
+hound, a few fields away to my right, poking along on what appeared to
+be a line; he flopped into a boggy ditch, and scrambled from it on to a
+fence.  He stood there undecidedly, like any human being, reviewing the
+situation, and then I saw his head and stern go up.  The next moment I
+also heard what he had heard, a faint and far-away note of the horn.
+It came again, a long and questing call.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The road was flat and fairly straight; far away upon it something was
+moving gradually into my scope of vision, something with specks of red
+in it.  It advanced upon me, firmly, and at a smart pace; heading it,
+like the ram of a battleship, was Mr. Knox.  With him, "of all his
+halls had nursed," remained only the two hounds with the hairless
+backs, the two who, according to Miss McRory, were always scratching.
+Behind him was a small and unsmiling selection from those who, like
+him, had lost the hunt.  Lady Knox headed them; my wife and Bill
+brought up the rear.  The hound whom I had seen in the bog had preceded
+me, and was now joining himself to his two comrades, putting the best
+face he could upon it, with a frowning brow and his hackles up.  The
+comrades, in their official position of sole representatives of the
+pack, received him with orthodox sternness, and though unable, for
+obvious reasons, to put their hackles up, the bald places on their
+backs were of an intimidating pink.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+My own reception followed the same lines.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Where are the hounds?" barked Flurry, in the awful tones of a parent
+addressing a governess who, through gross neglect, has mislaid her
+charges.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Before I had had time to make up my mind whether to be truculent or
+pacific, there was a shout away on our left.  At some little distance
+up a by-road, a man was standing on a furze-plumed bank, beckoning to
+us with a driving-whip.  Flurry stood in his stirrups, and held up his
+cap.  The man yelled information that was wholly unintelligible, but
+the driving-whip indicated a point beyond him, and Flurry's brown mare
+jumped from a standstill to a gallop, and swung into the by-road.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The little band of followers swung after him.  When Lady Knox was well
+ahead, I followed, and found myself battering between high banks behind
+Philippa and Bill Cunningham.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Where's Mossoo?" my wife said breathlessly, as Daniel's head drew
+level with her sandwich case.  "We met the man who pulled him out of
+the ditch&mdash;up in the hills there&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes, by Jove!" said Bill, "Flurry asked him if it was a Frenchman, and
+the chap said, 'French or German, he had curses as good as yourself!'
+I told Flurry it must have been you!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I don't mind Flurry, it's Lady Knox&mdash;&mdash;" began Philippa.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Here we all came to a violent full-stop.  Flurry's advance had been
+arrested by a covered-car and horse drawn across the road; the horse
+was eating grass, the driver, with the reins in his hand, was standing
+with his back to us on the top of the bank from which he had hailed us,
+howling plaudits, as if he were watching a race.  There were distant
+shouts, and barking dogs, and bellowing cattle, and blended with them
+was the unmistakable baying of hounds.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I daresay that what Flurry said to the driver did him good&mdash;did Flurry
+good, I mean.  The car lurched to one side, and, as we squeezed past
+it, we saw between its black curtains a vision of a scarlet-faced
+bride, embedded in female relatives; two outside cars, driverless, and
+loaded with wedding guests, were drawn up a little farther on.  Flurry,
+still exploding like a shell, thundered on down the lane; the high bank
+ended at a gateway, he turned in, and as we crushed in after him we
+were greeted by a long and piercing "Who-whoop!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We were in a straggling field with furzy patches in it.  At the farther
+end of it was a crowd of country people on horses and on foot,
+obviously more wedding-guests; back of all, on a road below, was a
+white-washed chapel, and near it, still on the chestnut horse, was the
+priest who had headed the morning fox.  Close to one of the clumps of
+furze the Comte de Pralines was standing, knee-deep in baying hounds,
+holding the body of the fox high above his head, and uttering scream
+upon scream of the most orthodox quality.  He flung the fox to the
+hounds, the onlookers cheered, Miss McRory, seated on the car-horse,
+waved the brush above her head, and squealed at the top of her voice
+something that sounded like "Yoicks!"  Her hair was floating freely
+down her back; a young countryman, in such sacrificial attire as
+suggested the bridegroom, was running across the field with her hat in
+his hand.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Flurry pulled up in silence; so did we.  We were all quite outside the
+picture, and we knew it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, the finest hunt ever you see!" cried the bridegroom as he passed
+us; "it was Father Dwyer seen him shnaking into the furze, the villyan!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Worry, worry, worry!  Tear him and eat him, old fellows!" shouted the
+Comte de Pralines.  "Give the hounds room, can't you, you chaps!  I
+suppose you never saw them break up a fox before!"  This to the wedding
+guests, who had crowded in, horse and foot, on top of the scuffling,
+growling pack.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Flurry turned an iron face upon me.  His eye was no bigger than a pin's
+head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I suppose it's from Larkie McRory he got the English?" he said; "he
+learnt it quick."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The McRorys don't speak English!" said Lady Knox, in a voice like a
+north-east wind.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"<I>Seulement très petit!</I>" Philippa murmured brazenly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Whether Lady Knox heard her or not, I am unable to say.  Her face was
+averted from me, and remained as inflexible as a profile on a coin&mdash;a
+Roman coin, for choice.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The faculty of not knowing when you are beaten is one that has, I
+think, been lauded beyond its deserving.  Napoleon the Great has
+condemned manoeuvring before a fixed position, and Lady Knox was
+clearly a fixed position.  Accepting these tenets, I began an
+unostentatious retirement, in which I was joined by Philippa.  We were
+nearing safety and the gate of the field, when a yearning, choking wail
+came to us from the lane.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The Bride?" queried my wife hysterically.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was repeated; in the same instant my admirers, the jackasses, <I>mère
+et fils</I>, advanced upon the scene at a delirious gallop, and, sobbing
+with the ecstasy of reunion, resumed their attendance upon Daniel.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For a moment the attention of the field, including even that of the
+Roman coin, was diverted from the Comte de Pralines, and was
+concentrated upon our retreat.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap11"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="t3b">
+XI
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="t4b">
+THE SHOOTING OF SHINROE
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mr. Joseph Francis M'Cabe rose stiffly from his basket chair, picked up
+the cushion on which he had been seated, looked at it with animosity,
+hit it hard with his fist, and, flinging it into the chair, replaced
+himself upon it, with the single word:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Flog!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I was aware that he referred to the flock with which the cushions in
+the lounge of Reardon's Hotel were stuffed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They have this hotel destroyed altogether with their improvements,"
+went on Mr. M'Cabe between puffs, as he lit his pipe.  "God be with the
+time this was the old smoking-room, before they knocked it and the hall
+into one and spoilt the two of them!  There were fine solid chairs in
+it that time, that you'd sleep in as good as your bed, but as for these
+wicker affairs, I declare the wind 'd whistle through them the same as
+a crow's nest."  He paused, and brought his heel down heavily on the
+top of the fire.  "And look at that for a grate!  A Well-grate they
+call it,&mdash;<I>I'd</I> say, 'Leave Well alone!'  Thirty years I'm coming to
+Sessions here, and putting up in this house, and in place of old Tim
+telling me me own room was ready for me, there's a whipper-snapper of a
+snapdragon in a glass box in the hall, asking me me name in broken
+English" (it may be mentioned that this happened before the War), "and
+'Had I a Cook's ticket?' and down-facing me that I must leave my key in
+what he called the 'Bew-ro.'"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I said I knew of a lady who always took a Cook's ticket when she went
+abroad, because when she got to Paris there would be an Englishman on
+the platform to meet her, or at all events a broken Englishman.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mr. M'Cabe softened to a temporary smile, but held on to his grievance
+with the tenacity of his profession.  (I don't think I have mentioned
+that he is a Solicitor, of a type now, unfortunately, becoming
+obsolete.)  He had a long grey face, and a short grey moustache; he
+dyed his hair, and his age was known to no man.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There was one of Cook's tourists sat next me at breakfast," he
+resumed, "and he asked me was I ever in Ireland before, and how long
+was I in it.  'Wan day,' says I!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Did he believe you?" I asked.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He did," replied Mr. M'Cabe, with something that approached compassion.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I have always found old M'Cabe a mitigating circumstance of Sessions at
+Owenford, both in Court and out of it.  He was a sportsman of the
+ingrained variety that grows wild in Ireland, and in any of the
+horse-coping cases that occasionally refresh the innermost soul of
+Munster, it would be safe to assume that Mr. M'Cabe's special gifts had
+ensured his being retained, generally on the shady side.  He fished
+when occasion served, he shot whether it did or not.  He did not
+exactly keep horses, but he always knew some one who was prepared to
+"pass on" a thoroughly useful animal, with some infirmity so
+insignificant that until you tried to dispose of him you did not
+realise that he was yours, until his final passing-on to the next
+world.  He had certain shooting privileges in the mountains behind the
+town of Owenford (bestowed, so he said, by a grateful client), and it
+had often been suggested by him that he and I should anticipate some
+November Sessions by a day, and spend it "on the hill."  We were now in
+the act of carrying out the project.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Ah, these English," M'Cabe began again, mixing himself a glass of
+whisky and water, "they'd believe anything so long as it wasn't the
+truth.  Talking politics these lads were, and by the time they had
+their ham and eggs swallowed they had the whole country arranged.  'And
+look,' says they&mdash;they were anglers, God help us!&mdash;'look at all the
+money that's going to waste for want of preserving the rivers!'  'I beg
+your pardon,' says I, 'there's water-bailiffs on the most of the
+rivers.  I was defending a man not long since, that was cot by the
+water-bailiff poaching salmon on the Owen.  'And what proof have you?'
+says I to the water-bailiff.  'How do you know it was a salmon at all?'
+'Is it how would I know?' says the bailiff, 'didn't I gaff the fish for
+him meself!'"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What did your anglers say to that?" I enquired.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, they didn't quite go so far as to tell me I was a liar," said
+Mr. M'Cabe tranquilly.  "Ah, telling such as them the truth is wasting
+what isn't plenty!  Then they'll meet some fellow that lies like a
+tooth-drawer, and they'll write to the English <I>Times</I> on the head of
+him!"  He stretched forth a long and bony hand for the tumbler of
+whisky and water.  "And talking of tooth-drawers," he went on, "there's
+a dentist comes here once a fortnight, Jeffers his name is, and a great
+sportsman too.  I was with him to-day"&mdash;he passed his hand consciously
+over his mouth, and the difference that I had dimly felt in his
+appearance suddenly, and in all senses of the word, flashed upon
+me&mdash;"and he was telling me how one time, in the summer that's past,
+he'd been out all night, fishing in the Owen.  He was going home before
+the dawn, and he jumped down off a bank on to what he took to be a
+white stone&mdash;and he aimed for the stone, mind you, because he thought
+the ground was wet&mdash;and what was it but a man's face!"  M'Cabe paused
+to receive my comment.  "What did he do, is it?  Ran off for his life,
+roaring out, 'There's a first-rate dentist in Owenford!'  The fellow
+was lying asleep there, and he having bundles of spurge with him to
+poison the river!  He had taken drink, I suppose."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Was he a water-bailiff too?" said I.  "I hope the conservators of the
+river stood him a set of teeth."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If they did," said M'Cabe, with an unexpected burst of feeling, "I
+pity him!"  He rose to his feet, and put his tumbler down on the
+chimney-piece.  "Well, we should get away early in the morning, and
+it's no harm for me to go to bed."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He yawned&mdash;a large yawn that ended abruptly with a metallic click.  His
+eyes met mine, full of unspoken things; we parted in a silence that
+seemed to have been artificially imposed upon Mr. M'Cabe.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The wind boomed intermittently in my chimney during the night, and a
+far and heavy growling told of the dissatisfaction of the sea.  Yet the
+morning was not unfavourable.  There was a broken mist, with shimmers
+of sun in it, and the carman said it would be a thing of nothing, and
+would go out with the tide.  The Boots, a relic of the old <I>régime</I>,
+was pessimistic, and mentioned that there were two stars squez up agin
+the moon last night, and he would have no dependence on the day.
+M'Cabe offered no opinion, being occupied in bestowing in a species of
+dog-box beneath the well of the car a young red setter, kindly lent by
+his friend the dentist.  The setter, who had formed at sight an
+unfavourable opinion of the dog-box, had resolved himself into an
+invertebrate mass of jelly and lead, and was with difficulty
+straightened out and rammed home into it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Have we all now?" said M'Cabe, slamming the door in the dog's face.
+"Take care we're not like me uncle, old Tom Duffy, that was going
+shooting, and was the whole morning slapping his pockets and saying,
+'Me powder! me shot! me caps! me wads!' and when he got to the bog, 'O
+tare an' ouns!' says he, 'I forgot the gun!'"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There are still moments when I can find some special and
+not-otherwise-to-be-attained flavour in driving on an outside car; a
+sense of personal achievement in sitting, by some method of instinctive
+suction, the lurches and swoops peculiar to these vehicles.  Reardon's
+had given us its roomiest car and its best horse, a yellow mare, with a
+long back and a slinging trot, and a mouth of iron.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Where did Mr. Reardon get the mare, Jerry?" asked M'Cabe, as we
+zigzagged in successive hairbreadths through the streets of Owenford.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"D-Dublin, sir," replied the driver, who, with both fists extended in
+front of him and both heels planted against his narrow footboard,
+seemed to find utterance difficult.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"She's a goer!" said M'Cabe.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"She is&mdash;she killed two men," said Jerry, in two jerks.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's a great credit to her.  What way did she do it?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"P-pulled the lungs out o' them!" ejaculated Jerry, turning the last
+corner and giving the mare a shade more of her head, as a tribute,
+perhaps, to her prowess.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She swung us for some six miles along the ruts of the coast road at the
+same unflinching pace, after which, turning inland and uphill, we began
+the climb of four miles into the mountains.  It was about eleven
+o'clock when we pulled up beside a long and reedy pool, high up in the
+heather; the road went on, illimitably it seemed, and was lost, with
+its attendant telegraph posts, in cloud.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Away with ye now, Jerry," said M'Cabe; "we'll shoot our way home."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He opened the back of the dog-box, and summoned its occupant.  The
+summons was disregarded.  Far back in the box two sparks of light and a
+dead silence indicated the presence of the dog.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"How, snug you are in there!" said M'Cabe; "here, Jerry, pull him out
+for us.  What the deuce is this his name is?  Jeffers told me
+yesterday, and it's gone from me."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I d'no would he bite me?" said Jerry, taking a cautious observation
+and giving voice to the feelings of the party.  "Here, poor fellow!
+Here, good lad!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The good lad remained immovable.  The lure of a sandwich produced no
+better result.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We can't be losing our day with the brute this way," said M'Cabe.
+"Tip up the car.  He'll come out then, and no thanks to him."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As the shafts rose heavenwards, the law of gravitation proved too many
+for the setter, and he slowly slid to earth.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If I only knew your dam name we'd be all right now," said M'Cabe.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The carman dropped the shafts on to the mare, and drove on up the pass,
+with one side of the car turned up and himself on the other.  The
+yellow mare had, it seemed, only begun her day's work.  A prophetic
+instinct, of the reliable kind that is strictly founded on fact, warned
+me that we might live to regret her departure.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The dentist's setter had, at sight of the guns, realised that things
+were better than he had expected, and now preceded us along the edge of
+the lake with every appearance of enthusiasm.  He quartered the ground
+with professional zeal, he splashed through the sedge, and rattled
+through thickets of dry reeds, and set successively a heron, a
+water-hen, and something, unseen, that I believe to have been a
+water-rat.  After each of these efforts he rushed in upon his quarry,
+and we called him by all the gun-dog names we had ever heard of, from
+Don to Grouse, from Carlo to Shot, coupled with objurgations on a
+rising scale.  With none of them did we so much as vibrate a chord in
+his bosom.  He was a large dog, with a blunt stupid face, and a faculty
+for excitement about nothing that impelled him to bound back to us as
+often as possible, to gaze in our eyes in brilliant enquiry, and to
+pant and prance before us with all the fatuity of youth.  Had he been
+able to speak, he would have asked idiotic questions, of that special
+breed that exact from their victim a reply of equal imbecility.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The lake and its environs, for the first time in M'Cabe's experience,
+yielded nothing; we struck up on to the mountain side, following the
+course of an angry stream that came racing down from the heights.  We
+worked up through ling and furze, and skirted flocks of pale stones
+that lay in the heather like petrified sheep, and the dog, ranging
+deliriously, set water-wagtails and anything else that could fly; I
+believe he would have set a blue-bottle, and I said so to M'Cabe.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Ah, give him time; he'll settle down," said M'Cabe, who had a
+thankfulness for small mercies born of a vast experience of makeshifts;
+"he might fill the bag for us yet."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We laboured along the flank of the mountain, climbing in and out of
+small ravines, jumping or wading streams, sloshing through yellow
+sedgery bog; always with the brown heather running up to the misty
+skyline, and always with the same atrocious luck.  Once a small pack of
+grouse got up, very wild, and leagues out of range, thanks to the
+far-reaching activities of the dog, and once a hermit woodcock exploded
+out of a clump of furze, and sailed away down the slope, followed by
+four charges of shot and the red setter, in equally innocuous pursuit.
+And this, up to luncheon time, was the sum of the morning's sport.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We ate our sandwiches on a high ridge, under the lee of a tumbled pile
+of boulders, that looked as if they had been about to hurl themselves
+into the valley, and had thought better of it at the last moment.
+Between the looming, elephant-grey mountains the mist yielded glimpses
+of the far greenness of the sea, the only green thing in sight in this
+world of grey and brown.  The dog sat opposite to me, and willed me to
+share my food with him.  His steady eyes were charged with the
+implication that I was a glutton; personally I abhorred him, yet I
+found it impossible to give him less than twenty-five per cent. of my
+sandwiches.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I wonder did Jeffers take him for a bad debt," said M'Cabe
+reflectively, as he lit his pipe.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I said I should rather take my chance with the bad debt.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He might have treated me better," M'Cabe grumbled on, "seeing that I
+paid him seven pound ten the day before yesterday, let alone that it
+was me that was the first to put him up to this&mdash;this bit of Shinroe
+Mountain that never was what you might call strictly preserved.  When
+he came here first he didn't as much as know what cartridges he'd want
+for it.  'Six and eight,' says I, 'that's a lawyer's fee, so if you
+think of me you'll not forget it!'  And now, if ye please," went on Mr.
+Jeffers' preceptor in sport, "he's shooting the whole country and
+selling all he gets!  And he wouldn't as much as ask me to go with him;
+and the excuse he gives, he wouldn't like to have an old hand like me
+connyshooring his shots!  How modest he is!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I taunted M'Cabe with having been weak enough thus to cede his rights,
+and M'Cabe, who was not at all amused, said that after all it wasn't so
+much Jeffers that did the harm, but an infernal English Syndicate that
+had taken the Shinroe shooting this season, and paid old Purcell that
+owned it ten times what it was worth.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It might be as good for us to get off their ground now," continued
+M'Cabe, rising slowly to his feet, "and try the Lackagreina Valley.
+The stream below is their bounds."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This, I hasten to say, was the first I had heard of the Syndicate, and
+I thought it tactless of M'Cabe to have mentioned it, even though the
+wrong that we had done them was purely technical.  I said to him that I
+thought the sooner we got off their ground the better, and we descended
+the hill and crossed the stream, and M'Cabe said that he could always
+shoot this next stretch of country when he liked.  With this assurance,
+we turned our backs on the sea and struck inland, tramping for an hour
+or more through country whose entire barrenness could only be explained
+on the hypothesis that it has been turned inside out to dry.  So far it
+had failed to achieve even this result.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The weather got thicker, and the sport, if possible, thinner; I had
+long since lost what bearings I possessed, but M'Cabe said he knew of a
+nice patch of scrub in the next valley that always held a cock.  The
+next valley came at last, not without considerable effort, but no patch
+of scrub was apparent.  Some small black and grey cattle stood and
+looked at us, and a young bull showed an inclination to stalk the dog;
+it seemed the only sport the valley was likely to afford.  M'Cabe
+looked round him, and looked at his watch, and looked at the sky, which
+did not seem to be more than a yard above our heads, and said without
+emotion:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Did ye think of telling the lad in the glass box in the hall that we
+might want some dinner kept hot for us?  I d'no from Adam where we've
+got to!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was a cattle track along the side of the valley which might,
+though not necessarily, lead somewhere.  We pursued it, and found that
+it led, in the first instance, to some blackfaced mountain sheep.  A
+cheerful interlude followed, in which the red setter hunted the sheep,
+and we hunted the setter, and what M'Cabe said about the dentist in the
+intervals of the chase was more appropriate to the occasion than to
+these pages.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When justice had been satiated, and the last echo of the last yell of
+the dog had trembled into silence among the hills, we resumed the
+cattle-track, which had become a shade more reliable, and, as we
+proceeded, began to give an impression that it might lead somewhere.
+The day was dying in threatening stillness.  Lethargic layers of mist
+bulged low, like the roof of a marquee, and cloaked every outline that
+could yield us information.  The dog, unchastened by recent events, and
+full of an idiot optimism, continued to range the hillside.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I suppose I'll never get the chance to tell Jeffers my opinion of that
+tom-fool," said M'Cabe, following with an eye of steel the
+perambulations of the dog; "the best barrister that ever wore a wig
+couldn't argue with a dentist!  He has his fist half way down your
+throat before you can open your mouth; and in any case he'll tell me we
+couldn't expect any dog would work for us when we forgot his name.
+What's the brute at now?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The brute was high above us on the hillside, setting a solitary furze
+bush with convincing determination, and casting backward looks to see
+if he were being supported.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It might be a hare," said M'Cabe, cocking his gun, with a revival of
+hope that was almost pathetic, and ascending towards the furze bush.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I neither quickened my pace nor deviated from the cattle track, but I
+may admit that I did so far yield to the theory of the hare as to slip
+a cartridge into my gun.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+M'Cabe put his gun to his shoulder, lowered it abruptly, and walked up
+to the furze bush.  He stooped and picked up something.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He's not such a fool after all!" he called out; "ye said he'd set a
+blue-bottle, and b' Jove ye weren't far out!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He held up a black object that was neither bird nor beast.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I took the cartridge out of my gun as unobtrusively as possible, and
+M'Cabe and the dog rejoined me with the product of the day's sport.  It
+was a flat-sided bottle, high shouldered, with a short neck; M'Cabe
+extracted the cork and took a sniff.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Mountain dew no less!" (Mr. M'Cabe adhered faithfully to the stock
+phrases of his youth.)  "This never paid the King a shilling!  Give me
+the cup off your flask, Major, till we see what sort it is."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was pretty rank, and even that seasoned vessel, old M'Cabe, admitted
+that it might be drinkable in another couple of years, but hardly in
+less; yet as it ran, a rivulet of fire, through my system, it seemed to
+me that even the water in my boots became less chill.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"In the public interest we're bound to remove it," said M'Cabe, putting
+the bottle into his game bag; "any man that drank enough of that 'd rob
+a church!  Well, anyway, we're not the only people travelling this
+path," he continued; "whoever put his afternoon tea to hide there will
+choose a less fashionable promenade next time.  But indeed the poor man
+couldn't be blamed for not knowing such a universal genius of a dog was
+coming this way!  Didn't I tell you he'd fill the bag for us!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He extracted from his pockets a pair of knitted gloves, and put them
+on; it was equivalent to putting up the shutters.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was shortly after this that we regained touch with civilisation.
+Above the profile of a hill a telegraph post suddenly showed itself
+against the grey of the misty twilight.  We made as bee-like a line for
+it as the nature of the ground permitted, and found ourselves on a
+narrow road, at a point where it was in the act of making a hairpin
+turn before plunging into a valley.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The Beacon Bay road, begad!" said M'Cabe; "I didn't think we were so
+far out of our way.  Let me see now, which way is this we'd best go."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He stood still and looked round him, taking his bearings; in the
+solitude the telegraph posts hummed to each other, full of information
+and entirely reticent.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The position was worse than I thought.  By descending into the valley
+we should, a couple or three miles farther on, strike the coast road
+about six miles from home; by ascending the hill and walking four
+miles, we should arrive at the station of Coppeen Road, and, with luck,
+there intercept the evening train for Owenford.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And that's the best of our play, but we'll have to step out,"
+concluded M'Cabe, shortening the strap of his game-bag, and settling it
+on his back.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If I were you," I said, "I'd chuck that stuff away.  Apart from
+anything else, it's about half a ton extra to carry."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There's many a thing, Major, that you might do that I might not do,"
+returned M'Cabe with solemnity, "and in the contrairy sense the
+statement is equally valid."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He faced the hill with humped shoulders, and fell with no more words
+into his poacher's stride, and I followed him with the best imitation
+of it that I could put up after at least six hours of heavy going.
+M'Cabe is fifteen years older than I am, and I hope that when I am his
+age I shall have more consideration than he for those who are younger
+than myself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was now nearly half-past five o'clock, and by the time we had
+covered a mile of puddles and broken stones it was too dark to see
+which was which.  I felt considerable dubiety about catching the train
+at Coppeen Road, all the more that it was a flag station, demanding an
+extra five minutes in hand.  Probably the engine-driver had long since
+abandoned any expectation of passengers at Coppeen Road, and, if he
+even noticed the signal, would treat it as a practical joke.  It was
+after another quarter of an hour's trudge that a distant sound entered
+into the silence that had fallen upon M'Cabe and me, an intermittent
+grating of wheels upon patches of broken stone, a steady hammer of
+hoofs.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+M'Cabe halted.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That car's bound to be going to Owenford," he said; "I wonder could
+they give us a lift."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A single light (the economical habit of the South of Ireland) began to
+split the foggy darkness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Begad, that's like the go of Reardon's mare!" said M'Cabe, as the
+light swung down upon us.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We held the road like highwaymen, we called upon the unseen driver to
+stop, and he answered to the name of Jerry.  This is not a proof of
+identity in a province where every third man is dignified by the name
+of Jeremiah, but as the car pulled up it was Reardon's yellow mare on
+which the lamplight fell, and we knew that the fates had relented.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We should certainly not catch the train at Coppeen Road, Jerry assured
+us; "she had," he said, "a fashion of running early on Monday nights,
+and in any case if you'd want to catch that thrain, you should make
+like an amber-bush for her."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We agreed that it was too late for the preparation of an ambush.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If the Sergeant had no objections," continued Jerry, progressing
+smoothly towards the tip that would finally be his, "it would be no
+trouble at all to oblige the gentlemen.  Sure it's the big car I have,
+and it's often I took six, yes, and seven on it, going to the races."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I was now aware of two helmeted presences on the car, and a decorous
+voice said that the gentlemen were welcome to a side of the car if they
+liked.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Is that Sergeant Leonard?" asked M'Cabe, who knew every policeman in
+the country.  "Well, Sergeant, you've a knack of being on the spot when
+you're wanted!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And sometimes when he's not!" said I.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was a third and unhelmeted presence on the car, and something of
+stillness and aloofness in it had led me to diagnose a prisoner.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The suggested dispositions were accomplished.  The two policemen and
+the prisoner wedged themselves on one side of the car, M'Cabe and I
+mounted the other, and put the dog on the cushion of the well behind us
+(his late quarters in the dog-box being occupied by half a mountain
+sheep, destined for the hotel larder).  The yellow mare went gallantly
+up to her collar, regardless of her augmented load; M'Cabe and the
+Sergeant leaned to each other across the back of the car, and fell into
+profound and low-toned converse; I smoked, and the dog, propping his
+wet back against mine, made friends with the prisoner.  It may be the
+Irish blood in me that is responsible for the illicit sympathy with a
+prisoner that sometimes incommodes me; I certainly bestowed some of it
+upon the captive, sandwiched between two stalwarts of the R.I.C., and
+learning that the strong arm of the Law was a trifle compared with the
+rest of its person.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What sport had you, Major?" enquired Jerry, as we slackened speed at a
+hill.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I was sitting at the top of the car, under his elbow, and he probably
+thought that I was feeling neglected during the heart-to-heart
+confidences of M'Cabe and the Sergeant.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Not a feather," I replied.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Sure the birds couldn't be in it this weather," said Jerry
+considerately; he had in his time condoled with many sportsmen.  "I'm
+after talking to a man in Coppeen Road station, that was carrying the
+game bag for them gentlemen that has Mr. Purcell's shooting on Shinroe
+Mountain, and what had the four o' them after the day&mdash;only one
+jack-snipe!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They went one better than we did," I said, but, as was intended, I
+felt cheered&mdash;"what day were they there?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"To-day, sure!" answered Jerry, with faint surprise, "and they hadn't
+their luncheon hardly ate when they met one on the mountain that told
+them he seen two fellas walking it, with guns and a dog, no more than
+an hour before them.  'That'll do!' says they, and they turned about
+and back with them to Coppeen Road to tell the police."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Did they see the fellows?" I asked lightly, after a panic-stricken
+pause.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They did not.  Sure they said if they seen them, they'd shoot them
+like rooks," replied Jerry, "and they would too.  It's what the man was
+saying if they cot them lads to-day they'd have left them in the way
+they'd be given up by both doctor and priest!  Oh, they're fierce
+altogether!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I received this information in a silence that was filled to bursting
+with the desire to strangle M'Cabe.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Jerry leaned over my shoulder, and lowered his voice.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They were saying in Coppeen Road that there was a gentleman that came
+on a mothor-bike this morning early, and he had Shinroe shot out by ten
+o'clock, and on with him then up the country; and it isn't the first
+time he was in it.  It's a pity those gentlemen couldn't ketch <I>him</I>!
+<I>They'd</I> mothor-bike him!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was apparent that the poaching of the motor-bicycle upon the
+legitimate preserves of carmen was responsible for this remarkable
+sympathy with the law; I, at all events, had it to my credit that I had
+not gone poaching on a motor-bicycle.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Just here M'Cabe emerged from the heart-to-heart, and nudged me in the
+ribs with a confederate elbow.  I did not respond, being in no mood for
+confederacy, certainly not with M'Cabe.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The Sergeant is after telling me this prisoner he has here is
+prosecuted at the instance of that Syndicate I was telling you about,"
+he whispered hoarsely in my ear, "for hunting Shinroe with greyhounds.
+He was cited to appear last week, and he didn't turn up; he'll be
+before you to-morrow.  I hope the Bench will have a fellow-feeling for
+a fellow-creature!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The whisper ended in the wheezy cough that was Mr. M'Cabe's equivalent
+for a laugh.  It was very close to my ear, and it had somewhere in it
+the metallic click that I had noticed before.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I grunted forbiddingly, and turned my back upon M'Cabe, as far as it is
+possible to do so on an outside car, and we hammered on through the
+darkness.  Once the solitary lamp illumined the prolonged countenance
+of a donkey, and once or twice we came upon a party of sheep lying on
+the road; they melted into the night at the minatory whistle that is
+dedicated to sheep, and on each of these occasions the dentist's dog
+was shaken by strong shudders, and made a convulsive attempt to spring
+from the car in pursuit.  We were making good travelling on a long
+down-grade, a smell of sea-weed was in the mist, and a salt taste was
+on my lips.  It was very cold; I had no overcoat, my boots had plumbed
+the depths of many bogholes, and I found myself shivering like the dog.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was at this point that I felt M'Cabe fumbling at his game-bag, that
+lay between us on the seat.  By dint of a sympathy that I would have
+died rather than betray, I divined that he was going to tap that fount
+of contraband fire that he owed to the dentist's dog.  It was,
+apparently, a matter of some difficulty; I felt him groping and tugging
+at the straps.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I said to myself, waveringly: "Old blackguard!  I won't touch it if he
+offers it to me."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+M'Cabe went on fumbling:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Damn these woolly gloves!  I can't do a hand's turn with them."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the dark I could not see what followed, but I felt him raise his
+arm.  There was a jerk, followed by a howl.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Hold on!" roared M'Cabe, with a new and strange utterance, "Thtop the
+horth!  I've dropped me teeth!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The driver did his best, but with the push of the hill behind her the
+mare took some stopping.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, murder! oh, murder!" wailed M'Cabe, lisping thickly, "I pulled
+them out o' me head with the glove, trying to get it off!" He scrambled
+off the car.  "Give me the lamp!  Me lovely new teeth&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I detached the lamp from its socket with all speed, and handed it to
+M'Cabe, who hurried back on our tracks.  From motives of delicacy I
+remained on the car, as did also the rest of the party.  A minute or
+two passed in awed silence, while the patch of light went to and fro on
+the dark road.  It seemed an intrusion to offer assistance, and an
+uncertainty as to whether to allude to the loss as "them," or "it,"
+made enquiries a difficulty.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"For goodneth'ake have none o' ye any matcheth, that ye couldn't come
+and help me?" demanded the voice of M'Cabe, in indignation blurred
+pathetically by his gosling-like lisp.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I went to his assistance, and refrained with an effort from suggesting
+the employment of that all-accomplished setter, the dentist's dog, in
+the search; it was not the moment for pleasantry.  Not yet.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We crept along, bent double, like gorillas; the long strips of broken
+stones yielded nothing, the long puddles between them were examined in
+vain.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What the dooth will I do to-morrow?" raged M'Cabe, pawing in the
+heather at the road's edge.  "How can I plead when I haven't a blathted
+tooth in me head?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'll give you half a crown this minute, M'Cabe," said I brutally, "if
+you'll say 'Sessions'!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Here the Sergeant joined us, striking matches as he came.  He worked
+his way into the sphere of the car-lamp, he was most painstaking and
+sympathetic, and his oblique allusions to the object of the search were
+a miracle of tact.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I see something white beyond you, Mr. M'Cabe,"' he said respectfully,
+"might that be them?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+M'Cabe swung the lamp as indicated.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No, it might not.  It's a pebble," he replied, with pardonable
+irascibility.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Silence followed, and we worked our way up the hill.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What's that, sir?" ventured the Sergeant, with some excitement,
+stopping again and pointing.  "I think I see the gleam of the gold!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Ah, nonthenth, man!  They're vulcanite!" snapped M'Cabe, more
+irascibly than ever.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The word nonsense was a disastrous effort, and I withdrew into the
+darkness to enjoy it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What colour might vulcanite be, sir?" murmured a voice beside me.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Jerry had joined the search-party; he lighted, as he spoke, an inch of
+candle.  On hearing my explanation he remarked that it was a bad
+chance, and at the same instant the inch of candle slipped from his
+fingers and fell into a puddle.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Divil mend ye for a candle!  Have ye a match, sir?  I haven't a one
+left!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As it happened, I had no matches, my only means of making a light being
+a patent tinder-box.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Have you a match there?" I called out to the invisible occupants of
+the car, which was about fifteen or twenty yards away, advancing
+towards it as I spoke.  The constable politely jumped off and came to
+meet me.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As he was in the act of handing me his match-box, the car drove away
+down the hill.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I state the fact with the bald simplicity that is appropriate to great
+disaster.  To be exact, the yellow mare sprang from inaction into a
+gallop, as if she had been stung by a wasp, and had a start of at least
+fifty yards before either the carman or the constable could get under
+weigh.  The carman, uttering shrill and menacing whistles, led the
+chase, the constable, though badly hampered by his greatcoat, was a
+good second, and the Sergeant, making the best of a bad start, followed
+them into the night.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The yellow mare's head was for home, and her load was on its own legs
+on the road behind her; hysterical yelps from the dentist's dog
+indicated that he also was on his own legs, and was, in all human
+probability, jumping at the mare's nose.  As the rapturous beat of her
+hoofs died away on the down-grade, I recalled the assertion that she
+had pulled the lungs out of two men, and it seemed to me that the
+prisoner had caught the psychological moment on the hop.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They'll not ketch him," said M'Cabe, with the flat calm of a broken
+man, "not to-night anyway.  Nor for a week maybe.  He'll take to the
+mountains."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The silence of the hills closed in upon us, and we were left in our
+original position, plus the lamp of the car, and minus our guns, the
+dentist's dog, and M'Cabe's teeth.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Far, far away, from the direction of Coppeen Road, that sinister
+outpost, where evil rumours were launched, and the night trains were
+waylaid by the amber-bushes, a steady tapping sound advanced towards
+us.  Over the crest of the hill, a quarter of a mile away, a blazing
+and many-pointed star sprang into being, and bore down upon us.  "A
+motor-bike!" ejaculated M'Cabe.  "Take the light and thtop him&mdash;he
+wouldn't know what I wath thaying&mdash;if he ran over them they're done
+for!  For the love o' Merthy tell him to keep the left thide of the
+road!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I took the lamp, and ran towards the bicyclist, waving it as I ran.
+The star, now a moon of acetylene ferocity, slackened speed, and a
+voice behind it said:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What's up?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I stated the case with telegraphic brevity, and the motor-bicycle slid
+slowly past me.  Its rider had a gun slung across his back, my lamp
+revealed a crammed game-bag on the carrier behind him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Sorry I can't assist you," he called back to me, keeping carefully at
+the left-hand side of the road, "but I have an appointment."  Then, as
+an afterthought, "There's a first-rate dentist in Owenford!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The red eye of the tail light glowed a farewell and passed on, like all
+the rest, into the night.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I rejoined M'Cabe.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He clutched my arm, and shook it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That wath Jefferth!  <I>Jefferth</I>, I tell ye!  The dirty poacher!  And
+hith bag full of our birdth!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was not till the lamp went out, which it did some ten minutes
+afterwards, that I drew M 'Cabe from the scene of his loss, gently, as
+one deals with the bereaved, and faced with him the six-mile walk to
+Owenford.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="t4">
+PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY BALLANTYNE, HANSON &amp; CO. LTD.
+<BR>
+EDINBURGH AND LONDON
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<HR>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap12"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="t3b">
+<I>BY THE SAME AUTHORS</I>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+SOME EXPERIENCES OF AN IRISH
+R.M.  With 31 Illustrations by E. &OElig;. SOMERVILLE.  Crown 8vo.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+FURTHER EXPERIENCES OF AN
+IRISH R.M.  With 35 Illustrations by E. &OElig;. SOMERVILLE.  Crown 8vo.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+SOME IRISH YESTERDAYS.  With 51
+Illustrations by E. &OElig;. SOMERVILLE.  Crown 8vo.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+*** <I>In this volume is included a reprint of "Slipper's
+ABC of Fox-hunting" with numerous illustrations.</I>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+ALL ON THE IRISH SHORE: Irish
+Sketches.  With 10 Illustrations by E. &OElig;. SOMERVILLE.  Crown 8vo.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+AN IRISH COUSIN.  Crown 8vo.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+THE REAL CHARLOTTE.  Crown 8vo.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+THE SILVER FOX.  Crown 8vo.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="t3b">
+BY E. &OElig;. SOMERVILLE
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+THE STORY OF THE DISCONTENTED
+LITTLE ELEPHANT.  Told in Pictures and
+Rhyme.  With 7 coloured, and many other
+Illustrations.  Oblong 4to.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="t3">
+LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="t4">
+LONDON, NEW YORK, BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR><BR>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of In Mr. Knox's Country, by 
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+</BODY>
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+</HTML>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of In Mr. Knox's Country, by
+E. OEnone Somerville and Martin Ross
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: In Mr. Knox's Country
+
+Author: E. OEnone Somerville
+        Martin Ross
+
+Illustrator: E. OEnone Somerville
+
+Release Date: November 19, 2011 [EBook #38062]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN MR. KNOX'S COUNTRY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Cover]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Frontispiece: "If ever you see hounds pointing this way, don't spare
+spurs to get to the cliff before them!"  [Page 4.]]
+
+
+
+
+
+In Mr. Knox's Country
+
+By
+
+E. [OE]. Somerville and Martin Ross
+
+
+  Authors of "Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.," "Further
+  Experiences of an Irish R.M.," "Some Irish Yesterdays,"
+  "All on the Irish Shore," "Dan Russel the Fox,"
+  "The Real Charlotte," etc. etc. etc.
+
+
+
+
+With 8 Illustrations by E. [OE]. Somerville
+
+
+
+
+  Longmans, Green and Co.
+  39 Paternoster Row, London
+  Fourth Avenue & 30th Street, New York
+  Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras
+  1915
+
+All rights reserved
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+    I. THE AUSSOLAS MARTIN CAT
+   II. THE FINGER OF MRS. KNOX
+  III. THE FRIEND OF HER YOUTH
+   IV. HARRINGTON'S
+    V. THE MAROAN PONY
+   VI. MAJOR APOLLO RIGGS
+  VII. WHEN I FIRST MET DR. HICKEY
+ VIII. THE BOSOM OF THE McRORYS
+   IX. PUT DOWN ONE AND CARRY TWO
+    X. THE COMTE DE PRALINES
+   XI. THE SHOOTING OF SHINROE
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+"If ever you see hounds pointing this way, don't spare spurs to get
+  to the cliff before them!" . . . . . . . . . . . . . _Frontispiece_
+
+Kitty the Shakes
+
+"I heard scald-crow laughter behind me in the shawls"
+
+"Lyney's a tough dog!"
+
+"Walkin' Aisy"
+
+James
+
+Miss Cooney O'Rattigan
+
+Miss Larkie McRory
+
+
+
+
+IN MR. KNOX'S COUNTRY
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE AUSSOLAS MARTIN CAT
+
+Flurry Knox and I had driven some fourteen miles to a tryst with one
+David Courtney, of Fanaghy.  But, at the appointed cross-roads, David
+Courtney was not.  It was a gleaming morning in mid-May, when
+everything was young and tense and thin and fit to run for its life,
+like a Derby horse.  Above us was such of the spacious bare country as
+we had not already climbed, with nothing on it taller than a thorn-bush
+from one end of it to the other.  The hill-top blazed with yellow
+furze, and great silver balls of cloud looked over its edge.  Nearly as
+white were the little white-washed houses that were tucked in and out
+of the grey rocks on the hill-side.
+
+"It's up there somewhere he lives," said Flurry, turning his cart
+across the road; "which'll you do, hold the horse or go look for him?"
+
+I said I would go to look for him.  I mounted the hill by a wandering
+bohireen resembling nothing so much as a series of bony elbows; a
+white-washed cottage presently confronted me, clinging, like a
+sea-anemone, to a rock.  I knocked at the closed door, I tapped at a
+window held up by a great, speckled foreign shell, but without success.
+Climbing another elbow, I repeated the process at two successive
+houses, but without avail.  All was as deserted as Pompeii, and, as at
+Pompeii, the live rock in the road was worn smooth by feet and scarred
+with wheel tracks.
+
+An open doorway faced me; I stooped beneath its lintel and asked of
+seeming vacancy if there were "anyone inside."  There was no reply.  I
+advanced into a clean kitchen, with a well-swept earthen floor, and was
+suddenly aware of a human presence very close to me.
+
+A youngish woman, with a heavy mop of dark hair, and brown eyes staring
+at the opposite wall, was sitting at the end of a settle behind the
+door.  Every bit of her was trembling.  She looked past me as if I did
+not exist.  Feeling uncertain as to whether she or I were mad, I put to
+her my question as to where David Courtney lived, without much
+expectation of receiving an answer.
+
+Still shaking from head to foot, and without turning her eyes, she
+replied:
+
+"A small piece to the north.  The house on the bare rock."
+
+The situation showed no symptom of expansion; I faltered thanks to her
+profile and returned to Flurry.
+
+The house of David Courtney produced David Courtney's large and
+handsome wife, who told us that Himself was gone to a funeral, and all
+that was in the village was gone to it, but there was a couple of the
+boys below in the bog.
+
+"What have they done with those cubs?" asked Flurry.
+
+Mrs. Courtney shot at him a dark-blue side-glance, indulgent and
+amused, and, advancing to the edge of her rock terrace, made a trumpet
+of her hands and projected a long call down the valley.
+
+"Mikeen!  Con!  Come hither!"
+
+From a brown patch in the green below came a far-away response, and we
+presently saw two tall lads coming towards us, running up the hill as
+smoothly and easily as a couple of hounds.  Their legs were bare and
+stained with bog-mould, they were young and light and radiant as the
+May weather.
+
+I did not withhold my opinion of them from their proprietor.
+
+"Why, then, I have six more as good as them!" replied Mrs. Courtney,
+her hands on her hips.
+
+We took the horse from the shafts and pushed him, deeply suspicious,
+into a darksome lair, in one corner of which glimmered a pale object,
+either pig or calf.  When this was done we followed Mikeen and Con up
+through blossoming furze and blue-grey rock to the ridge of the hill,
+and there came face to face with the vast blue dazzle of the Atlantic,
+with a long line of cliffs standing it off, in snowy lather, as far as
+eye could follow them into the easterly haze.
+
+"That's the cliff over-right you now," said one of the boys, pointing
+downwards, with a hand dark with bog-stuff, to a grey and green wedge
+thrust out into the blue.  "It's there where she have her den.  She
+have a pat' down for herself in it--it's hardly a bird could walk
+it--the five pups was following her, and two o' them rolled down into
+the strand, and our dogs held them.  Ourselves was below in the cove
+gathering seaweed."
+
+"Make a note of it now, Major," said Flurry, "and if ever you see
+hounds pointing this way, don't spare spurs to get to the cliff before
+them!"
+
+"Why don't you get them out and blow up the place?"
+
+"Is it get them out of that hole!" said one of the boys.  "If all the
+foxes in Europe was inside in it you couldn't get them out!"
+
+"We mightn't want them either," said Flurry, his eye ranging the face
+of the cliff, and assimilating its uncompromising negations.
+
+"Then there's plenty that would!" returned Mikeen, looking at us with
+an eye as blue and bright as the sea.  "There was a man east here that
+cot a fox and her five young ones in the one night, and he got three
+half-crowns for every lad o' them!"
+
+"He'd be turned out of hell for doing that," said Flurry, very severely.
+
+We went back to the cottage on the rock, and the matter entered upon
+its more serious phase.  I took no part in the negotiations, and
+employed myself in converse with Mrs. Courtney, who--it may not be out
+of place to recall--informed me, amongst other domestic details, that
+the farm wouldn't carry all the children she had, and that nowadays,
+when the ger'rls would be going to America, it's white nightdresses and
+flannelette nightdresses she should give them; and further, that she
+thought, if she lived to be as old as a goat, she'd never see them so
+tasty.
+
+On the way home I asked Flurry what he was going to do with the two
+cubs, now immured in a market basket under the seat of the dog-cart.
+
+Flurry was ambiguous and impenetrable; there were certain matters in
+which Flurry trusted nobody, knowing the darkness of his own heart and
+the inelasticity of other people's points of view.
+
+"That woman, you know, that told you the way," he remarked, with
+palpable irrelevance, "'Kitty the Shakes,' they call her--they say she
+mightn't speak to anyone once in three months, and she shakes that way
+then.  It's a pity that was the house you went into first."
+
+[Illustration: Kitty the Shakes.]
+
+"Why so?" said I.
+
+"That's the why!" said Flurry.
+
+
+It was during the week following this expedition that Philippa and I
+stayed for a few days at Aussolas, where Flurry and Mrs. Flurry were
+now more or less permanently in residence.  The position of guest in
+old Mrs. Knox's house was one often fraught with more than the normal
+anxieties proper to guests.  Her mood was like the weather, a matter
+incalculable and beyond control; it governed the day, and was the _leit
+motif_ in the affairs of the household.  I hope that it may be given to
+me to live until my mood also is as a dark tower full of armed men.
+
+On the evening of our arrival my wife, whose perception of danger is
+comparable only to that of the wild elephant, warned me that Mrs. Knox
+was rheumatic, and that I was on no account to condole with her.  Later
+on the position revealed itself.  Mrs. Knox's Dublin doctor had ordered
+her to Buxton with as little delay as possible; furthermore, she was to
+proceed to Brighton for the summer, possibly for the winter also.  She
+had put Aussolas on a house agent's books, "out of spite," Flurry said
+sourly; "I suppose she thinks I'd pop the silver, or sell the feather
+beds."
+
+It was a tribute to Mrs. Knox's character that her grandson treated her
+as a combatant in his own class, and did not for an instant consider
+himself bound to allow her weight for either age or sex.
+
+At dinner that night Mrs. Knox was as favourable to me as usual; yet it
+was pointed out to me by Mrs. Flurry that she was wearing two shawls
+instead of one, always an indication to be noted as a portent of storm.
+At bridge she played a very sharp-edged game, in grimness scarcely
+mitigated by two well-brought-off revokes on the part of Philippa, who
+was playing with Flurry; a gross and unprincipled piece of chivalry on
+my wife's part that was justly resented by Mr. Knox.
+
+Next morning the lady of the house was invisible, and Mullins, her
+maid, was heard to lament to an unknown sympathiser on the back stairs
+that the divil in the wild woods wouldn't content her.
+
+In the grove at Aussolas, on a height behind the castle, romantically
+named Mount Ida, there is a half-circle of laurels that screens, with
+pleasing severity, an ancient bench and table of stone.  The spot
+commands a fair and far prospect of Aussolas Lake, and, nearer at hand,
+it permitted a useful outlook upon the kitchen garden and its affairs.
+When old Mrs. Knox first led me thither to admire the view, she
+mentioned that it was a place to which she often repaired when the cook
+was on her trail with enquiries as to what the servants were to have
+for dinner.
+
+Since our expedition to Fanaghy the glory of the weather had remained
+unshaken, and each day there was a shade of added warmth in the
+sunshine and a more caressing quality in the wind.  Flurry and I went
+to Petty Sessions in the morning, and returned to find that Mrs. Knox
+was still in her room, and that our respective wives were awaiting us
+with a tea-basket in the classic shades of Mount Ida.  Mrs. Knox had
+that mysterious quality of attraction given to some persons, and some
+dogs, of forming a social vortex into which lesser beings inevitably
+swim; yet I cannot deny that her absence induced a sneaking sensation
+of holiday.  Had she been there, for example, Mrs. Flurry would
+scarcely have indicated, with a free gesture, the luxuriance of the
+asparagus beds in the kitchen garden below, nor promised to have a
+bundle of it cut for us before we went home; still less would she and
+Philippa have smoked cigarettes, a practice considered by Mrs. Knox to
+be, in women, several degrees worse than drinking.
+
+To us there, through the green light of young beech leaves and the
+upstriking azure glare of myriads of bluebells, came the solid presence
+of John Kane.  It would be hard to define John Kane's exact status at
+Aussolas; Flurry had once said that, whether it was the house, or the
+garden, or the stables, whatever it'd be that you wanted to do, John
+Kane'd be in it before you to hinder you; but that had been in a moment
+of excusable irritation, when John Kane had put a padlock on the oat
+loft, and had given the key to Mrs. Knox.
+
+John Kane now ascended to us, and came to a standstill, with his soft
+black hat in his hands; it was dusty, so were his boots, and the
+pockets of his coat bulked large.  Among the green drifts and flakes of
+the pale young beech leaves his bushy beard looked as red as a
+squirrel's tail.
+
+"I have the commands here, Master Flurry," he began, "and it's to
+yourself I'd sooner give them.  As for them ger'rls that's inside in
+the kitchen, they have every pup in the place in a thrain at the back
+door, and, if your tobacco went asthray, it's me that would be blemt."
+
+"The commands"--_i.e._ some small parcels--were laid on the stone
+table, minor pockets yielded an assortment of small moneys that were
+each in turn counted and placed in heaps by their consort parcels.
+
+"And as for the bottle, the misthress wrote down for me," said John
+Kane, his eye rounding up his audience like a sheep-dog, "I got me
+'nough with the same bottle.  But sure them's the stupidest people in
+Hennessy's!  'Twas to Hennessy himself I gave the misthress's paper,
+and he was there looking at it for a while.  'What have she in it?'
+says he to me.  'How would I know,' says I, 'me that have no learning?'
+He got the spy-glass to it then, and 'twas shortly till all was in the
+shop was gethered in it looking at it.  'Twould take an expairt to read
+it!' says one fella----"
+
+"True for him!" said Flurry.
+
+"----  'She have written it in Latin!' says Hennessy.  'Faith she's
+able to write it that way, or anny other way for yee!' says I.  'Well,
+I'll tell ye now what ye'll do,' says Hennessy.  'There's a boy in the
+Medical Hall, and he's able to read all languages.  Show it to him,'
+says he.  I showed it then to the boy in the Medical Hall.  Sure, the
+very minute he looked at it--'Elliman's Embrocation,' says he."  John
+Kane waved his hand slightly to one side; his gestures had throughout
+been supple and restrained.  "Sure them's the stupidest people in
+Hennessy's!"
+
+My sympathies were with the house of Hennessy; I, too, had encountered
+Mrs. Knox's handwriting, and realised the high imaginative and
+deductive qualities needed in its interpreter.  No individual word was
+decipherable, but, with a bold reader, groups could be made to conform
+to a scheme based on probabilities.
+
+"You can tell the mistress what they were saying at Hennessy's about
+her," said Flurry.
+
+"I will, your honour," replied John, accepting the turn in the
+conversation as easily as a skilful motorist changes gear.  "I suppose
+you'll have a job for me at Tory Lodge when I get the sack from the
+misthress?"
+
+"No, but they tell me I'm to be put on the Old Age Pension Committee,"
+returned Flurry, "and I might get a chance to do something for you if
+you'd give over dyeing that beard you have."
+
+"I'm sorry to say it's the Almighty is dyeing my beard for me, sir,"
+replied John Kane, fingering a grey streak on his chin, "and I think
+He's after giving yourself a touch, too!"  He glanced at the side of
+Flurry's head, and his eye travelled on to mine.  There was an almost
+flagrant absence of triumph in it.
+
+He put aside a beechen bough with his hand; "I'll leave the things on
+the hall table for you, sir," he said, choosing the perfect moment for
+departure, and passed out of sight.  The bough swung into place behind
+him; it was like an exit in a pastoral play.
+
+"She never told me about the embrocation," said Sally, leaning back
+against the mossed stones of the bench and looking up into the web of
+branches.  "She never will admit that she's ill."
+
+"Poor old Mrs. Knox!" said Philippa compassionately, "I thought she
+looked so ill last night when she was playing bridge.  Such a tiny
+fragile thing, sitting wrapped up in that great old chair----"
+
+Philippa is ineradicably romantic, yet my mind, too, dwelt upon the old
+autocrat lying there, ill and undefeated, in the heart of her ancient
+fortress.
+
+"Fragile!" said Flurry, "you'd best not tell her that.  With my
+grandmother no one's ill till they're dead, and no one's dead till
+they're buried!"
+
+Away near the house the peacock uttered his defiant screech, a note of
+exclamation that seemed entirely appropriate to Aussolas; the
+turkey-cock in the yard accepted the challenge with effusion, and from
+further away the voice of Mrs. Knox's Kerry bull, equally instant in
+taking offence, ascended the gamut of wrath from growl to yell.
+Blended with these voices was another--a man's voice, in loud harangue,
+advancing down the long beech walk to the kitchen garden.  As it
+approached, the wood-pigeons bolted in panic, with distracted clappings
+of wings, from the tall firs by the garden wall in which they were wont
+to sit arranging plans of campaign with regard to the fruit.  We sat in
+tense silence.  The latch of the garden gate clicked, and the voice
+said in stentorian tones:
+
+"----My father 'e kept a splendid table!"
+
+"I hear wheels!" breathed Sally Knox.
+
+A hawthorn tree and a laburnum tree leaned over the garden gate, and
+from beneath their canopy of cream and pale gold there emerged the
+bath-chair of Mrs. Knox, with Mrs. Knox herself seated in it.  It was
+propelled by Mullins--even at that distance the indignation of Mullins
+was discernible--and it progressed up the central path.  Beside it
+walked the personage whose father had kept a splendid table.
+Parenthetically it may be observed that he did credit to it.
+
+"Glory be to Moses!  Look at my grandmother!" said Flurry under his
+breath.  "How fragile she is!  Who the dickens has she got hold of?"
+
+"He thinks she's deaf, anyhow," said Sally.
+
+"That's where he makes the mistake!" returned Flurry.
+
+"I don't see your glawss, Mrs. Knox," shouted the stout gentleman.
+
+"That's very possible," replied the incisive and slightly cracked voice
+of Mrs. Knox, "because the little that is left of it is in the mortar
+on the wall, to keep thieves out, which it fails to do."
+
+The pair passed on, and paused, still in high converse, at the
+asparagus beds; Mullins, behind the bath-chair, wiped her indignant
+brow.
+
+"You'll go home without the asparagus," whispered Flurry, "she has
+every stick of it counted by now!"
+
+They moved on, heading for the further gate of the garden.
+
+"I'll bet a sovereign he's come after the house!" Flurry continued,
+following the _cortege_ with a malevolent eye.
+
+Later, when we returned to the house, we found a motor-bicycle, dusty
+and dwarfish, leaning against the hall door steps.  Within was the
+sound of shouting.  It was then half-past seven.
+
+"Is it possible that she's keeping him for dinner?" said Sally.
+
+"Take care he's not staying for the night!" said Flurry.  "Look at the
+knapsack he has on the table!"
+
+"There's only one room he can possibly have," said Mrs. Flurry, with a
+strange and fixed gaze at her lord, "and that's the James the Second
+room.  The others are cleared for the painters."
+
+"Oh, that will be all right," replied her lord, easily.
+
+When I came down to dinner I found the new arrival planted on his
+short, thick legs in front of the fireplace, still shouting at Mrs.
+Knox, who, notwithstanding the sinister presence of the two shawls of
+ill-omen, was listening with a propitious countenance.  She looked very
+tired, and I committed the _gaucherie_ of saying I was sorry to hear
+she had not been well.
+
+"Oh, that was nothing!" said Mrs. Knox, with a wave of her tiny,
+sunburnt, and bediamonded hand.  "I've shaken that off, 'like dewdrops
+from the lion's mane!'  This is Mr. Tebbutts, from--er--England, Major
+Yeates."
+
+Mr. Tebbutts, after a bewildered stare, presumably in search of the
+lion, proclaimed his gratification at meeting me, in a voice that might
+have been heard in the stable yard.
+
+At dinner the position developed apace.  The visitor was, it appeared,
+the representative of a patriarchal family, comprising samples of all
+the relationships mentioned in the table of affinities, and
+_fortissimo_, and at vast length, he laid down their personal histories
+and their various requirements.  It was pretty to see how old Mrs.
+Knox, ill as she looked, and suffering as she undoubtedly was, mastered
+the bowling.
+
+Did the Tebbutts ladies exact bathing for their young?  The lake
+supplied it.
+
+("It's all mud and swallow-holes!" said Flurry in an audible aside.)
+
+Did the brothers demand trout fishing? the schoolboys rabbit shooting?
+the young ladies lawn tennis and society?--all were theirs, especially
+the latter.  "My grandson and his wife will be within easy reach in
+their own house, Tory Lodge!"
+
+The remark about the swallow-holes had not been lost upon the Lady of
+the Lake.
+
+Mrs. Knox had her glass of port at dessert, an act equivalent to
+snapping her rheumatic fingers in our faces, and withdrew, stiff but
+erect, and still on the best of terms with her prospective tenant.  As
+I held the door open for her, she said to me:
+
+"''Twas whispered in heaven, 'twas muttered in hell.'"
+
+By an amazing stroke of luck I was enabled to continue:
+
+"'And echo caught softly the sound as it fell!'" with a glance at Mr.
+Tebbutts that showed I was aware the quotation was directed at his
+missing aspirates.
+
+As the door closed, the visitor turned to Flurry and said impressively:
+
+"There's just one thing, Mr. Knox, I should like to mention, if you
+will allow me.  Are the drains quite in order?"
+
+"God knows," said Flurry, pulling hard at a badly-lighted cigarette and
+throwing himself into a chair by the turf fire.
+
+"Mrs. Knox's health has held out against them for about sixty years," I
+remarked.
+
+"Well, as to that," replied Mr. Tebbutts, "I feel it is only right to
+mention that the dear old lady was very giddy with me in the garden
+this afternoon."
+
+Flurry received this remarkable statement without emotion.
+
+"Maybe she's taken a fancy to you!" he said brutally.  "If it wasn't
+that it was whipped cream."
+
+Mr. Tebbutts' bulging eyes sought mine in complete mystification; I
+turned to the fire, and to it revealed my emotions.  Flurry was not at
+all amused.
+
+"Well--er--I understood her maid to say she 'ad bin ailing," said the
+guest after a pause.  "I'd have called it a kind of a megrim myself,
+and, as I say, I certainly perceived a sort of charnel-'ouse smell in
+the room I'm in.  And look 'ere, Mr. Knox, 'ere's another thing.  'Ow
+about rats?  You know what ladies are; there's one of my
+sisters-in-law, Mrs. William Tebbutts, who'd just scream the 'ouse down
+if she 'eard the 'alf of what was goin' on behind the panelling in my
+room this evening."
+
+"Anyone that's afraid of rats had better keep out of Aussolas," said
+Flurry, getting up with a yawn.
+
+"Mr. Tebbutts is in the James the Second room, isn't he?" said I, idly.
+"Isn't that the room with the powdering-closet off it?"
+
+"It is," said Flurry.  "Anything else you'd like to know?"
+
+I recognised that someone had blundered, presumably myself, and made a
+move for the drawing-room.
+
+Mrs. Knox had retired when we got there; my wife and Mrs. Flurry
+followed suit as soon as might be; and the guest said that, if the
+gentlemen had no objection, he thought he'd turn in too.
+
+Flurry and I shut the windows--fresh air is a foible of the female
+sex--heaped turf on the fire, drew up chairs in front of it, and
+composed ourselves for that sweetest sleep of all, the sleep that has
+in it the bliss of abandonment, and is made almost passionate by the
+deep underlying knowledge that it can be but temporary.
+
+How long we had slumbered I cannot say; it seemed but a moment when a
+door opened in our dreams, and the face of Mr. Tebbutts was developed
+before me in the air like the face of the Cheshire cat, only without
+the grin.
+
+"Mr. Knox!  Gentlemen!" he began, as if he were addressing a meeting.
+The thunder had left his voice; he stopped to take breath.  He was in
+his shirt and trousers, and the laces of his boots trailed on the floor
+behind him.  "I've 'ad a bit of a start upstairs.  I was just winding
+up my watch at the dressing-table when I saw some kind of an animal
+gloide past the fireplace and across the room----"
+
+"What was it like?" interrupted Flurry, sitting up in his chair.
+
+"Well, Mr. Knox, it's 'ard to say what it was like.  It wasn't a cat,
+nor yet it wasn't what you could call a squirrel----"
+
+Flurry got on to his feet.
+
+"By the living Jingo!" he said, turning to me an awestruck countenance;
+"he's seen the Aussolas Martin Cat!"
+
+I had never before heard of the Aussolas Martin Cat, and it is
+indisputable that a slight chill crept down my backbone.
+
+Mr. Tebbutts' eyes bulged more than ever, and his lower lip fell.
+
+"What way did it go?" said Flurry; "did it look at you?"
+
+"It seemed to disappear in that recess by the door," faltered the seer
+of the vision; "it just vanished!"
+
+"I don't know if it's for my grandmother or for me," said Flurry in a
+low voice, "but it's a death in the house anyway."
+
+The colour in Mr. Tebbutts' face deepened to a glossy sealing-wax red.
+
+"If one of you gents would come upstairs with me," he said, "I think
+I'll just get my traps together.  I can be back at the 'otel in 'alf an
+'our----"
+
+Flurry and I accompanied Mr. Tebbutts to the James the Second room.
+Over Mrs. Knox's door there were panes of glass, and light came forth
+from them.  (It is my belief that Mrs. Knox never goes to bed.)  We
+trod softly as we passed it, and went along the uncarpeted boards of
+the Musicians' Gallery above the entrance hall.
+
+There certainly was a peculiar odour in the James the Second room, and
+the adjective "charnel-'ouse" had not been misapplied.
+
+I thought about a dead rat, and decided that the apparition had been
+one of the bandit tribe of tawny cats that inhabited the Aussolas
+stables.  And yet legends of creatures that haunted old houses and
+followed old families came back to me; of one in particular, a tale of
+medieval France, wherein "a yellow furry animal" ran down the throat of
+a sleeping lady named Sagesse.
+
+Mr. Tebbutts, by this time fully dressed, was swiftly bestowing a brush
+and comb in his knapsack.  Perhaps he, too, had read the legend about
+Madame Sagesse.  Flurry was silently, and with a perturbed countenance,
+examining the room; rapping at the panelling and peering up the
+cavernous chimney; I heard him sniff as he did so.  Possibly he also
+held the dead-rat theory.  He opened the flap in the door of the
+powdering-closet, and, striking a match, held it through the opening.
+I looked over his shoulder, and had a glimpse of black feathers on the
+floor, and a waft of a decidedly "charnel-'ouse" nature.  "Damn!"
+muttered Flurry to himself, and slammed down the flap.
+
+"I think, sir," said Mr. Tebbutts, with his knapsack in his hand and
+his cap on his head, "I must ask you to let Mrs. Knox know that this
+'ouse won't suit Mrs. William Tebbutts.  You might just say I was
+called away rather sudden.  Of course, you won't mention what I saw
+just now--I wouldn't wish to upset the pore old lady----"
+
+We followed him from the room, and treading softly as before, traversed
+the gallery, and began to descend the slippery oak stairs.  Flurry was
+still looking furtively about him, and the thought crossed my mind that
+in the most hard-headed Irishman there wanders a vein of superstition.
+
+Before we had reached the first landing, the violent ringing of a
+handbell broke forth in the room with the light over the door, followed
+by a crash of fire-irons; then old Mrs. Knox's voice calling
+imperatively for Mullins.
+
+There was a sound of rushing, slippered feet, a bumping of furniture;
+with a squall from Mullins the door flew open, and I was endowed with a
+never-to-be-forgotten vision of Mrs. Knox, swathed in hundreds of
+shawls, in the act of hurling the tongs at some unseen object.
+
+Almost simultaneously there was a scurry of claws on the oak floor
+above us, Mrs. Knox's door was slammed, and something whizzed past me.
+I am thankful to think that I possess, as a companion vision to that of
+Mrs. Knox, the face of Mr. Tebbutts with the candle light on it as he
+looked up from the foot of the stairs and saw the Aussolas Martin Cat
+in his track.
+
+"Look out, Tebbutts!" yelled Flurry.  "It's you he's after!"
+
+Mr. Tebbutts here passed out of the incident into the night, and the
+Aussolas Martin Cat was swallowed up by a large hole in the surbase in
+the corner of the first landing.
+
+"He'll come out in the wine-cellar," said Flurry, with the calm that
+was his in moments of crisis, "the way the cat did."
+
+I pulled myself together.
+
+"What's happened to the other Fanaghy cub?" I enquired with, I hope,
+equal calmness.
+
+"He's gone to blazes," replied Flurry; "there isn't a wall in this
+house that hasn't a way in it.  I knew I'd never have luck with them
+after you asking the way from Kitty the Shakes."
+
+As is usual in my dealings with Flurry, the fault was mine.
+
+While I reflected on this, the stillness of the night was studded in a
+long and diminishing line by the running pant of the motor-bicycle.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE FINGER OF MRS. KNOX
+
+A being stood in a dark corner under the gallery of the hall at
+Aussolas Castle; a being who had arrived noiselessly on bare feet, and
+now revealed its presence by hard breathing.
+
+"Come in, Mary," commanded old Mrs. Knox without turning her head;
+"make up the fire."
+
+"I will, ma'am," murmured the being, advancing with an apologetic eye
+upon me, and an undulating gait suggestive of a succession of incipient
+curtsies.
+
+She was carrying an armful of logs, and, having stacked them on the
+fire in a heap calculated to set alight any chimney less roomy than the
+Severn Tunnel, she retired by way of the open hall door with the same
+deferential stealth with which she had entered.
+
+"The hen-woman," explained Mrs. Knox casually, "the only person in this
+place who knows a dry log from a wet one."
+
+Like all successful rulers, Mrs. Knox had the power of divining in her
+underlings their special gifts, and of wresting them to the sphere in
+which they shone, no matter what their normal functions might be.  She
+herself pervaded all spheres.
+
+"There's no pie but my grandmother has a finger in it," was Flurry
+Knox's epitome of these high qualities; a sour tribute from one
+freebooter to another.
+
+"If the Mistress want a thing she mus' have it!" was the comment of
+John Kane, the gamekeeper, as he threw down the spade with which he was
+digging out a ferret, and armed himself with a holly-bush wherewith to
+sweep the drawing-room chimney.
+
+As Mrs. Knox and I sat by the hen-woman's noble fire, and gossiped, the
+cook panted in with the tea-tray; the butler, it appeared, had gone out
+to shoot a rabbit for dinner.  All these things pointed to the fact
+that Mrs. Knox's granddaughter-in-law, Mrs. Flurry, was not, at the
+moment, in residence at Aussolas.  The Jungle was creeping in; Sally
+Knox, by virtue, I suppose, of her English mother, spasmodically
+endeavoured to keep it out, but with her departure the Wild triumphed.
+
+It was an October afternoon, grey and still; the hall door stood open,
+as indeed it always did at Aussolas, and on the topmost of the broad
+limestone steps Mrs. Knox's white woolly dog sat, and magisterially
+regarded lake and wood and lawn.  The tawny bracken flowed like a sea
+to the palings that bounded the lawn; along its verge squatted the
+rabbits, motionless for the most part, sometimes languidly changing
+their ground, with hops like the dying efforts of a mechanical toy.
+The woolly dog had evidently learned in many fruitless charges the
+futility of frontal attack; a close and menacing supervision from the
+altitude of the steps was all that was consistent with dignity, but an
+occasional strong shudder betrayed his emotion.  The open door framed
+also a pleasing view of my new car, standing in beautiful repose at the
+foot of the steps, splashed with the mud of a twenty-mile run from an
+outlying Petty Sessions Court; her presence added, for me, the touch of
+romance.
+
+It was twilight in the back of the hall by the fireplace; the flames of
+the logs, branching like antlers, made a courteous and not too
+searching inquisition into dark corners, and lighted with a very
+suitable evasiveness Mrs. Knox's Witch of Endor profile.  She wore her
+usual velvet bonnet; the rest of her attire recalled to my memory the
+summary of it by her kinswoman, Lady Knox, "A rag bag held together by
+diamond brooches."  Yet, according to her wont, her personality was the
+only thing that counted; it reduced all externals to a proper
+insignificance.
+
+The object of my visit had ostensibly been to see her grandson, but
+Flurry was away for the night.
+
+"He's sleeping at Tory Lodge," said Mrs. Knox.  "He's cubbing at
+Drumvoortneen, and he has to start early.  He tried to torment me into
+allowing him to keep the hounds in the yard here this season, but I had
+the pleasure of telling him that old as I might be, I still retained
+possession of my hearing, my sense of smell, and, to a certain extent,
+of my wits."
+
+"I should have thought," I said discreetly, "that Tory Lodge was more
+in the middle of his country."
+
+"Undoubtedly," replied Flurry's grandmother; "but it is not in the
+middle of my straw, my meal, my buttermilk, my firewood, and anything
+else of mine that can be pilfered for the uses of a kennel!"  She
+concluded with a chuckle that might have been uttered by a scald-crow.
+
+I was pondering a diplomatic reply, when the quiet evening was rent by
+a shrill challenge from the woolly dog.
+
+"Thy sentinel am I!" he vociferated, barking himself backwards into the
+hall, in proper strategic retreat upon his base.
+
+A slow foot ascended the steps, and the twilight in the hall deepened
+as a man's figure appeared in the doorway; a middle-aged man, with his
+hat in one hand, and in the other a thick stick, with which he was
+making respectfully intimidating demonstrations to the woolly dog.
+
+"Who are you?" called out Mrs. Knox from her big chair.
+
+"I'm Casey, your ladyship," replied the visitor in a deplorable voice,
+"from Killoge."
+
+"Cornelius Casey?" queried Mrs. Knox.
+
+"No, but his son, your honour ma'am, Stephen Casey, one of the tenants."
+
+"Well, come in, Stephen," said Mrs. Knox affably, supplementing her
+spectacles with a gold-rimmed single eye-glass, and looking at him with
+interest.  "I knew your father well in old times, when he used to stop
+the earths in Killoge Wood for the Colonel.  They tell me that's all
+cut down now?"
+
+"There's not the boiling of a kettle left in it afther Goggin, my
+lady!" said Casey eagerly.  Mrs. Knox cut him short.
+
+"Many a good hunt the Colonel had out of Killoge, and I too, for the
+matter of that!" she added, turning to me; "my cousin Bessie Hamilton
+and I were the only huntresses in the country in those days, and people
+thought us shocking tomboys, I believe.  Now, what with driving motors
+and riding astride, the gentlemen are all ladies, and the ladies are
+gentlemen!"  With another scald-crow chuckle she turned to Casey.  "Did
+your father ever tell you of the great hunt out of Killoge into the
+Fanaghy cliffs?"
+
+"He did, your ladyship, he did!" responded Casey, with a touch of life
+in his lamentable voice.  "Often he told me that it knocked fire from
+his eyes to see yourself facing in at the Killoge river."
+
+"I was riding Bijou, the grandmother of old Trinket, in that run," said
+Mrs. Knox, leaning back in her chair, with a smile that had something
+of the light of other days in it.
+
+I remembered the story that Colonel Knox had run away with her after a
+hunt, and wondered if that had been the occasion when she had knocked
+fire from the eyes of Cornelius Casey.
+
+Her thin old hand drooped in momentary languor over the arm of her
+chair; and the woolly dog thrust his nose under it, with a beady eye
+fixed upon the hot cakes.
+
+"Here!" said Mrs. Knox, sitting up, and throwing a buttery bun on the
+floor.  "Be off with you!  Well, Casey," she went on, "what is it you
+want with me?"
+
+"Great trouble I got, Mrs. Knox, your honour ma'am," replied Casey from
+the door-mat, "great trouble entirely."  He came a step or two nearer.
+He had a long, clean-shaved face, with mournful eyes, like a sick
+bloodhound, and the enviable, countryman's thatch of thick, strong
+hair, with scarcely a touch of grey in it.
+
+"That Goggin, that has the shop at Killoge Cross, has me processed.
+I'm pairsecuted with him; and the few little bastes I has, and me
+donkey and all--" his voice thinned to a whimper, "he's to drive them
+to-morrow----"
+
+"I suppose that's Goggin, the Gombeen?" said Mrs. Knox; "how were you
+fool enough to get into dealings with him?"
+
+The statement of Casey's wrongs occupied quite ten minutes, and was
+generous in detail.  His land was bad, ever and always.  The grass that
+was in it was as bare as that you could pick pins in it.  He had no
+pushing land at all for cattle.  Didn't he buy a heifer at Scabawn fair
+and the praisings she got was beyant all raves, and he had her one
+month, and kinder company he never had, and she giving seven pints at
+every meal, and wasn't that the divil's own produce?  One month,
+indeed, was all he had her till she got a dropsy, and the dropsy
+supported her for a while, and when it left her she faded away.  And
+didn't his wife lose all her hens in one week?  "They fell dead on her,
+like hailstones!"  He ceased, and a tear wandered down the channels in
+his long cheek.
+
+"How much do you owe Goggin?" asked Mrs. Knox sharply.
+
+What Casey owed to Goggin had, as might have been expected, but a
+remote relation to the sum that Goggin was now endeavouring to extract
+from Casey.  At the heart of the transaction was a shop account,
+complicated by loans of single pounds (and in my mind's eye I could
+see, and with my mind's nose I could smell, the dirty crumpled notes).
+It was further entangled by per-contra accounts of cribs of turf,
+scores of eggs, and a day's work now and again.  I had, from the
+judgment seat, listened to many such recitals, so, apparently, had Mrs.
+Knox, judging by the ease with which she straightened Casey's devious
+narrative at critical points, and shepherded him to his facts, like a
+cunning old collie steering a sheep to its pen.  The conclusion of the
+matter was that Goggin was, on the morrow, to take possession of
+Casey's remaining stock, consisting of three calves, a donkey, and a
+couple of goats, in liquidation of a debt of L15, and that he, Stephen
+Casey, knew that Mrs. Knox would never be satisfied to see one of her
+own tenants wronged.
+
+"I have no tenants," replied Mrs. Knox tartly; "the Government is your
+landlord now, and I wish you joy of each other!"
+
+"Then I wish to God it was yourself we had in it again!" lamented
+Stephen Casey; "it was better for us when the gentry was managing their
+own business.  They'd give patience, and they'd have patience."
+
+"Well, that will do now," said Mrs. Knox; "go round to the servants'
+hall and have your tea.  I'll see what I can do."
+
+There was silence while Stephen Casey withdrew.  As the sound of his
+hobnailed tread died away the woolly dog advanced very stiffly to the
+hall door, and, with his eyes fixed on the departing visitor, licked
+his lips hungrily.
+
+"When those rascals in Parliament took our land from us," said Mrs.
+Knox, flinging a sod of turf on to the huge fire with practised aim,
+"we thought we should have some peace, now we're both beggared and
+bothered!"  She turned upon me a countenance like that of an ancient
+and spectacled falcon.  "Major Yeates!  You have often offered me a
+drive in your motor-car.  Will you take me to Killoge to-morrow
+morning?"
+
+It was a brisk and windy morning, with the sharpness of 9 A.M. in it,
+when Mullins, Mrs. Knox's tirewoman, met me at the hall door of
+Aussolas with her arms full of shawls, and a countenance dark with doom
+and wrath.  She informed me that it was a shame for me to be enticing
+the Mistress out of her bed at this hour of the morning, and that she
+would get her death out of it.  I was repudiating this soft impeachment
+(which had indeed some flavour of the Restoration drama about it), when
+the companion of my flight appeared.
+
+"How would anyone know the minute--" continued Mullins, addressing the
+universe, "that this what's-this-I'll-call-it wouldn't turn into a
+bog-hole?"  She put this conundrum while fiercely swaddling her
+mistress in cloak upon cloak.  I attempted no reply, and Mrs. Knox,
+winking both eyes at me over the rim of the topmost shawl, was hoisted
+into the back of the car; as we glided away I had, at all events, the
+consolation of knowing that, in the event of an accident, Mrs. Knox in
+her cloaks would float from the car as softly and bulkily as a bumble
+bee.
+
+As we ran out of the gates on to the high road I remembered that my
+passenger's age was variously reckoned at from ninety to a hundred, and
+thought it well to ask her if fifteen miles an hour would be too fast
+for pleasure.
+
+"You can't go too fast to please me," replied Mrs. Knox, through the
+meshes of a Shetland shawl.  "When I was a girl I rode a fourteen-hand
+pony to the fourteenth milestone on the Cork road in a minute under the
+hour!  I think you should be able to double that!"
+
+I replied to this challenge with twenty miles an hour, which, with a
+head wind and a bad road, I considered to be fast enough for any old
+lady.  As a matter of fact it was too fast for her costume.  We had run
+some eight or nine miles before, looking back, I noticed that a change
+of some sort had occurred.
+
+"Oh, the red one blew away long ago!" screamed Mrs. Knox against the
+wind; "it doesn't matter, I shall get it back--I'll ask Father Scanlan
+to speak about it at Mass next Sunday.  There's a veil gone too--how
+frantic Mullins will be!"
+
+A skirl of laughter came from the recesses of the remaining shawls.
+
+We were running now on a level road under the lee of a long line of
+hills; a strip of plantation, gay with the yellows and greens of
+autumn, clung to a steep slope ahead of us, and, at the top of it, some
+ragged pines looked like blots against the sky.  As we neared it, a
+faint and long-drawn call came from the height; presently among the
+tree-trunks we saw hounds, like creatures in a tapestry hunting scene,
+working up and up through the brown undergrowth.  I slackened speed.
+
+"'Pon my honour, we've hit off the Hunt!" exclaimed Mrs. Knox.
+
+As she spoke there was a responsive yelp from a tract of briars in the
+lower part of the wood; two or three couples jostled downwards to their
+comrade, and a full chorus, led by the soprano squeals of the Hunt
+terrier, arose and streamed along the wood above the road.  I came to a
+full stop, and, just in front of us, a rabbit emerged very quietly from
+the fence of the wood, crept along in the ditch, and disappeared in a
+hole in the bank.  The hounds still uttered the classic paeans of the
+Chase; hoofs clattered in a steep lane on the hill-side, and Flurry
+Knox charged on to the road a little ahead of us.
+
+"Forrad, forrad, forrad!" he shouted as he came.
+
+"Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit!" cackled his grandmother at him in malevolent
+imitation.
+
+I let the car go, and as we flew past him he asked me, sideways out of
+a very red face, what the devil I was doing there.  It was evident that
+Mrs. Knox's observation had been accepted in the spirit in which it was
+offered.
+
+"That will do my young gentleman no harm!" said Mrs. Knox complacently,
+as we became a speck in the distance.
+
+It was about ten o'clock when we ran down a valley between steep hills
+to Killoge cross-roads.  The hill-sides were set thick with tree
+stumps, like the crowded headstones of a cemetery, with coarse grass
+and briars filling the spaces between them.  Here and there a slender,
+orphaned ash sapling, spared because despised, stood among the havoc,
+and showed with its handful of yellow leaves what the autumn colours
+might once have been here.  A starkly new, cemented public-house, with
+"J. Goggin" on the name board, stood at the fork of the roads.
+Doubtless into it had flowed the blood-money of the wood; it
+represented the alternative offered to the community by Mr. Goggin.  I
+slowed up and looked about me.
+
+"I suppose this is--or was--Killoge Wood?" I said to my passenger.
+
+Mrs. Knox was staring through her spectacles at the devastated
+hill-side.
+
+"Ichabod, Ichabod!" she murmured, and leaned back in her place.
+
+A man got up from a heap of stones by the roadside and came slowly
+towards the car.
+
+"Well, Stephen," began Mrs. Knox irritably, "what about the cattle?  He
+looks as if he were walking behind his own coffin!" she continued in a
+loud aside to me.
+
+Stephen Casey removed his hat, and with it indicated a group composed
+of three calves--and nothing can look as dejected as an ill-fed,
+under-bred calf--two goats, and a donkey, attended by a boy with a
+stick, and a couple of cur dogs.
+
+"Himself and the sheriff's man is after driving them, my lady," replied
+their proprietor, and proceeded to envelop the name of Goggin in a
+flowing mantle of curses.
+
+"There, that will do for the present," said Mrs. Knox peremptorily, as
+Casey, with tears streaming down his face, paused to catch his wind.
+"Where's Goggin?"
+
+"The two of them is inside in the shop," answered the miserable Casey,
+still weeping copiously.
+
+I drove over to the public-house, thinking that if Casey could not put
+up a better fight than this it would be difficult to do much for him.
+The door of the pub was already filled by the large and decent figure
+of Mr. Goggin, who advanced to meet us, taking off his hat
+reverentially; I remembered at once his pale and pimpled face, his pink
+nose, his shabby grey and yellow beard.  He had been before me in a
+matter of selling drink on Sunday, and had sailed out of court in
+stainless triumph, on sworn evidence that he was merely extending
+hospitality to some friends that had come to make a match for a niece
+of his own, and were tired after walking the land and putting a price
+on the cattle.
+
+"Well, Goggin," said Mrs. Knox, waving towards the hill-side a tiny
+hand in a mouldy old black kid glove, "you've done a great work here!
+You've destroyed in six months what it took the Colonel and the Lord
+Almighty eighty years to make.  That's something to be proud of!"
+
+Goggin, again, and with even deeper reverence, removed his hat, and
+murmured something about being a poor man.
+
+"It was your own grandfather that planted those trees for the Colonel,"
+continued Mrs. Knox, diving, as it were, into an ancient armoury and
+snatching a rusty weapon from the wall.
+
+"That's the case, ma'am," replied Mr. Goggin solemnly.  "The Lord have
+mercy on his soul!"
+
+"You'll be wanting mercy on your own soul in the next world, if you
+meet the Colonel there!" said Mrs. Knox unhesitatingly.
+
+"I mightn't have the honour of meeting the Colonel there, ma'am!"
+tittered Goggin sycophantically.
+
+"You might not indeed," responded Mrs. Knox, "but you might find your
+grandfather making up a good fire for you with the logs out of Killoge
+Wood!"
+
+"Ha, ha!  That's good, faith!" said a fat voice from the
+porter-flavoured depths of the pub.  I recognised among other half-seen
+faces the round cheeks and bristling moustache of little M'Sweeny, the
+sheriff's officer, at Goggin's elbow.
+
+"And what's this I hear about Stephen Casey?" went on Mrs. Knox, in
+shrill and trenchant tones, delivering her real attack now that she had
+breached the wall.  "You lent him five pounds two years ago, and now
+you're driving all his stock off!  What do you call that, I'd thank you
+to tell me?"
+
+In the discussion that followed I could almost have been sorry for
+Goggin, so entirely over-weighted was he by Mrs. Knox's traditional
+prestige, by my official position, by knowledge of the unseen audience
+in the pub, and by the inherent rottenness of his case.  Nevertheless,
+the defence put forward by him was a very creditable work of art.  The
+whole affair had its foundation in a foolish philanthropy, the outcome
+of generous instincts exploited to their utmost, only, indeed, kept
+within bounds by Mr. Goggin's own financial embarrassments.  These he
+primarily referred back to the excessive price extorted from him by
+Mrs. Knox's agent for the purchase of his land under the Act; and
+secondarily to the bad debts with which Stephen Casey and other
+customers had loaded him in their dealings with his little shop.  There
+were moments when I almost had to accept Mr. Goggin's point of view, so
+well-ordered and so mildly stated were his facts.  But Mrs. Knox's
+convictions were beyond and above any possibility of being shaken by
+mere evidence; she has often said to me that if all justice magistrates
+were deaf there would be more done.  She herself was not in the least
+deaf, but she knew Mr. Goggin, which did as well.
+
+"Fifteen pounds worth of stock to pay a debt that was never more than
+L7!  What do you call that, Major Yeates?"
+
+She darted the question at me.
+
+I had, some little time before, felt my last moment of sympathy with
+Goggin expire, and I replied with considerable heat that, if Mrs. Knox
+would forgive my saying so, I called it damned usury.
+
+From this point the Affaire Casey went out swiftly on an ebb tide.  It
+was insinuated by someone, M'Sweeny, I think, that an instalment of
+five pounds might be accepted, and the eyes of Goggin turned,
+tentatively, to Mrs. Knox.  It has always been said of that venerable
+warrior that if there were a job to be done for a friend she would work
+her fingers to the bone, but she would never put them in her pocket.  I
+observed that the eye of Goggin, having failed in its quest of hers,
+was concentrating itself upon me.  The two walls of a corner seemed to
+rise mysteriously on either side of me; I suddenly, and without
+premeditation, found myself promising to be responsible for the five
+pounds.
+
+Before the glow of this impulse had time to be succeeded by its too
+familiar reaction, the broken, yet persistent cry of hounds came to my
+ear.  It advanced swiftly, coming, seemingly, from higher levels, into
+the desolated spaces that had once been Killoge Wood.  From the inner
+depths of Mrs. Knox's wrappings the face of the woolly dog amazingly
+presented itself; from the companion depths of the public-house an
+equally unexpected party of _convives_ burst forth and stood at gaze.
+Mrs. Knox tried to stand up, was borne down by the sheer weight of rugs
+and the woolly dog, glared at me for a tense moment, and hissed,
+"They're coming this way!  Try to get a view!"
+
+Before the words had passed her lips someone in the group at the door
+vociferated, "Look at him above!  Look at him!"
+
+I looked "above," but could see nothing.  Not so the rest of the group.
+
+"Now! look at him going west the rock!  Now!  He's passing the little
+holly-tree--he's over the fence----"
+
+I bore, as I have so often borne, the exasperation of, as it were,
+hearing instead of seeing a cinematograph, but I saw no reason why I
+should submit to the presence of Mr. M'Sweeny, who had sociably sprung
+into the motor beside me in order to obtain a better view.
+
+"Look at him over the wall!" howled the cinematograph.  "Look at the
+size he is!  Isn't he the divil of a sheep!"
+
+It was at this moment that I first caught sight of the fox, about fifty
+yards on the farther side of Casey's assortment of live stock and their
+guardian cur dogs, gliding over the wall like a cat, and slipping away
+up the road.  At this point Mr. M'Sweeny, finding the disadvantage of
+his want of stature, bounded on to the seat beside me and uttered a
+long yell.
+
+"Hi!  At him!  Tiger, good dog!  Hi!  Rosy!"
+
+I cannot now say whether I smote M'Sweeny in the legs before he jumped,
+or if I merely accelerated the act; he appeared to be running before he
+touched the ground, and he probably took it as a send-off, administered
+in irrepressible fellow-feeling.
+
+Tiger and Rosy were already laying themselves out down the road, and
+their yelps streamed back from them like the sparks from an engine.
+The party at the door was suddenly in full flight after them with a
+swiftness and unanimity that again recalled the cinematograph.  They
+caught away with them Stephen Casey and his animals; and I had an
+enlivening glimpse of the donkey at the top of the hunt, braying as it
+went; of Goggin trying in vain to stem the companion flight of the
+calves.  The bend of the road hid them all from us; the thumping of
+heavy feet, the sobbing bray of the donkey, passed rapidly into
+remoteness, and Mrs. Knox and I were left with nothing remaining to us
+of the situation save the well-defined footmarks of M'Sweeny on the
+seat beside me (indelible, as I afterwards discovered).
+
+"Get on, Major Yeates!" screamed Mrs. Knox, above the barking of the
+woolly dog.  "We must see it out!"
+
+I started the car, and just before we in our turn rounded the corner I
+looked back, and saw the leading hounds coming down the hill-side.  I
+slackened and saw them drop into the road and there remain, mystified,
+no doubt, by the astonishing variety of scents, from goat to gombeen
+man, that presented themselves.  Of Flurry and his followers there was
+no sign.
+
+"Get on, get on," reiterated Mrs. Knox, divining, no doubt, my
+feelings; "we shall do no more harm than the rest!"
+
+I gave the car her head, knowing that whatever I did Flurry would have
+my blood.  In less than two minutes we were all but into Stephen
+Casey's goats, who, being yoked together in body but not in spirit,
+required the full width of the road for their argument.  We passed
+Stephen Casey and the gombeen man cornering the disputed calves in the
+sympathetic accord that such an operation demands.  As we neared
+M'Sweeny, who brought up the rear, the body of the hunt, still headed
+by the donkey, swept into a field on the left of the road.  The fox, as
+might have been expected, had passed from the ken of the cur dogs, and
+these, intoxicated by the incitements of their owners, now flung
+themselves, with the adaptability of their kind, into the pursuit of
+the donkey.
+
+I stopped and looked back.  The leading hounds were galloping behind
+the car; I recognised at their heads Rattler and Roman, the puppies I
+had walked, and for a moment was touched by this mark of affection.
+The gratification was brief.  They passed me without a glance, and with
+anticipatory cries of joy flung themselves into the field and joined in
+the chase of the donkey.
+
+"They'll kill him!" exclaimed Mrs. Knox, restraining with difficulty
+the woolly dog; "what good is Flurry that he can't keep with his
+hounds!"
+
+Galloping hoofs on the road behind us clattered a reply, accompanied by
+what I can only describe as imprecations on the horn, and Flurry
+hurtled by and swung his horse into the field over a low bank with all
+the dramatic fury of the hero rushing to the rescue of the leading
+lady.  It recalled the incidents that in the palmy days of the
+Hippodrome gloriously ended in a plunge into deep water, amid a salvo
+of firearms.
+
+In Flurry's wake came the rest of the pack, and with them Dr. Jerome
+Hickey.  "A great morning's cubbing!" he called out, snatching off his
+old velvet cap.  "Thirty minutes with an old fox, and now a nice burst
+with a jackass!"
+
+For the next three or four minutes shrieks, like nothing so much as
+forked lightning, lacerated the air, as the guilty hounds began to
+receive that which was their due.  It seemed possible that my turn
+would come next; I looked about to see what the chances were of turning
+the car and withdrawing as soon as might be, and decided to move on
+down the road in search of facilities.  We had proceeded perhaps a
+hundred yards without improving the situation, when my eye was caught
+by something moving swiftly through the furze-bushes that clothed a
+little hill on the right of the road.  It was brownish red, it slid
+into the deep furze that crested the hill, and was gone.
+
+Here was a heaven-sent peace-offering!
+
+"Tally-ho!" I bellowed, rising in my place and waving my cap high in
+air.  "Tally-ho, over!"
+
+The forked lightning ceased.
+
+"What way is he?" came an answering bellow from Flurry.
+
+"This way, over the hill!"
+
+The hounds were already coming to the holloa.  I achieved some very
+creditable falsetto screeches; I leaped from the car, and cheered and
+capped them over the fence; I shouted precise directions to the Master
+and Whip, who were now, with the clamours proper to their calling,
+steeplechasing into the road and out of it again, followed by two or
+three of the Field, including the new District Inspector of the Royal
+Irish Constabulary (recently come from Meath with a high reputation as
+a goer).  They scrambled and struggled up the hill-side, through rocks
+and furze (in connection with which I heard the new D.I. making some
+strenuous comments to his Meath hunter), the hounds streamed and
+screamed over the ridge of the hill, the riders shoved their puffing
+horses after them, topped it, and dropped behind it.  The furzy skyline
+and the pleasant blue and white sky above it remained serene and silent.
+
+I returned to the car, and my passenger, who, as I now realised, had
+remained very still during these excitements.
+
+"That was a bit of luck!" I said happily, inflated by the sense of
+personal merit that is the portion of one who has viewed a fox away.
+As I spoke I became aware of something fixed in Mrs. Knox's expression,
+something rigid, as though she were repressing emotion; a fear flashed
+through my mind that she was overtired, and that the cry of the hounds
+had brought back to her the days when she too had known what a first
+burst away with a fox out of Killoge Wood had felt like.
+
+"Major Yeates," she said sepulchrally, and yet with some inward thrill
+in her voice, "I think the sooner we start for home the better."
+
+I could not turn the car, but, rather than lose time, I ran it
+backwards towards the cross-roads; it was a branch of the art in which
+I had not become proficient, and as, with my head over my shoulder, I
+dodged the ditches, I found myself continually encountering Mrs. Knox's
+eye, and was startled by something in it that was both jubilant and
+compassionate.  I also surprised her in the act of wiping her eyes.  I
+wondered if she were becoming hysterical, and yearned for Mullins as
+the policeman (no doubt) yearns for the mother of the lost child.
+
+On the road near the public-house we came upon M'Sweeny, Goggin, and
+Casey, obviously awaiting us.  I stopped the car, not without
+reluctance.
+
+"That will be all right, Goggin," said Mrs. Knox airily; "we're in a
+hurry to get home now."
+
+The three protagonists looked at one another dubiously, and
+simultaneously cleared their throats.
+
+"I beg your pardon, Mrs. Knox, ma'am," began Mr. Goggin very
+delicately.  "Mr. M'Sweeny would be thankful to speak a word to you
+before you go."
+
+"Well, let him speak and be quick about it," returned Mrs. Knox, who
+seemed to have recovered remarkably from her moment of emotion.
+
+"You must excuse me, Major Yeates," said Mr. M'Sweeny, chivalrously
+selecting me as the person to whom to present the business end of the
+transaction, "but I'm afraid I must trouble you about that little
+matter of the five pounds that we arranged a while ago--I couldn't go
+back without it was settled----"
+
+Mr. Goggin coughed, and looked at his boots; Stephen Casey sighed
+heavily.
+
+At the same moment I thought I heard the horn.
+
+"I'm afraid I haven't got it with me," I said, pulling out a handful of
+silver and a half-sovereign.  "I suppose eighteen and sixpence wouldn't
+be any use to you?"
+
+Mr. M'Sweeny smiled deprecatingly, as at a passing jest, and again I
+heard the horn, several harsh and prolonged notes.
+
+Mrs. Knox leaned forward and poked me in the back with some violence.
+
+"Goggin will lend it to you," she said, with the splendid simplicity of
+a great mind.
+
+It must be recorded of Goggin that he accepted this singular inversion
+of the position like a gentleman.  We moved on to his house and he went
+in with an excellent show of alacrity to fetch the money wherewith I
+was to stop his own mouth.  It was while we were waiting that a small
+wet collie, reddish-brown in colour, came flying across the road, and
+darted in at the open door of the house.  Its tongue was hanging out,
+it was panting heavily.
+
+"I seen her going over the hill, and the hounds after her; I thought
+she wouldn't go three sthretches before they'd have her cot," said
+M'Sweeny pleasantly.  "But I declare she gave them a nice chase.  When
+she seen the Doctor beating the hounds, that's the time she ran."
+
+I turned feebly in my place and looked at Mrs. Knox.
+
+"It was a very natural mistake," she said, again wiping her eyes; "I
+myself was taken in for a moment--but only for a moment!" she added,
+with abominable glee.
+
+I gave her but one glance, laden with reproach, and turned to M'Sweeny.
+
+"You'll get the five pounds from Goggin," I said, starting the car.
+
+As we ran out of Killoge, at something near thirty miles an hour, I
+heard scald-crow laughter behind me in the shawls.
+
+[Illustration: "I heard scald-crow laughter behind me in the shawls."]
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE FRIEND OF HER YOUTH
+
+It has come to this with me, I am not the country-house visitor that I
+once was.  It is a sign of age, I suppose, and of growing unamiability;
+so, at any rate, my wife tells me.  For my part, I think it indicates a
+power of discriminating between the things that are good enough, and
+the infinitely more numerous things that are the reverse.
+
+"Do you mean to say this isn't good enough?" said Philippa, putting
+down the novel that, at 11 A.M., she was shamelessly reading, and
+indicating our surroundings with a swing of her open parasol.
+
+It was a perfect morning in August.  She and I were seated in
+incredible leisure, in comfortable basket chairs, on a space of sward
+that sank in pleasant curves to the verge of the summer sea.  We looked
+across three miles of burnished water to the Castle Manus hills, that
+showed mistily through grey veils of heat; in the middle distance a
+40-ton cutter yacht drowsed at anchor; at the end of the sward a
+strand, theatrical in the perfection of its pale sand and dark rocks,
+laid itself out to attract the bather.
+
+"I think it is very good," I replied, "but it won't last.  At any
+minute old Derryclare will come and compel me to go out trawling, or
+mending nets, or cutting up bait, or mucking out the dinghey----"
+
+"You may be thankful if he lets you off with that!" said Philippa,
+flitting from her first position and taking up one in advance of mine.
+
+Following the direction of her eyes, I perceived, as it were at the
+back of the stage, two mysterious, shrouded figures pursuing a swift
+course towards the house through a shrubbery of immense hydrangea
+bushes.  Their heads resembled monster black door-handles, round their
+shoulders hung flounces of black muslin; in gauntleted hands they bore
+trays loaded with "sections" of honey; even at a distance of fifty
+yards we could see their attendant _cortege_ of indignant bees.
+
+"Taken thirty pounds this morning!" shouted the leading door-handle,
+speeding towards the house.  "Splendid heather honey!"
+
+"You ought to show some interest," said my wife malignly.  "Go in and
+look at it.  He's your host!"
+
+"Not if he were all the hosts of Midian!" I said, but I felt shaken.
+
+I rose from my chair.
+
+"I'm going to the motor-house," I said firmly.
+
+"Very well, I shall bathe," replied Philippa.
+
+"I suppose you are aware that your old friend, Mr. Chichester, is at
+present in possession of the bathing cove," I returned, "and it might
+be as well to ascertain the opinion of your hostess on the subject of
+mixed bathing."
+
+"Did you observe that Lord Derryclare was wearing your new
+motor-gloves?" said Philippa as I moved away.
+
+I magnanimously left the last word with her.
+
+The Derryclares were in the habit of hurling themselves, at intervals,
+out of civilisation, and into the wilderness, with much the same zest
+with which those who live in the wilderness hurl themselves into
+civilisation.  In the wilderness, twenty miles from a railway station,
+they had built them a nest, and there led that variety of the simple
+life that is founded on good servants, old clothes, and a total
+indifference to weather.  Wandering friends on motor tours swooped
+occasionally out of space; married daughters, with intervals between
+visits to be filled in, arrived without warning, towing reluctant
+husbands (who had been there before).  Lost men, implicated with Royal
+Commissions and Congested Districts, were washed in at intervals; Lady
+Derryclare said she never asked anyone; people came.
+
+It is true that she had asked us, but the invitation had been given on
+our wedding-day, and had been put away with our duplicate wedding
+presents; we had now disinterred it, because I had bought a motor, and
+was still in the stage of enthusiasm when the amateur driver will beat
+up visits for his wife to pay.  I do not know how Chichester got there;
+he, like Lady Derryclare, dated from the benighted period before
+Philippa knew me, and I may admit that, in common with most husbands, I
+am not attracted by the male friends of my wife's youth.  If Chichester
+had been the type she fancied, was I merely a Super-Chichester?
+
+Chichester was an elderly young man, worn smooth by much visiting in
+country houses, and thoroughly competent in the avocations proper to
+his career.  He knew the best "stands" at half the shoots in Ireland,
+and could tell to half a crown the value set upon each by the keeper;
+if you gave him a map he could put a pudgy finger upon the good cooks
+as promptly as an archbishop upon his cathedral towns; he played a
+useful and remunerative game of bridge; to see his eye, critical, yet
+alight with healthful voracity, travelling down the array of dishes on
+the side-table at breakfast, and arranging unhesitatingly the order in
+which they were to be attacked, was a lesson to the heedless who blunt
+the fine edge of appetite with porridge.
+
+He faced me at lunch, plump and pink and shining after his bathe; he
+was clean-shaved (the only reliable remedy for a greying moustache, as
+I did not fail to point out to Philippa); it increased his resemblance
+to a well-fed and _passe_ schoolboy.  Old Derryclare, whose foible it
+was to believe that he never had any luncheon, was standing at the
+sideboard, devouring informally a slice of bread and honey.  One of his
+eyes was bunged up by bee-stings, and the end of his large nose shone
+red from the same cause.
+
+"Bill," he said, addressing his eldest son, "don't you forget to take
+those sections on board this afternoon."
+
+"No fear!" responded Bill, helping himself to a beaker of barley-water
+with hands that bore indelible traces of tar and motor grease.
+
+Bill was a vigorous youth, of the type that I have heard my friend
+Slipper describe as "a hardy young splinter"; he was supposed to be
+preparing for a diplomatic career, and in the meantime was apparently
+qualifying for the engine-room of a tramp steamer (of which, it may be
+added, his father would have made a most admirable skipper).
+
+"Great stuff, honey, with a rice-pudding," went on Bill.  "Mrs. Yeates,
+do you know I can make a topping rice-pudding?"
+
+I noticed that Chichester, who was seated next to Philippa, suddenly
+ceased to chew.
+
+"I can do you a very high-class omelette, too," continued Bill, bashing
+a brutal spoon into the fragile elegance of something that looked as if
+it were made of snow and spun glass.  "I'm not so certain about my
+mutton-chops and beefsteak, but I've had the knives sharpened, anyhow!"
+
+Chichester turned his head away, as from a jest too clownish to be
+worthy of attention.  His cheek was large, and had a tender, beefy
+flush in it.
+
+"In my house," he said to Philippa, "I never allow the knives to be
+sharpened.  If meat requires a sharp knife it is not fit to eat."
+
+"No, of course not!" replied Philippa, with nauseating hypocrisy.
+
+"The principle on which my wife buys meat," I said to the table at
+large, "is to say to the butcher, 'I want the best meat in your shop;
+but don't show it to me!'"
+
+"Mrs. Yeates is quite right," said Chichester seriously; "you should be
+able to trust your butcher."
+
+The door flew open, and Lady Derryclare strode in, wrestling as she
+came with the strings of a painting apron, whose office had been no
+sinecure.  She was tall and grey-haired, and was just sufficiently
+engrossed in her own pursuits to be an attractive hostess.
+
+"It was perfectly lovely out there on the _Sheila_," she said, handing
+the apron to the butler, who removed it from the room with respectful
+disapproval.  "If only she hadn't swung with the tide!  I found my
+sketch had more and more in it every moment--turning into a panorama,
+in fact!  Yachts would be perfect if they had long solid legs and stood
+on concrete."
+
+I said that I thought a small island would do as well.
+
+Lady Derryclare disputed this, and argued that an island would involve
+a garden, whereas the charm of a yacht was that one hideous bunch of
+flowers on the cabin table was all that was expected of it, and that
+kind people ashore always gave it vegetables.
+
+I said that these things did not concern me, as I usually neither
+opened my eyes or touched food while yachting.  I said this very
+firmly, being not without fear that I might yet find myself hustled
+into becoming one of the party that was to go aboard the _Sheila_ that
+very night.  They were to start on the top of the tide, that is to say,
+at 4 A.M. the following morning, to sail round the coast to a bay some
+thirty miles away, renowned for its pollack-fishing, and there to fish.
+Pollack-fishing, as a sport, does not appeal to me; according to my
+experience, it consists in hauling up coarse fish out of deep water by
+means of a hook baited with red flannel.  It might appear
+poor-spirited, even effeminate, but nothing short of a press-gang
+should get me on board the _Sheila_ that night.
+
+"Every expedition requires its martyr," said Lady Derryclare, helping
+herself to some of the best cold salmon it has been my lot to
+encounter, "it makes it so much pleasanter for the others; some one
+they can despise and say funny things about."
+
+"The situation may produce its martyr," I said.
+
+Lady Derryclare glanced quickly at me, and then at Chichester, who was
+now expounding to Philippa the method, peculiar to himself, by which he
+secured mountain mutton of the essential age.
+
+At nine-thirty that night I sat with my hostess and my wife, engaged in
+a domestic game of Poker-patience.  Shaded lights and a softly burning
+turf fire shed a mellow radiance; an exquisite completeness was added
+by a silken rustle of misty rain against the south window.
+
+"Do you think they'll start in this weather?" said Philippa
+sympathetically.
+
+"Seventy-five, and one full house, ten, that's eighty-five," said Lady
+Derryclare abstractedly.  "Start? you may be quite sure they'll start!
+Then we three shall have an empty house.  That ought to count at least
+twenty!"
+
+Lady Derryclare was far too good a hostess not to appreciate the charms
+of solitude; that Philippa and I should be looked upon as solitude was
+soothing to the heart of the guest, the heart that, however good the
+hostess, inevitably conceals some measure of apprehension.
+
+"Has Mr. Chichester been on board the _Sheila_?" I enquired, with
+elaborate unconcern.
+
+"_Never!_" said Lady Derryclare melodramatically.
+
+"I believe he has done some yachting?" I continued.
+
+"A five-hundred-ton steam yacht to the West Indies!" replied Lady
+Derryclare.  "Bathrooms and a _chef_----"
+
+There was a thumping of heavy feet outside the door, and the yacht
+party entered, headed by Lord Derryclare with a lighted lantern.  They
+were clad in oilskins and sou'-westers; Bill had a string of onions in
+one hand and a sponge-bag in the other; Chichester carried a large
+gold-mounted umbrella.
+
+"You look as if you were acting a charade," said Lady Derryclare,
+shuffling the cards for the next game, the game that would take place
+when the pleasure-seekers had gone forth into the rain.  "The word is
+Fare-well, I understand?"
+
+It occurred to me that to fare well was the last thing that Chichester
+was likely to do; and, furthermore, that the same thing had occurred to
+him.
+
+"'Fare thee well, my own Mary Anne!'" sang Lord Derryclare, in a voice
+like a bassoon, and much out of tune.  "It's a dirty night, but the
+glass is rising, and" (here he relapsed again into song) "'We are bound
+for the sea, Mary Anne!  We are bound for the sea!'"
+
+"Then we're to meet you on Friday?" said Philippa, addressing herself
+to Chichester in palpable and egregious consolation.
+
+"Dear lady," replied Chichester tartly, "in the South of Ireland it is
+quite absurd to make plans.  One is the plaything of the climate!"
+
+"All aboard," said Lord Derryclare, with a swing of his lantern.
+
+As they left the room the eye of Bill met mine, not without
+understanding.
+
+"Now D's perfectly happy," remarked Lady Derryclare, sorting her suits;
+"but I'm not quite so sure about the Super-Cargo."
+
+The game progressed pleasantly, and we heard the rain enwrap the house
+softly, as with a mantle.
+
+The next three days were spent in inglorious peace, not to say sloth.
+On one of them, which was wet, I cleared off outstanding letters and
+browsed among new books and innumerable magazines: on the others, which
+were fine, I ran the ladies in the car back into the hills, and
+pottered after grouse with a venerable red setter, while Lady
+Derryclare painted, and Philippa made tea.  When not otherwise
+employed, I thanked heaven that I was not on board the _Sheila_.
+
+On Thursday night came a telegram from the yacht:
+
+
+"Ronnie's flotilla in; luncheon party to-morrow; come early.--BILL."
+
+
+At nine o'clock the next morning we were on the road; there was a light
+northerly breeze, enough to dry the roads and to clear the sky of all
+save a few silver feathers of cloud; the heather was in bloom on the
+hills, the bogs were bronze and green, the mountains behind them were
+as blue as grapes; best of all, the car was running like a saint,
+floating up the minor hills, pounding unfalteringly up the big ones.
+She and I were still in the honeymoon stage, and her most normal
+virtues were to me miraculous; even my two ladies, though, like their
+sex, grossly utilitarian, and incapable, as I did not fail to assure
+them, of appreciating the poesy of mechanism, were complimentary.
+
+In that part of Ireland in which my lot is cast signposts do not exist.
+The residents, very reasonably, consider them to be superfluous, even
+ridiculous, in view of the fact that every one knows the way, and as
+for strangers, "haven't they tongues in their heads as well as
+another?"  It all tends to conversation and an increased knowledge of
+human nature.  Therefore it was that when we had descended from the
+hills, and found ourselves near the head of Dunerris Bay, at a junction
+of three roads, any one of which might have been ours, our only course
+was to pause there and await enlightenment.
+
+It came, plentifully, borne by an outside car, and bestowed by no less
+than four beautifully dressed young ladies.  I alighted and approached
+the outside car, and was instructed by the driver as to the route, an
+intricate one, to Eyries Harbour.  The young ladies offered
+supplementary suggestions; they were mysteriously acquainted with the
+fact that the _Sheila_ was our destination, and were also authorities
+on the movements of that section of the British Navy that was known to
+the family of Sub-Lieutenant the Hon. Ronald Cunningham as "Ronnie's
+Flotilla."
+
+"We met the yacht gentlemen at tea on Mr. Cunningham's torpedo-boat
+yesterday afternoon," volunteered the prettiest of the young ladies,
+with a droop of her eyelashes.
+
+The party then laughed, and looked at each other, as those do who have
+together heard the chimes at midnight.
+
+"Why, we're going to lunch with them to-day at the hotel at Ecclestown!
+And with you, too!" broke in another, with a sudden squeal of laughter.
+
+I said that the prospect left nothing to be desired.
+
+"Mr. Chichester invited us yesterday!" put in a third from the other
+side of the car.
+
+"I don't think it's pollack he'll order for luncheon," said the fourth
+of the party from under the driver's elbow, a flapper, with a slow,
+hoarse voice, and a heavy cold in her head.
+
+"Shut up, Katty, you brat!" said the eldest, with lightning utterance.
+
+The quartette again dissolved into laughter.  I said "Au revoir," and
+withdrew to report progress to my deeply interested passengers.
+
+As the outside car disappeared from view at a corner, the Flapper waved
+a large pocket-handkerchief to me.
+
+"You seem to have done wonderfully well in the time," said Lady
+Derryclare kindly.
+
+For half an hour or more we ran west along the southern shore of the
+great bay; Ecclestown, where Chichester's luncheon-party was to take
+place, was faintly visible on the further side.  So sparkling was the
+sea, so benign the breeze, that even I looked forward without anxiety,
+almost with enjoyment, to the sail across the bay.
+
+There is a bland and peaceful suggestion about the word village that is
+wholly inapplicable to the village of Eyries, a collection of dismal,
+slated cabins, grouped round a public-house, like a company of shabby
+little hens round a shabby and bedraggled cock.  The road that had
+conveyed us to this place of entertainment committed suicide on a weedy
+beach below, its last moments much embittered by chaotic heaps of
+timber, stones, and gravel.  A paternal Board was building a pier, and
+"mountains of gold was flying into it, but the divil a much would ever
+come out of it."
+
+This I was told by the publican as I bestowed the car in an outhouse in
+his yard, wherein, he assured me, "neither chick nor child would find
+it."
+
+The _Sheila_ was anchored near the mouth of the harbour; there was a
+cheerful air of expectancy about her, and her big mainsail was hoisted;
+her punt, propelled by Bill, was already tripping towards us over the
+little waves; the air was salt, and clean, and appetising.  Bill
+appeared to be in robust health; he had taken on a good many extra
+tones of sunburn, and it was difficult, on a cursory inspection, to
+decide where his neck ended and his brown flannel shirt began.
+
+"----Oh, a topping time!" he said, as we moved out over the green,
+clear water, through which glimmered to us the broken pots and pans of
+Eyries that lay below.  "Any amount of fish going.  We've had to give
+away no end."
+
+"I should like to hear what you've been giving Mr. Chichester to eat?"
+said Lady Derryclare suavely.
+
+"Well, there was the leg of mutton that we took with us; he ate that
+pretty well; and a sort of a hash next day, fair to middling."
+
+"And after that?" said his mother, with polite interest.
+
+"Well, after that," said Bill, leaning his elbows on his sculls and
+ticking off the items on his fingers, "we had boiled pollack, and fried
+pollack, and pollack _rechauffe aux fines herbes_--onions, you know----"
+
+Bill broke off artistically, and I recalled to myself a saying of an
+American sage, "Those that go down to the sea in ships see the works of
+the Lord, but those that go down to the sea in cutters see hell."
+
+"He went ashore yesterday," said Bill, resuming his narrative and the
+sculls, "and came aboard with a pig's face and a pot of jam that he got
+at the pub, and I say!--that pig's face!--Phew!  My aunt!"
+
+"'Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been,'" quoted Lady Derryclare.
+
+Philippa shuddered aloud.
+
+"But he's going to come level to-day," went on Bill; "he's standing us
+all lunch at the Ecclestown Hotel, Ronnie's skipper and all.  He spent
+a good half-hour writing out a menu, and Ronnie took it over last
+night.  We had tea on board Ronnie's ship, you know."
+
+We said we knew all about the tea-party and the guests.
+
+"Oh, you do, do you?" said Bill; "then you know a good deal!
+Chichester can tell you a bit more about the dark one if you like to
+ask him!"
+
+"He seems to have outgrown his fancy for fair people," I said.
+
+Philippa put her nose in the air.
+
+"He's gorgeously dressed for the occasion," continued Bill.
+
+"More than you are!" said his mother.
+
+"Oh, my one don't care.  No more does Ronnie's.  What they enjoyed was
+the engine-room."
+
+"It seems to me," said Lady Derryclare to Philippa, "that we are rather
+superfluous to this entertainment."
+
+Chichester stood at the gangway and helped the ladies on to the narrow,
+hog-backed deck of the _Sheila_.  He was indeed beautifully dressed,
+but to the critical eye it seemed that the spotless grey flannel suit
+hung a shade easier, and that the line of his cheek was less freshly
+rounded.  His nose had warmed to a healthful scarlet, but his eye was
+cold, and distinctly bleak.  He was silent, not, it was obvious to me,
+because he had nothing to say, but because he might have more to say
+than would be convenient.  In all senses save the literal one he
+suggested the simple phrase, "Fed up."  I felt for him.  As I saw the
+grim deck-bosses on which we might have to sit, and the dark mouth of
+the cabin in which we might have to eat, and tripped over a rope, and
+grasped at the boom, which yielded instead of supporting me, I thought
+with a lover's ardour of the superiority--whether as means of
+progression or as toy--of the little car, tucked away in the Eyries
+publican's back-yard, where neither chick nor child would find her.
+
+"You ought to have come with us, Yeates," said Derryclare, emerging
+from the companion-hatch with a fishing-line in his hand.  "Great
+sport! we got a hundred and fifty yesterday--beats trout-fishing!
+Doesn't it, Chichester?"
+
+Chichester smiled sarcastically and looked at his watch.
+
+"Quite right," said his lordship, twisting his huge hairy paw, and
+consulting the nickel time-keeper on his wrist.  "Time to be
+off--mustn't keep our young ladies waiting.  We'll slip across in no
+time with this nice breeze.  Regular ladies' day.  Now then, Bill! get
+that fores'l on her--we'll up anchor and be off!"
+
+There are few places in creation where the onlooker can find himself
+more painfully and perpetually _de trop_ than on the deck of a small
+yacht.  I followed the ladies to the saloon.  Chichester remained on
+deck.  As I carefully descended the companion-ladder I saw him looking
+again at his watch, and from it across the bay to the hazy white
+specks, some four miles away, in one of which assiduous waiters were
+even now, it might be, setting forth the repast that was to indemnify
+him for three days of pollack.
+
+"P'ff; I wonder if they ever open the windows," said Lady Derryclare,
+fitting herself skilfully into the revolving chair at the end of the
+cabin table.  "Do sit down--these starting operations are always
+lengthy."
+
+I took my seat, that is to say, I began to sit down in the air, well
+outside the flap of the table, and gradually inserted myself underneath
+it.  The bunch of flowers, foretold by Lady Derryclare, confronted us,
+packed suffocatingly into its vase, and even the least astute of the
+party (I allude to myself) was able unhesitatingly to place it as an
+attention from the fair ones of the outside car.  Behind my shoulders,
+a species of trough filled the interval between the back of the seat
+and the sloping side of the yacht; in it lay old tweed caps, old
+sixpenny magazines, field-glasses, cans of tobacco, and a well-worn box
+of "Patience" cards.  Above and behind it a rack made of netting was
+darkly charged with signal-flags, fishing-rods, and minor offal.
+
+"Think of them all, smoking here on a wet night," said Lady Derryclare
+with abhorrence; "with the windows shut and no shade on the lamp!  Let
+nothing tempt any of you to open the pantry door; we might see the
+pig's face.  Unfortunate George Chichester!"
+
+"I shouldn't pity him too much," said I.  "I expect he wouldn't take
+five pounds for his appetite this moment!"
+
+The rhythmic creak of the windlass told that the anchor was coming up.
+It continued for some moments, and then stopped abruptly.
+
+"Now then, all together!" said Lord Derryclare's voice.
+
+A pause, punctuated by heavy grunts of effort--then Bill's voice.
+
+"What the blazes is holding it?  Come on, Chichester, and put your back
+into it!"
+
+Chichester's back, ample as it would seem, had no appreciable effect on
+the situation.
+
+"You ought to go and help them, Sinclair," said my wife, with that
+readiness to offer a vicarious sacrifice that is so characteristic of
+wives.
+
+I said I would wait till I was asked.  I had not to wait long.
+
+I took my turn at the warm handle-bar of the windlass, and grunted and
+strove as strenuously as my predecessors.  The sun poured down in
+undesired geniality, the mainsail lurched and flapped; the boom tugged
+at its tether; the water jabbered and gurgled past the bows.
+
+"I think we're in the _consomme_!" remarked Bill, putting his hands in
+his pockets.
+
+"Here," said Lord Derryclare, with a very red face; "confound her!
+we'll sail her off it!"
+
+Chichester sat down in a deck-chair as remote as possible from his
+kind, and once again consulted his watch.  Bill took the tiller; ropes
+were hauled, slacked, made fast; the boom awoke to devastating life;
+the _Sheila_ swung, tilted over to the breeze, and made a rush for
+freedom.  The rush ended in a jerk, the anchor remained immovable, and
+the process was repeated in the opposite direction, with a vigour that
+restored Chichester abruptly to the bosom of society--in point of fact,
+my bosom.  He said nothing, or at least nothing to signify, as I
+assisted him to rise, but I felt as if I were handling a live shell.
+
+During the succeeding quarter of an hour the _Sheila_, so it seemed to
+my untutored mind, continued to sail in tangents towards all the points
+of the compass, and at the end of each tangent was brought up with an
+uncompromising negative from the anchor.  By that time my invariable
+yacht-headache was established, and all the other men in the ship were
+advancing, at a varying rate of progress, into a frame of mind that
+precluded human intercourse, and was entirely removed from perceiving
+any humour in the situation.
+
+Through all these affairs the sound of conversation ascended steadily
+through the main-hatch.  Lady Derryclare and my wife were playing
+Patience in the cabin, and were at the same time discussing intricate
+matters in connection with District Nurses, with that strange power of
+doing one thing and talking about another that I have often noticed in
+women.  It was at about this period that the small, rat-like head of
+Bill's kitchen-maid, Jimmy, appeared at the fore-hatch (accompanied by
+a reek of such potency that I immediately assigned it to the pig's
+face), and made the suggestion about the Congested Diver.  That the
+Diver, however congested, was a public official, engaged at the moment
+in laying the foundations of the Eyries Pier, did not, this being
+Ireland, complicate the situation.  The punt, with Bill, hot and
+taciturn, in the stern, sprang forth on her errand, smashing and
+bouncing through the sharpened edges of the little waves.  As I faced
+that dainty and appetising breeze, I felt the first pang of the same
+hunger that was, I knew, already gnawing Chichester like a wolf.
+
+"We must have fouled some old moorings," said Derryclare, coming up
+from the cabin, with a large slice of bread and honey in his hand, and
+an equanimity somewhat restored by a working solution of the problem.
+"Damn nuisance, but it can't be helped.  Better get something to eat,
+Chichester; you won't get to Ecclestown before three o'clock at the
+best."
+
+"No, thank you," said Chichester, without raising his eyes from the
+four-day-old paper that he was affecting to read.
+
+I strolled discreetly away, and again looked down through the skylight
+into the cabin.  The ladies were no longer there, and, in defiance of
+all nautical regulations, a spirit-lamp with a kettle upon it was
+burning on the table, a sufficient indication to a person of my
+experience that Philippa and Lady Derryclare had abandoned hope of the
+Ecclestown lunch and were making tea.  The prospect of something to
+eat, of any description, was not unpleasing; in the meantime I took the
+field-glasses, and went forward to follow, pessimistically, the
+progress of the punt in its search for the Diver.
+
+There was no one on the pier.  Bill landed, went up the beach, and was
+lost to sight in the yard of the public-house.
+
+"It must be he's at his dinner," said Jimmy at my elbow, descrying
+these movements with a vision that appeared to be equal to mine plus
+the field-glasses.  There was an interval, during which I transferred
+my attention to Ecclestown; its white hotel basked in sunshine, settled
+and balmy, as of the land of Beulah.  Its comfortable aspect suggested
+roast chicken, tingling glasses of beer, even of champagne.  A
+torpedo-boat, with a thread of smoke coming quietly from its foremost
+funnel, lay in front of the hotel.  It seemed as though it were
+enjoying an after-luncheon cigarette.
+
+"They're coming out now!" said Jimmy, with excitement; "it must be they
+were within in the house looking at the motor."
+
+I turned the field-glasses on Eyries; a fair proportion of its
+population was emerging from the yard of the public-house, and the
+length to which their scientific interest had carried them formed a
+pleasing subject for meditation.
+
+"There's the ha'past-one mail-car coming in," said Jimmy; "it's likely
+he'll wait for the letters now."
+
+The mirage of the Ecclestown lunch here melted away, as far as I was
+concerned, and with a resignation perfected in many Petty Sessions
+courts, I turned my appetite to humbler issues.  To those who have
+breakfasted at eight, and have motored over thirty miles of moorland,
+tea and sardines at two o'clock are a mere affair of outposts, that
+leave the heart of the position untouched.  Yet a temporary glow of
+achievement may be attained by their means, and the news brought back
+by Bill, coupled with a fresh loaf, that the Diver was coming at once,
+flattered the hope that the game was still alive.  Bill had also
+brought a telegram for Chichester.
+
+"Who has the nerve to tell Mr. Chichester that there's something to eat
+here?" said Lady Derryclare, minutely examining the butter.
+
+"Philippa is obviously indicated," I said malignly.  "She is the Friend
+of his Youth!"
+
+"You're all odious," said Philippa, sliding from beneath the flap of
+the table with the light of the lion-tamer in her eye.
+
+What transpired between her and the lion we shall never know.  She
+returned almost immediately, with a heightened colour, and the
+irrelevant information that the Diver had come on board.  The news had
+the lifting power of a high explosive.  We burst from the cabin and
+went on deck as one man, with the exception of my wife, who, with a
+forethought that did her credit, turned back to improvise a cosy for
+the teapot.
+
+The Diver was a large person, of few words, with a lowering brow and a
+heavy moustache.  He did not minimise the greatness of his
+condescension in coming aboard the yacht; he listened gloomily to the
+explanations of Lord Derryclare.  At the conclusion of the narrative he
+moved in silence to the bows and surveyed the situation.  His boat,
+containing the apparatus of his trade, was alongside; a stalwart
+underling, clad in a brown jersey, sat in the bows; in the stern was
+enthroned the helmet, goggling upon us like a decapitated motorist.  It
+imparted a thrill that I had not experienced since I read Jules Verne
+at school.
+
+"Here, Jeremiah," said the Diver.
+
+The satellite came on deck with the single sinuous movement of a salmon.
+
+The Diver motioned him to the windlass.  "We'll take a turn at this
+first," he said.
+
+They took each a handle, they bent to their task, and the anchor rose
+at their summons like a hot knife out of butter.
+
+Every man present, with the exception of the Diver and the satellite,
+made the simple declaration that he was damned, and it was in the
+period of paralysis following on this that a fresh ingredient was added
+to the situation.
+
+A giant voice filled the air, and in a windy bellow came the words:
+
+"Nice lot you are!"
+
+We faced about and saw "Ronnie's torpedo-boat" executing a sweeping
+curve in the mouth of Eyries Harbour.
+
+"Couldn't wait any longer!" proceeded the voice of the Megaphone.
+"We've got to pick up the others outside.  Thanks awfully for luncheon!
+Top-hole!"
+
+T.B. No. 1000 completed the curve and headed for the open sea with a
+white mane of water rising above her bows.  There was something else
+white fluttering at the stern.  I put up the field-glasses, and with
+their aid perceived upon the deck a party of four ladies, one of whom
+was waving a large pocket handkerchief.  The glasses were here taken
+out of my hand by Chichester, but not before I had identified the
+Flapper.
+
+What Chichester said of Ronnie was heard only by me, and possibly by
+Jimmy, who did not count.  I think it may have saved his life, being
+akin to opening a vein.  That I was the sole recipient of these
+confidences was perhaps due to the fact that the _Sheila_, so swiftly
+and amazingly untethered, here began to fall away to leeward, with all
+the wilful helplessness of her kind, and instant and general confusion
+was the result.  There were a few moments during which ropes, spars,
+and human beings pursued me wherever I went.  Then I heard Lord
+Derryclare's voice--"Let go that anchor again!"
+
+The sliding rattle of the chain followed, the anchor plunged; the
+_status quo_ was re-established.
+
+Chichester went ashore with the Diver to catch the outgoing mail-car.
+The telegram that had arrived with Bill was brought into action
+flagrantly, and was as flagrantly accepted.  (It was found,
+subsequently, on his cabin floor, and was to the effect that the
+cartridges had been forwarded as directed.) The farewells were made,
+the parting regrets very creditably accomplished, and we stood on the
+deck and saw him go, with his suit-case, his rods, his gun-case, heaped
+imposingly in the bow, his rug, and his coats, the greater and the
+less, piled beside him in the stern.
+
+The wind had freshened; the Diver and Jeremiah drove the boat into it
+with a will, and the heavy oars struck spray off the crests of the
+waves.  We saw Chichester draw forth the greater coat, and stand up and
+put it on.  The boat lurched, and he sat down abruptly, only to start
+to his feet again as if he had been stung by a wasp.  He thrust his
+hand into the pocket, and Philippa clutched my arm.
+
+"Could it have been into the pocket of his coat that I put the
+teapot----?" she breathed.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+HARRINGTON'S
+
+Breakfast was over; Philippa was feeding the dogs.  Philippa's cousin,
+Captain Andrew Larpent, R.E., was looking out of the window with that
+air of unemployment that touches the conscience of a host like a spur.
+Andrew did not smoke, a serious matter in a male guest, which means
+that there are, for him, no moments of lethargy, and that, when he
+idles, his idleness stands stark in the foreground against a clear sky,
+a reproach and a menace to his entertainers.
+
+It was a cold day about the middle of September, and there was an
+unrest among the trees that commemorated a night of storm; the gravel
+was wet, the lawn-tennis ground was strewn with sycamore leaves.
+
+"I suppose you'll say I'm drunk," said Andrew, "but the fact remains
+that I see two Natives coming up the drive."
+
+In the green tunnel that was the avenue at Shreelane were two dark
+figures; both were dressed in frock-coats, of which the tails fluttered
+meagrely in the wind; their faces were black; with the half-hearted
+blackness of a leg in a black silk stocking; one of them wore a tall
+hat.
+
+"This is what comes of leaving Calcutta without paying your bills," I
+suggested; "or perhaps it's a Missionary Deputation----"
+
+The Natives advanced into the middle distance.
+
+"It's the Sweep!" exclaimed Philippa.  "It's my beloved Cantillon!"
+
+She flung open the window.
+
+"Oh, Cantillon!" she cried, invoking the gentleman in the top-hat as if
+he were an idol, "I've been longing to see you!"
+
+The leading Native halted beneath the window and curtseyed.
+
+"I partly guessed it, my Lady!" he replied modestly, and curtseyed
+again.
+
+"Then why didn't you come before?" screamed Philippa, suppressing with
+difficulty the indignation of the dogs.
+
+"I had the toothache, my Lady, and a howlt in my poll," returned the
+sweep, in dignified narrative.  "I may say my hands was crackin' with
+the stren'th of pain, and these four days back there was the rumour of
+passpiration all over me, with respex to ye----"
+
+"I'll see you in the kitchen," said Philippa, shutting the window
+abruptly.  "My poor friends," she continued, "this means a cold
+luncheon for you, and a still colder reception for me from Mrs.
+Cadogan, but if I let Cantillon escape me now, I may never see him
+again--which is unthinkable!"
+
+I presume that white is the complimentary colour of a sweep.  In half
+an hour after the arrival of Mr. Cantillon the sitting-rooms were
+snowed over with sheets, covering alike floor and furniture, while he
+and his disciple moved from room to room on tiptoe, with ostentatious
+humility, leaving a round black spoor upon the snow.  My writing-table
+was inaccessible, so also was the piano, which could usually be trusted
+to keep Andrew quiet for an hour of the morning.  Perhaps it would be
+more accurate to say it kept him occupied.  Captain Larpent had not
+been many years in the service of his country, yet it was already told
+of him that "From Birr to Bareilly," undeterred by hardships, his
+intrepid piano had accompanied him, and that house-rents fell to zero
+within a half-mile radius of his vicinity.  Daily the walls of
+Shreelane shook to the thunder of his practising; nightly his duets
+with my wife roared like a torrent over my sleeping head.  Sometimes,
+also, he sang, chiefly in German (a language I do not understand), and
+with what seemed to me superfluous energy.  But this, I am told, means
+"temperament."
+
+Haunting as a waltz refrain the flavour of soot stole through the menu
+at dinner; it was whispered in the soup, it was muttered in the
+savoury, and in the coffee it abandoned subterfuge and shouted down all
+opposition.  Next morning, at breakfast, Philippa asked if the car
+wanted exercise, because it seemed to her a day marked out by
+Providence for calling on the Chicken Farmers.  We might start early,
+take sandwiches, show Andrew something of the country--the programme
+was impulsively sketched in, but none the less I divined that an
+indignant household had demanded a day of atonement in which to
+obliterate the memory of the sweep.
+
+It was, as well as I remember, in the preceding spring that the Chicken
+Farmers had come before the swallow dared, and had taken--in addition
+to the winds of March--a small farm about midway in the wilderness
+between us and the Derryclares.  They were two young women who had
+recently been commended to our special attention by Lady Derryclare;
+they were, she said, Pioneers, and were going to make their fortunes,
+and would incidentally set an example to the district.  Philippa had
+met them on the Derryclares' yacht.
+
+"One of them is very pretty," she explained to Andrew, "and the other
+is a doctor."
+
+"I wonder which of them does most damage?" said Andrew.  "I think I'll
+stay at home."
+
+None the less he came.
+
+It was not until the car was at the door that I found we were to be
+favoured with the society of my eldest son, Anthony, in consequence of
+the facts that (1) the day before had been his ninth birthday, (2) that
+he had not cried when he met the sweep in the passage, and (3) that for
+lack of the kitchen fire he had had no birthday cake.  Minx, also, was
+one of us, but as she came as a stowaway, this did not transpire till
+later, when explanations were superfluous.
+
+It was at the moment of departure that I perceived a donkey-cart,
+modestly screening itself behind the evergreens on the way to the yard,
+and one of Flurry Knox's men approached me with Mr. Knox's compliments,
+and would I lend him the loan of the long ladder?  Some two years ago,
+in a moment of weakness, I had provided myself with a ladder wherewith
+to attain to the eaveshoots of Shreelane, since when I had found myself
+in the undesired position of public benefactor.  How life without a
+long ladder had hitherto been possible for my neighbours I was at a
+loss to imagine, and as I was also at a loss for any valid excuse for
+refusing to lend it, the ladder enjoyed a butterfly existence of
+country-house visiting.  Its visits to Mr. Knox had been especially
+lengthy and debilitating.  It is, as Mrs. Cadogan is wont to say, the
+last straw that puts the hump on the camel.  The blood suddenly mounted
+to my brain, and with it came inspiration.
+
+"You can tell Mr. Knox that the eaveshoots of this house are leaking
+like sieves, and I want the ladder myself."
+
+In the glow of satisfaction kindled by the delivery of this message I
+started the caravan.  The western breeze fanned my brow agreeably, the
+car purred her satisfaction with our new and only stretch of
+steam-rolled road, and Anthony was still in the condition of Being Good
+(a condition, nevertheless, by no means to be relied on, and quite
+distinct from Goodness).
+
+We ran west, we ran north; we skirted grey and sounding bays of the
+Atlantic; we climbed high among heathery, stone-besprinkled moors; we
+lunched by the roadside in the lee of a rick of turf, and Anthony, by
+this time emerging from the condition of Being Good, broke the Thermos,
+and flashed his birthday electric torch in Minx's face until she very
+properly bit him, and Philippa slurred over the incident with impartial
+chocolate, and said it was time to start.
+
+The region in which the Chicken Farmers had established themselves
+suggested the nurture of snipe and sea-gulls rather than chickens.  It
+was an indeterminate patchwork of stony knobs of hill and pockets of
+bog, among which the road humped and sagged, accepting pessimistically
+the facts of nature.  Hardy, noisy hill-streams scurried beside it, or
+over it, as seemed good to them; finally a sharp turn, a high horizon
+of sea, and a steep down-hill grade, ending on the shore of a small,
+round lake.  There was a little pink box of a house on its farther
+side, with a few bunches of trees round it, and among them a pigmy
+village of prim wooden huts.
+
+"That's the place," said Philippa, who had been there with Lady
+Derryclare.  "And those are the last cry in hen-houses.  Now remember,
+both of you, one of them is a doctor, Scotch, and a theosophist, or
+something mysterious of that sort; and the pretty one was engaged to a
+gunner and it was broken off--why, I don't know--drink, I fancy, or
+mad--so you had better be careful----"
+
+"I shall be guarded in my condolences," I said, turning in at the
+little gate, with the sensation of being forcibly fed.
+
+"As far as one can gather," said Andrew, "there remains no topic in
+heaven or earth that----"
+
+"Music and poultry," said Philippa in a breath, as I drew up at the
+hall door.
+
+Andrew rang the bell, and a flock of white ducks hurried up from among
+the trees and gathered round him with loud cries of welcome.  There was
+no other reply to his summons, and at the second essay the bell-wire
+came out by the roots with generous completeness.
+
+"The ladies is gone to th' oxtion!" cried a voice from among the
+hen-coops, and the ducks lifted up their voices in ardent reply.
+
+"Where is the auction?" Philippa called, when a comparative silence had
+fallen.
+
+"In Harrington's, beyond at the Mines!" replied the oracle, on a
+well-sustained high G.
+
+"Put the cards on the hall table," said Philippa, "we might go back
+that way."
+
+Several things combine in the spell that an auction casts upon my wife,
+as upon many others of her sex; the gamble, the competition, the lure
+of the second-hand, the thrill of possible treasure-trove.  We
+proceeded along the coast road towards the mines, and I could hear
+Philippa expounding to her first-born the nature and functions of
+auctions, even as the maternal carnivore instructs her young in the art
+of slaughter.  The road with which we were now dealing ran, or, it
+would be more accurate to say, walked, across the stony laps of the
+hills.  The cliffs were on our right; the sea was still flustered after
+the storm, like a dog that has fought and is ready to fight again.  We
+toiled over the shoulder of a headland, and there caught sight of
+"Harrington's."
+
+On a green plateau, high above the sea, were a couple of iron sheds and
+a small squat tower; landward of them was a square and hideous house,
+of the type that springs up, as if inevitably, in the neighbourhood of
+mines, which are, in themselves, among the most hideous works of man.
+One of the sheds had but half a roof; a truck lay on its side in a pool
+of water; defeat was written starkly over all.
+
+"Copper, and precious little of it," I explained to Andrew; "and they
+got some gold too--just enough to go to their heads, and ruin them."
+
+"Did they put it in their mouths--where you have it, Father?" enquired
+Anthony, who was hanging on my words and on the back of my seat.
+
+"Suppose you shut yours," I replied, with the brutality that is the
+only effective defence against the frontal attacks of the young.
+
+We found the yard at Harrington's thronged with a shabby company of
+carts, cars, and traps of many varieties; donkey-carts had made their
+own of the road outside, even the small circle of gravel in front of
+the hall door was bordered by bicycles; apparently an auction was a
+fashionable function in the region of the Lug-na-Coppal copper-mines.
+Dingy backs bulged from the open door of the hall, and over their heads
+as we arrived floated the voice of the auctioneer, demanding in tragic
+incredulity if people thought his conscience would permit him to let an
+aneroid barometer go for half-a-crown.  Without a word Philippa
+inserted herself between the backs, followed by her son, and was lost
+to view.
+
+"Thank you, madam!" said the voice, with a new note of cheer in it.
+"Five shillings I am bid!  Any advance on five shillings?"
+
+"That's a good weather-glass!" hissed a farmer's daughter with a plumed
+hat, to a friend with a black shawl over her head.  "An' I coming into
+the house to-day I gave it a puck, and it knocked a lep out o' the
+needle.  It's in grand working order."
+
+"I'm told it was the last thing in the house poor Mr. Harrington left a
+hand on, the day he made away with himself, the Lord save us!" remarked
+a large matron, casually, to Andrew and me.
+
+"I thought the Coroner's Jury found that he fell down the shaft?" I
+returned, accepting the conversational opening in the spirit in which
+it was offered.
+
+The matron winked at me with a mixture of compassion and confederacy.
+
+"Ah, the poor fellow was insured, and the jury were decent men, they
+wouldn't wish to have anything said that 'd put the wife out of the
+money."
+
+"The right men in the right place, evidently," said Andrew, who rather
+fancies his dry humour.  "But apart from the climate and the
+architecture, was there any reason for suicide?"
+
+"I'm told he was a little annoyed," said an enormous old farmer,
+delicately.
+
+"It was the weather preyed on him," said the matron.  "There was a
+vessel was coming round to him with coal and all sorts, weather-bound
+she was, in Kinsale, and in the latther end she met a rock, and she
+went down in a lump, and his own brother that was in her was drownded."
+
+"There were grounds for annoyance, I admit," said Andrew.
+
+The big farmer, who had, perhaps, been one of the jury, remarked
+non-committally that he wouldn't say much for the weather we were
+getting now, and there was one of them planets was after the moon
+always.
+
+We moved on to the yard, in which prospective buyers were prowling
+among wheelbarrows, coils of rope, ladders, and the various rubbish
+proper to such scenes, and Andrew discoursed of the accessories that
+would be needed for the repair of my eaveshoots, with the
+large-mindedness of the Government official who has his own spurs and
+another man's horse.  He was in the act of assuring me that I should
+save half a man's wages by having a second long ladder, when some one
+in the house began to play on a piano, with knowledge and vigour.  The
+effect on Captain Larpent was as when a hound, outside a covert, hears
+the voice of a comrade within.  The room from which the music came was
+on the ground floor, the back door was open, and Andrew walked in.
+
+"That is one of those young ladies who have come here to make their
+fortunes with poultry," observed a melancholy-looking clergyman at my
+elbow, "Miss Longmuir, I expect; she is the musician.  Her friend, Dr.
+Catherine Fraser, is here also.  Wonderful young ladies--no wish for
+society.  I begged them to come and live near my church--I offered them
+a spare corner of the churchyard for their hen-coops--all of no avail."
+
+I said that they seemed hard to please.
+
+"Very, very," assented the clergyman; "yet I assure you there is
+nothing cynical about them.  They are merely recloozes."
+
+He sighed, on what seemed to be general grounds, and moved away.
+
+I followed Andrew into the house and found myself in the kitchen.  The
+unspeakable dreariness of an auction was upon it.  Pagodas of various
+crockeries stood high on the tables, and on benches round the walls
+sat, rook-like, an assembly of hooded countrywomen.  A man with a dingy
+pale face was standing in front of the cold fireplace, addressing the
+company.  On my arrival he removed his hat with stately grace, and with
+an effort I recognised Cantillon the sweep, in mufti--that is to say,
+minus some of his usual top-dressing of soot.
+
+"It's what I was saying, Major Yeates," he resumed.  "I'm sweeping
+those chimneys thirty years, and five managers I seen in this house,
+and there wasn't one o' them that got the price of their ticket to Cork
+out o' that mine.  This poor man was as well-liked as anyone in the
+world, but there was a covey of blagyards in it that'd rob St. Pether,
+let alone poor Mr. Harrington!"
+
+The company assented with a groan of general application, and the
+ensuing pause was filled by the piano in the next room, large and heavy
+chords, suggestive of the hand of Andrew.
+
+"God!  Mrs. Harrington was a fine woman!" croaked one of the rooks on
+the bench.
+
+"She was, and very stylish," answered another.  "Oh, surely she was a
+crown!"
+
+"And very plain," put in a third, taking up the encomium like a part in
+a fugue, "as plain as the grass on the hills!"
+
+I moved on, and met my wife in a crowd at the door of the dining-room,
+and in an atmosphere which I prefer not to characterise.
+
+"I've got the barometer!" she said breathlessly.  "No one bid for it,
+and I got it for five shillings!  A lovely old one.  It's been in the
+house for at least fifty years, handed on from one manager to another."
+
+"It doesn't seem to have brought them luck," I said.  "What have you
+done with Anthony?  Lost him, I hope!"
+
+"There have been moments when I could have spared him," Philippa
+admitted, "especially when it came to his bidding against me, from the
+heart of the crowd, for a brass tea-kettle, and running the price up to
+the skies before I discovered him.  Then I found him upstairs,
+auctioning a nauseous old tail of false hair, amidst the yells of
+country girls; and finally he tried to drop out of the staircase
+window--ten feet at least--with a stolen basket of tools round his
+neck.  I just saw his hands on the edge of the window-sill."
+
+"I think it's time to go home," I said grimly.
+
+"Darling, _not_ till I've bought the copper coal-scuttle.  Come and
+look at it!"
+
+I followed her, uttering the impotent growls of a husband.  As we
+approached the drawing-room the music broke forth again, this time in
+power.  Three broad countrywomen, in black hooded cloaks and brown kid
+gloves, were seated on a sofa; two deeply-engrossed backs at the piano
+accounted for the music.  There is no denying the fact that a piano
+duet has some inescapable association with the schoolroom, no matter
+how dashing the execution, how superior the performers.
+
+"Poor old 'Semiramide'!" whispered Philippa; "I played that overture
+when I was twelve!"  Over her shoulder I had a view of Andrew's sleek
+black poll and brown neck, and an impression of fluffy hair, and a
+slight and shapely back in a Norfolk jacket.
+
+"He seems to have done very well in the time," I said.  "That's the
+pretty one, isn't it?"
+
+I here became aware that the hall was filling with people, and that Mr.
+Armstrong, the auctioneer, with his attendant swarm of buyers, was at
+my elbow.
+
+"That's a sweet instrument," he said dispassionately, "and, I may say,
+magnificently played.  Come, ladies and gentlemen, we'll not interrupt
+the concert.  It might be as good for me to take the yard next, before
+the rain comes."
+
+He led away his swarm, like a queen bee; "Semiramide" stormed on; some
+people strayed into the room and began to examine the furniture.  The
+afternoon had grown overcast and threatening, and I noticed that a tall
+man in dark clothes and a yachting cap had stationed himself near the
+treble's right hand.  He was standing between her and the light, rather
+rudely, it seemed to me, but the players did not appear to notice.
+
+"That was rather a free and easy fellow," I said to Philippa, as we
+were borne along to the back door by the tide of auction.
+
+"Who?  Do you mean Mr. Armstrong?" said Philippa.  "I'm rather fond of
+him----"
+
+"No, the tall chap in the yachting cap."
+
+"I didn't notice him--" began Philippa, but at this moment we were shot
+into the yard by pressure from behind.  Mr. Armstrong took his stand on
+a packing-case, the people hived in round him, and I saw my wife no
+more.
+
+Coils of fencing wire and sheets of corrugated iron were proffered, and
+left the audience cold; a faint interest was roused when the
+auctioneer's clerk held up one of a party of zinc pails for inspection.
+
+"You'd count the stars through that one!" said a woman beside me.
+
+"You can buy it for a telescope, ma'am!" said Mr. Armstrong swiftly.
+
+"Well, well, hasn't he a very fine delivery!" said my neighbour,
+regarding Mr. Armstrong as if he were a landscape.
+
+"Hannah," said the woman on my other hand, in a deep and reproachful
+contralto, speaking as if I did not exist, "did ye let the kitchen
+chairs go from you?"
+
+"There wasn't one o' them but had a leg astray," apologised
+Hannah--"they got great hardship.  When Harrington 'd have a drop taken
+he'd throw them here and there."
+
+"Ladies!  Ladies!" reproved Mr. Armstrong.  "Is this an oxtion or is it
+a conversassiony?  John! show that ladder."
+
+"A big lot of use a forty-foot ladder'd be to the people round this
+place!" said a superior young farmer in a new suit of clothes; "there
+isn't a house here, unless it's my father's, would have any occasion
+for it."
+
+Hannah dug me hard in the ribs with her elbow and put out her tongue.
+
+"Five shillings I am bid for a forty-foot ladder!" said Mr. Armstrong
+to the Heavens; "I'd get a better price at a jumble sale!"
+
+"Look at the poker they have in it by the way of a rung!" continued the
+young farmer.  "I wouldn't be bothered buying things at oxtions; if it
+was only gettin' marr'ed you were you'd like a new woman!"
+
+"Seven and six!"
+
+To my own astonishment I heard my voice saying this.
+
+"Seven and six I am bid," said the auctioneer, seizing me with his eye.
+"Ten shillings may I say?  Thank you, sir----"
+
+The clergyman had entered the lists against me.
+
+I advanced against him by half-crowns; the audience looked on as at a
+battle of giants.  At twenty-five shillings I knew that he was
+weakening; at thirty shillings the ladder was mine.
+
+I backed out of the crowd with the victor's laurels on my brow, and, as
+I did so, a speck of rain hit me in the eye.  The sea was looking cold
+and angry, and the horizon to windward was as thick as a hedge.  It was
+obviously time to go, and I proceeded in the direction of the car.
+
+As I left the yard a remarkable little animal, which for a single wild
+instant I took for a fox or a badger, came running up the road.  It was
+reddish brown, with white cheeks and a white throat; it advanced
+hesitatingly and circled round me with agitated and apologetic whimpers.
+
+"Minx!" I said incredulously.
+
+The fox or badger flung itself on its side and waved a forepaw at me.
+
+"It's hunting rabbits below on the cliffs she was," said a boy in a
+white flannel jacket, who was sitting on the wall.
+
+"Oh, there you are," said Philippa's voice behind me; "I wanted to
+remind you to remember the aneroid.  It's on the dining-room table.
+I'm feeling rather unhappy about that child," she went on, "I can't
+find him anywhere."
+
+"_I'll_ go in and find him," I said, with a father's ferocity.
+
+"I hope he's there," said Philippa uncomfortably.  "Good gracious!  Is
+that Minx?"
+
+I left the boy to explain, and made for the house, getting through the
+crowd in the doorway by the use of tongue and elbows, and making my way
+upstairs, strode hastily through the dark and repellent bedrooms of
+"Harrington's."  Anthony was not there.
+
+In the dining-room I heard Andrew's voice.  I went in and found him
+sitting at the dinner-table with two ladies, one of whom was holding
+his hand and examining it attentively.
+
+She had pale eyelashes, and pale golden hair, very firmly and
+repressively arranged; she was big and fresh and countrified looking,
+and her eyes were water-green.  She looked like an Icelander or a Finn,
+but I recognised her as the second Chicken Farmer, Dr. Fraser.
+
+"I was looking for Anthony," I said, withholding with difficulty an
+apology for intrusion.  "We've got to get away, Andrew----"
+
+"I was having my fortune told," said Andrew, looking foolish.
+
+"I saw your little boy going across the field there, about half an hour
+ago," said Dr. Fraser, looking up at me with eyes of immediate
+understanding.  "The white terrier was with him."
+
+"Towards the cliffs?" I said, feeling glad that Philippa was not there.
+
+"No, to the right--towards the tower."  She went to the window.  "There
+was some one with him," she added quickly.  "There he is now--that man
+in a yachting cap, by the tower----"
+
+"I don't see anyone," I said, refixing my eye-glass.
+
+Miss Fraser continued to stare out of the window.  "You're
+short-sighted," she said, without looking at me.  "Perhaps if the
+window were open----"
+
+Before I could help her she had opened it, and the west wind rushed in,
+with big drops in it.
+
+"I must be blind," I said, "I can see no one."
+
+"Nor can I--now," she said, drawing back from the window.
+
+She sat down at the table as if her knees had given way, and her strong
+white hand fell slackly on Philippa's purchase, the old aneroid
+barometer, and rested there.  The other girl looked at her anxiously.
+
+"Hold up, Cathie!" she said, as one speaks to a horse when it stumbles.
+
+Her friend's eyes were fixed, and empty of expression, and the fresh
+pervading pink of her face had paled.
+
+"Perhaps we had better go and look for that kid," said Andrew, getting
+up, and I knew that he too was aware of something uncomfortable in the
+atmosphere.  Before we could get out of the room, Dr. "Cathie" spoke.
+
+"I see tram-lines," she said gropingly, "and water--I wonder if he's
+asleep----"
+
+She sighed.  Andrew and I, standing aghast, saw her colour begin to
+return.
+
+Her friend's eye indicated to us the door.  We closed it behind us, and
+shoved our way through the hall.
+
+"I say!" said Andrew, as we got outside, "I thought she was going to
+chuck a fit, or have hysterics, or something.  Didn't you?"
+
+I did not answer.  Cantillon, the sweep, was hurrying towards me with
+tidings in his face.
+
+"Mrs. Yeates is after going to the cliff looking for the young
+gentleman--but sure what I was saying----"
+
+I did not wait to hear what Cantillon's observations had been, because
+I had caught sight of Philippa, away in a field near the edge of the
+cliffs.  She was running, and the boy with the white flannel jacket was
+in front of her.  It seemed ridiculous to hurry, when I knew that
+Anthony had been accompanied by a large man in a yachting cap (in
+itself a guarantee of competency).
+
+None the less, I ran, with the wind and the heavy raindrops in my face,
+across country, not round by the road, and ran the faster for seeing my
+wife and her companion sinking out of sight over the edge of the cliff,
+as by an oblique path.  My way took me past the tower; there was a
+little plateau there, with a drooping wire fence round it, and I had a
+glimpse of the square black mouth of the disused shaft.
+
+"Near the tower," the girl had said; but she had also said there was a
+man with him.
+
+I ran on, but fear had sprung out of the shaft and came with me.
+
+A hard-trodden path led from the tower to the cliff; it fell steeper
+and steeper, till, at a hairpin turn, it became rocky steps, slanting
+in sharp-cut zigzags down the face of the cliff.  On the right hand the
+rocks leaned out above my head, yellow and grey and dripping, and
+tufted with sea pinks; on the left there was nothing except the wind.
+A couple of hundred feet below the sea growled and bellowed, plunging
+among broken rocks.  I did not give room to the thought of Anthony's
+light body, tossed about there.
+
+At a corner far below I had a glimpse of Philippa and the boy in the
+white jacket; he was leading her down--holding her hand--my poor
+Philippa, whose nightmare is height, who has _vertige_ on a
+step-ladder.  She must have had a sure word that Anthony had gone down
+this dizzy path before her.  A mass of rock rose up between us, and
+they were gone, and in that gusty and treacherous wind it was
+impossible to make better speed.
+
+The damnable iteration of the steps continued till my knees shook and
+my brain was half numb.  They ceased at last at the mouth of a tunnel,
+half-way down the vertical face of the cliff; there was a platform
+outside it, over the edge of which two rusty rails projected into space
+above a narrow cove, where yellow foam, far below, churned and blew
+upwards in heavy flakes.  Philippa and her guide had vanished.  I felt
+for my match-box, and plunged into the dark and dripping tunnel.
+
+I pushed ahead, at such speed as is possible for a six-foot man in a
+five-foot passage, splashing in the stream that gurgled between the
+tram-rails, and stumbling over the sleepers.  Soon the last touches of
+daylight glinted in the water, they died, and it was pitch dark.  I
+struck a match, sheltering it with my cap from the drips of the roof,
+and shouted, and stood still, listening.  There was no sound, except
+the muffled roar of the sea outside; the match kindled broad sparkles
+of copper ore in the rock, but other response there was none.
+
+Match by match I got ahead, shouting at intervals, stooping, groping,
+clutching at the greasy baulks of timber that supported the roof and
+sides, till a cold draught blew out my match.  My next revealed a
+cross-gallery, with a broken truck blocking one entrance.  There
+remained two ways to choose between.  It was certain that the
+tram-rails must lead to the shaft, but which way had Philippa gone?
+And Anthony--I stood in maddening blackness; some darkness is a
+negative thing, this seemed an active, malevolent pressure.  I counted
+my matches, and shouted, and still my voice came back to me, baffled,
+and without a hope in it.  There were not half a dozen matches left.
+
+A faint, paddling sound became audible above the drippings from the
+roof; I struck another of my matches, and something low and brown came
+panting into the circle of light.  It was Minx, coming to me along the
+gallery of the tram-rails.  She paused just short of the cross-ways,
+staring as though I were a stranger, and again a circling wind blew out
+my match.  A fresh light showed her, still motionless; her back was up,
+not in the ordinary ridge, but in patches here and there; she was
+looking at something behind me; she made her mouth as round as a
+shilling, held up her white throat, and howled, thinly and carefully,
+as if she were keening.  I cannot deny that I stiffened as I stood, and
+that second being that inhabits us, the being that is awake when we are
+asleep (and is always afraid), took charge for a moment; the other
+partner, who is, I try to think, my real self, pulled himself together
+with a certain amount of bad language, thrust Minx aside, and went
+ahead along the gallery of the tram-lines.
+
+It needed only a dozen steps, and what Minx had or had not seen became
+a negligible matter.  A white light, that turned the flame of my match
+to orange, began to irradiate the tunnel like moonrise, defining
+theatrically the profiles of rock, and the sagging props and beams.  It
+came from an electric lamp, Anthony's electric lamp, standing on a heap
+of shale.  The boy in the flannel jacket was holding a lighted
+candle-end in his fingers, and bending low over Philippa, who was
+kneeling between the tram-lines in the muddy water, holding Anthony in
+her arms.  He was motionless and limp, and I felt that sickening drop
+of the heart that comes when the thing that seems too bad to think of
+becomes in an instant the thing that is.
+
+"Tram-lines and water--" said a level voice in my brain.  "I wonder if
+he is asleep----"
+
+I wondered too.
+
+Philippa looked up, with eyes that accepted me without comment.
+
+"Only stunned, I think," she said hoarsely.  "He opened his eyes an
+instant ago."
+
+"The timber fell on him," said the country boy.  "Look where he have
+the old prop knocked.  'Twas little but he was dead."
+
+Anthony stirred uneasily.
+
+"Oh, mother, you're holding me too tight!" he said fractiously.
+
+From somewhere ahead vague noises came, rumblings, scrapings, hangings
+like falling stones--
+
+"It must be they're putting a ladder down in the shaft," said the boy.
+
+
+Anthony had broken his collar-bone.  So Dr. Fraser said; she tied him
+up with her knitted scarf by the light of the electric torch; I carried
+him up the ladder, and have an ineffaceable memory of the lavender
+glare of daylight that met us, and of the welcome that was in the
+everyday rain and the wet grass.  In the relief of the upper air I even
+bore with serenity the didactics of Andrew, who assured me that he had
+seen from the first that the shaft was the centre of the position,
+though he had never been in the slightest degree uneasy, because Dr.
+Fraser had seen some one with Anthony.
+
+Dr. Fraser said nothing; no more did I.
+
+"See now," said Cantillon the sweep, who, in common with the rest of
+the auction, was standing round the car to view our departure, "it
+pinched me like death when they told me the Major had that laddher
+bought!"
+
+Being at the time sufficiently occupied in preparing to get away, I did
+not enquire why Cantillon should have taken the matter so much to heart.
+
+"But after all," he proceeded, having secured the attention of his
+audience by an effective opening, "wasn't it the mercy of God them
+chaps Mr. Knox has at the kennels had it lent to the Mahonys, and them
+that's here took it from the Mahonys in a hurry the time Mr. Harrington
+died!  And through all it was the Major's ladder."
+
+Andrew had the ill-breeding to laugh.
+
+"Sure it'd be no blame for a gentleman not to know the like of it,"
+said Cantillon with severity.  "Faith, I mightn't know it meself only
+for the old poker I stuck in it one time at Mr. Knox's when a rung
+broke under me----"
+
+It is a valuable property of the motor-car that it can, at a moment's
+notice, fill an inconvenient interval with loud noises.  I set the
+engine going and jumped into the car.
+
+Something, covered by a rug, cracked and squashed under my foot.  It
+was the aneroid.
+
+When we reached a point in the road where it skirts the cliff I stopped
+the car, and flung the aneroid, like a quoit, over the edge, through
+the wind and the rain, into oblivion.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE MAROAN PONY
+
+It had taken ten minutes to work the car over the bridge at Poundlick,
+so intricate was the crowd of people and carts, so blind and deaf to
+any concerns save their own; a crowd that offered sometimes the
+resistance of the feather bed, sometimes that of the dead wall, an
+intractable mass, competent to reduce the traffic of Piccadilly to
+chaos, and the august Piccadilly police to the point of rushing to the
+nearest lunatic asylum, and saying, "Let us in!  We are mad!"
+
+The town of Poundlick is built at so accommodating a tilt that it is
+possible to stand on the bridge at its foot, and observe the life of
+its single street displayed like a poster on the hillside; even to
+compare the degrees of custom enjoyed by its public-houses, and to
+estimate the number of cur dogs to the square yard of pavement.  I
+speak of an ordinary day.  But this hot twentieth of September was far
+from being ordinary.
+
+The Poundlick Races are, I believe, an ancient and annual function,
+but, being fifteen miles from anywhere, I had hitherto been content to
+gauge their attractions by their aftermath of cases in the Petty
+Sessions Court next following the fixture.  There is, however, no
+creature more the sport of circumstances than a married man with a
+recent motor; my attendance, and that of the car, at the Poundlick
+Races had been arranged to the last sandwich before I had time to
+collect objections (and this method, after all, saves some wear and
+tear).
+
+The races are held on the banks of the Arrigadheel River, within hail
+of the town, and are reached--as everything in Ireland is reached--by a
+short cut.  We--that is to say, my wife, her cousin, Captain Andrew
+Larpent, R.E., and I--were gathered into the jovial crowd that
+straggled, and hustled, and discoursed over the marshy meadows of the
+river, and ploughed through the brown mud in the gaps without a check
+in pace or conversation.  The Committee had indeed "knocked" walls, and
+breached banks, but had not further interfered with the course of
+nature, and we filed at length on to the course across a tributary of
+the river, paying a penny each for the facilities offered by a narrow
+and bounding plank and the muddy elbow of a young man who stood in
+mid-stream; an amenity accepted with suitable yells by the ladies (of
+whom at least ninety per cent. remarked "O God!" in transit).
+
+The fact that there are but four sound and level fields within a
+ten-mile radius of Poundlick had simplified the labours of the
+Committee in the selection of a course.  Rocky hills rose steeply on
+two sides of the favoured spot, the Arrigadheel laid down the law as to
+its boundaries, and within these limitations an oval course had been
+laid out by the simple expedient of breaking gaps in the banks.  The
+single jump-race on the programme was arranged for by filling the gaps
+with bundles of furze, and there was also a water-jump, more or less
+forced upon the Committee by the intervention of a ditch pertaining to
+one of the fences.  A section of the ditch had been widened and dammed,
+and the shallow trough of pea-soup that resulted had been raised from
+the rank of a puddle by a thin decoration of cut furze-bushes.
+
+The races had not begun, but many horses were galloping about and over
+the course, whether engaged in unofficial competitions or in adding a
+final bloom to their training, I am unable to say.  We wandered
+deviously among groups of country people, anchored in conversation, or
+moving, still in conversation, as irresistibly as a bog-slide.  Whether
+we barged into them, or they into us, was a matter of as complete
+indifference to them as it would have been to a drove of their own bony
+cattle.
+
+"These are the sort of people I love," said Philippa, her eyes ranging
+over the tented field and its throngs, and its little red and green
+flags flapping in the sunshine.  "Real Primitives, like a chorus in
+_Acis and Galatea_!"
+
+She straightened her hat with a gasp, as a couple of weighty female
+primitives went through us and passed on.  (In all circumstances and
+fashions, my wife wears a large hat, and thereby adds enormously to the
+difficulties of life.)  Among the stalls of apples and biscuits, and
+adjacent to the drink tent, a roulette table occurred, at which the
+public were invited to stake on various items of the arms of the United
+Kingdom.  The public had accepted the invitation in considerable
+numbers, and I did not fail to point out to Philippa the sophisticated
+ease with which Acis flung his penny upon "Harp," while Galatea,
+planking twopence upon the Prince of Wales' plumes, declared that the
+last races she was at she got the price of her ticket on "Feather."
+
+We passed on, awaking elusive hopes in the bosoms of two neglected
+bookmakers, who had at intervals bellowed listlessly to the elements,
+and now eagerly offered me Rambling Katty at two to one.
+
+"Boys, hurry!  There's a man dead, north!" shrieked a boy, leaping from
+the top of a bank.  "Come north till we see him!"
+
+A rush of boys went over us; the roulette table was deserted in a
+flash, and its proprietor and the bookmakers exchanged glances
+expressive of the despicable frivolity of the rustics of Poundlick.
+
+"We ought to try to find Dr. Fraser," said Philippa, hurrying in the
+wake of the stampede.
+
+"I did not know that the Chicken Farmers were to be among the
+attractions," I said to Andrew, realising, not for the first time, that
+I am but an infant crying in the night where matters of the higher
+diplomacy are toward.
+
+Andrew made no reply, as is the simple method of some men when they do
+not propose to give themselves away, and we proceeded in the direction
+of the catastrophe.
+
+The dead man was even less dead than I had expected.  He was leaning
+against a fence, explaining to Dr. Catherine Fraser that he felt all
+the noise of all the wars of all the worlds within in his head.
+
+Dr. Fraser, who was holding his wrist, while her friend, Miss Longmuir,
+kept the small boys at bay, replied that she would like a more precise
+description.  The sufferer, whose colour was returning, varied the
+metaphor, and said that the sound was for all the world like the
+quacking of ducks.
+
+"You'd better go home and keep quiet," said Dr. Fraser, accepting the
+symptom with professional gravity.
+
+I asked my next door neighbour how the accident had occurred.
+
+"Danny Lyons here was practising this young mare of Herlihy's for Lyney
+Garrett, that's to ride her in the first race," said my neighbour, a
+serious man with bushy black whiskers, like an old-fashioned French
+waiter, "and sure she's as loose as a hare, and when she saw the flag
+before her on the fence, she went into the sky, and Danny dhruv in the
+spur to keep the balance, and with that then the sterrup broke."
+
+"It's little blagyarding she'd have if it was Lyney was riding her!"
+said some one else.
+
+"Ah, Lyney's a tough dog," said my neighbour; "in the Ring of Ireland
+there isn't a nicer rider."
+
+[Illustration: "Lyney's a tough dog!"]
+
+"There might be men as good as him in Poundlick!" said an ugly little
+black-muzzled fellow, suddenly and offensively, "and horses too!  As
+good as any _he'll_ throw his leg over!"
+
+Dr. Fraser's patient stood up abruptly.
+
+"Oh, oh, oh!" said the man with the bushy whiskers, placing himself in
+front of the invalid.  "Let you be said by the lady, Danny, and go
+home!  Have behaviour now, Peter Lynch!"
+
+The matter hung for a moment; a bell began to ring in the middle of the
+course, and the onlookers flung the situation from them like a squeezed
+lemon, and swept _en masse_ towards the summons, bearing with them the
+invalid.
+
+"Off the stage I have never seen people clear out so fast," remarked
+Andrew.  "Now that we've seen Dr. Fraser's Lightning Cure, I suppose we
+may as well go too."
+
+His eyes, by a singular coincidence, met those of Miss Longmuir, which
+were very pretty eyes, dark and soft.
+
+"I must go and hunt up our pony," she said, with a very businesslike
+air; "we've entered her for the third race, you know."
+
+She put back her hair as it blew across her forehead, and the gold in
+it glinted in the sun.
+
+"How sporting of you!" we heard Andrew say, as they walked away
+together.
+
+My wife and Dr. Fraser and I turned as one man, and went in the
+opposite direction.
+
+We steered for an island of furze and grey boulders that had been flung
+into the valley like a vedette from the fortified hill-side, and was
+placed, considerately, at the apex of the oval course.  Half a dozen
+men were already grouped upon the boulders, like cormorants.  We
+clambered to a higher _etage_, and there spread forth ourselves and our
+belongings upon the warm slabs.  The sun was hot, yet not too hot, the
+smell of trodden turf was pleasant in the air, the river sparkled and
+gurgled beside us; the chimneys of Poundlick sent up languid spires of
+blue smoke; its yellow and pink and white houses became poetic in the
+September haze.  The first delicate pangs of hunger were stealing upon
+us, and I felt reasonably certain that nothing necessary to our welfare
+had been forgotten.  I lit a cigarette and pulled my cap over my eyes,
+and listened to a lark, spiring, like the smoke, into the blue, while
+my wife clattered in the luncheon basket.  It was a moment of entire
+well-being, overshadowed only by the prospect of having to take an
+interest in the racing.
+
+I said as much to Dr. Fraser, who was dismembering a cold chicken with
+almost awful surgical dexterity.
+
+"You must wake up for our race," she said.  "I'll call you in time."
+
+"Must I?  I hope you're going to ride."
+
+"Heaven forfend!" replied Dr. Fraser.  "Nothing more spirited than a
+weight-carrying bicycle!  I'm not in the least horsey.  Meg was dying
+to ride, but as we bought the pony from the great Lyney, and he had won
+any number of races on her, he was distinctly indicated."
+
+"Quite right too," I said, with dowager-like propriety.  "And I should
+wish it to be clearly understood that if, at the last moment, your
+friend Mr. Lyney should be too drunk to ride, I will not take his
+place."
+
+"He doesn't drink," said Dr. Fraser, who has an unsympathetic way of
+keeping to the point.  "He's been a great friend of mine ever since I
+mended a broken finger for him."
+
+There was a stir among the cormorants on the lower tier of boulders, a
+shot was fired at the far end of the course, every one began to shout,
+and an irregularly shaped mass was detached from the crowd, and
+resolved itself into a group of seven horses, pounding towards us at a
+lumbering canter.  One of the riders had a green jacket, the others
+were in shirt sleeves, with coloured scarves over their shoulders; all
+were bareheaded.  As they neared the first jump, I found myself on my
+feet on my boulder, with two unknown men hanging on to me to steady
+themselves.
+
+"That's no throuble to them!" shouted one of my _attaches_, as each
+horse in turn galloped over or through the barrier of furze in the gap.
+
+"Which is Lyney Garrett?" I asked.
+
+"That's him on the chestnut mare--the jock that have the dhress on
+him."  He pointed to the wearer of the green jacket.
+
+"Ah ha!  Lyney's the boy!  Look at him now, how he'll stoop and leave
+the horse to go for herself!  He'll easy the horse, and he'll easy
+himself!"
+
+"That Rambling Katty he's riding's a nice loose mare--she has a good
+fly in her," said another.
+
+"Lyney's built for it.  If there's any sort of a spring in a horse at
+all, he'll make him do it."
+
+"He'd make a donkey plough!" flung in another enthusiast.
+
+As they neared the flags at the turn of the oval--and an uncommonly
+sharp turn it was--the pace improved, each man trying to get the inside
+station; I could already see, written on the countenance of a large
+young grey horse, his determination to pursue an undeviating course of
+his own.
+
+"Now, Lyney!  Spare him in the angle!" shouted my neighbour, hanging on
+to my sleeve and rocking perilously.
+
+Lyney, a square-shouldered young man, pale and long-jawed, bored
+determinedly on to the first flag, hit it with his right knee, wrenched
+Rambling Katty round the second flag, and got away for the water-jump
+three lengths ahead of anyone else.
+
+"Look at that for ye--how he goes round the corner on one leg!" roared
+his supporter.  "He'd not stop for the Lord Leftenant!"
+
+The remaining riders fought their way round the flags, with strange
+tangents and interlacing curves; all, that is to say, save the grey
+horse, who held on unswervingly and made straight for the river.  The
+spectators, seated on the low bank at its edge, left their seats with
+singular unanimity.  The majority fled, a little boy turned a
+somersault backwards into the water, but three or four hardier spirits
+tore off their coats, swung them like flails in front of the grey, and
+threw their caps in his face, with a wealth of objurgation that I have
+rarely heard equalled.
+
+"The speed was in him and he couldn't turn," explained one of my
+neighbours, at the top of his voice, as the grey, yielding to public
+opinion, returned to the course and resumed the race.
+
+"That horse is no good," said a dapper young priest, who had joined our
+crowd on the rock.  "Look at his great flat feet!  You'd bake a cake on
+each of them!"
+
+"Well, that's the case indeed, Father," replied a grizzled old farmer,
+"but he's a fine cool horse, and a great farming horse for ever.  Be
+gance!  He'd plough the rocks!"
+
+"Well, he'll get a nice view of the race, anyway," said the young
+priest, "he has it all before him."
+
+"They don't seem to be getting any delay with the water-jump," said
+some one else regretfully.
+
+"Ah, what's in it but the full of a few tin cans!" said my adherent.
+
+"Well, for all, it knocked a good lep out o' Rambling Katty: she went
+mountains over it!"
+
+"Look south!  Look south!  They're coming on again, and only five o'
+them in it----"
+
+The cheering was hotter this time, and it was entirely characteristic
+that it was the riders who were shouted for and not the horses.
+
+"They'll win now this turn--there's three o' them very thick, that's a
+nice tidy race," said the old farmer.
+
+"Good boy, Kenny!  Go on, Kenny!" bellowed some one on a lower ledge.
+
+"Who's second, coming up to the flag now?" panted Philippa, who was
+hanging on to the collar of my coat and trying to see over my shoulder.
+
+"That's Jimmy Kenny," responded the man below, turning a black-muzzled
+face up towards us, his light eyes gleaming between their black lashes
+in the sunshine, like aquamarines.  I recognised Peter Lynch, whom we
+had met earlier in the day.
+
+"It's young Kenny out of the shop," explained the old farmer to me; "he
+rides very nate."
+
+No one was found to endorse his opinion.  The horses came on, sweating
+and blowing, the riders, by this time very red in the face, already
+taking to their whips.  By some intricate process of jostling, young
+Kenny got the inside place at the first flag.
+
+"Now is he nate!  What was I saying!" exulted the old farmer.
+
+"Lyney!  Lyney!" roared the faithful gallery, as the leaders hustled
+round the second flag and went away up the course.
+
+"Up, Kenny!" replied the raucous tenor of Peter Lynch in solitary
+defiance.
+
+Last of all, the grey horse, who would plough the rocks, came on
+indomitably, and made, as before, a bee-line for the river.  Here,
+however, he was confronted by a demonstration hurriedly arranged by his
+friends, who advanced upon him waving tall furze-bushes, with which
+they beat him in the face.  The grey horse changed his mind with such
+celerity that he burst his girths; some one caught him by the head,
+while his rider hung precariously upon his neck; some one else dragged
+off the saddle, replanted his jockey upon his broad bare back, and
+speeded him on his way by bringing the saddle down upon his
+hind-quarters with an all-embracing thump.
+
+"It's only the age he wants," said a partisan.  "If they'd keep him up
+to the practice, he'd be a sweeper yet!"
+
+Tumult at the end of the course, and a pistol-shot, here announced that
+the race was over.
+
+"Lyney have it!" shouted some men, standing on the fence by the
+water-jump.
+
+"What happened Kenny?" bawled Peter Lynch.
+
+"He was passing the flag and he got clung in the pole, and the next man
+knocked him down out of the pole!" shouted back the Field Telegraph.
+
+"Oh pity!" said the old farmer.
+
+"He didn't get fair play!" vociferated Peter Lynch, glowering up at the
+adherents of Lyney with a very green light in his eye.
+
+The young priest made a slight and repressive gesture with his hand.
+"That'll do now, Peter," he said, and turned to the old farmer.  "Well,
+Rambling Katty's a hardy bit of stuff," he went on, brushing the
+rock-lichen from his black coat.
+
+"She is that, Father," responded my late adherent, who, to my
+considerable relief, had now ceased to adhere.  "And nothing in her but
+a fistful of bran!"
+
+"She's the dryest horse that came in," said the young priest,
+descending actively from the rock.
+
+With the knowledge that the Committee would allow an hour at least for
+the effects of a race to pass off before launching another, we climbed
+to the summit of the island, and began upon the luncheon basket; and,
+as vultures drop from the blue empyrean, so did Andrew and Miss
+Longmuir arrive from nowhere and settle upon the sandwiches.
+
+"Oh, I can't eat our own game, can I?" said the latter, with a slight
+shudder, as I placed the chicken before her.  "No--really--not even for
+your sake!"  She regarded me very pleasingly, but I notice that it is
+only since my hair began to turn grey over my ears that these things
+are openly said to me.  "I had to feed four dozen of the brutes before
+we started this morning, and I shall have to do it all over again when
+we get home!"
+
+"I don't know how you stand it, I should let 'em starve," said Andrew,
+his eyes travelling from her white forehead to her brown hands.  "_I_
+don't consider it is work for ladies."
+
+"You can come and help the ladies if you like," said Miss Longmuir,
+glancing at him as she drove her white teeth into a sandwich.
+
+"Do you mean that?" said Andrew in a low voice.
+
+"She's blown him to pieces before he's left the covert," I said to
+myself, and immediately withdrew into blameless conversation with my
+wife and Dr. Fraser.
+
+We had gone pretty well down through the luncheon basket, and had
+arrived at a second and even more balmy--being well-fed--period of
+peace, before it occurred to Miss Longmuir to look at her watch, and to
+spoil the best cigarette of the day with agitations concerning the
+non-appearance of her pony.  I suggested that she and Captain Larpent
+should go in search of it, and for a brief interval the disturbing
+element was eliminated.  It returned, with added agitation, in a
+quarter of an hour.
+
+"Cathie!  I can't find Nancy anywhere!  We've been all round the
+course," cried Miss Longmuir from below.  "And John Sullivan is nowhere
+to be found either, and I can't get near Lyney, he's riding in the
+Trotting Race."
+
+"You'll find the pony is somewhere about all right," I said, with the
+optimism of combined indolence and indifference.
+
+"That seems probable," said Andrew, "but the point is, she's somewhere
+where we're not."
+
+"The point is, she ought to be here," said Miss Longmuir, with a very
+bright colour in her cheeks as she looked up at us.
+
+"Heavens!  They're very angry!" I murmured to Dr. Fraser.
+
+"Well, what do you want us to do?" enquired Dr. Fraser lethargically.
+
+"You might take some faint shadow of interest in the fact that Nancy is
+lost," replied Miss Longmuir.
+
+"I think we'd better organise a search-party," said Philippa (who does
+not smoke).
+
+We rose stiffly, descended from our sun-warmed boulders, and took up
+the White Man's Burden.
+
+A sweeping movement was inaugurated, whose objects were to find the
+pony or her attendant, John Sullivan, or Lyney.
+
+"Should you know the pony if you saw her?" I said confidentially to Dr.
+Fraser, as she and I set forth together.
+
+"We've not had it very long," she replied dubiously.  "Luckily it's an
+easy colour.  John Sullivan calls it maroan--a sort of mixture of roan
+and maroon."
+
+We advanced from field to field, driving like twin darning-needles
+through the groups of people, but neither John Sullivan nor the maroan
+pony transpired.
+
+"Come on, come on!  The Stepping Match is starting!" shouted some one.
+
+Dr. Fraser and I were caught in the tightening mesh of the crowd, as in
+the intricacies of a trammel net; an irregular thumping of hoofs, and a
+row of bare and bobbing heads, passing above the heads of the crowd,
+indicated that the Stepping Match was under way.  Lyney's dour face and
+green jacket were in the lead, and, as before, had he been Diana of the
+Ephesians, he could not have been more passionately called upon.  As it
+was obviously useless for us to do so at this juncture, we climbed on
+to a bank near the winning post, and watched the race.  Lyney was
+riding a long-backed yellow animal with a face as cross as his own, and
+a step as fast as the tick of a watch.
+
+"Anny other man than Lyney wouldn't carry that old pony round," said
+one man.
+
+"She has a score o' years surely, but she's as wicked as a bee," said
+another.
+
+"Lyney's very knacky; he couldn't be bate," said the first man.
+
+"Well, well, look at Jimmy Kenny and his father, and the two o' them
+riding!" went on the commentator.  "Faith, I'd give the father the
+sway.  Jimmy's riding uneven.  When the nag is rising, he's falling."
+
+"Sure he has his two elbows into his ears!  Go on, Lyney boy!"
+
+The horses pounded past, splashing through the shallow flood of the
+water-jump, and trampling over such furze-bushes as had withstood the
+vicissitudes of the steeplechase.  They passed from our view, and Dr.
+Fraser and I agreed that we should be justified in staying where we
+were till the finish.  Three times they passed us, enveloped in a
+travelling roar of encouragements, and with each passing the supporters
+of Lyney and Kenny bayed and howled more emulously.  The competitors,
+now, to all practical intent, reduced to the Kennys, _pere et fils_,
+and Lyney, again disappeared on their last round, and the volleys of
+incitement became a dropping fire of criticism.
+
+"Kenny's mare is the one, the others is too crippled."
+
+"She'll not bate Lyney!  Divil blast the bate she have in her! she's
+too dropped and too narra!"
+
+"What horse is first?"
+
+"I d'know; only one, I think."
+
+"Look at young Kenny coming up on the father now!"
+
+"Ah, there's more in the owld fella, never fear him!"
+
+"Come on, Lyney!  Come on, Kenny!  Lyney!  Lyney!"
+
+Lyney won.  The bee-like wickedness of the yellow mare apparently
+served her as well as youth, and despite the fact that she was but
+little over fourteen hands and was carrying twelve stone, she finished
+a dozen lengths in front.  The interest of the race was at once
+transferred to the struggle for second place between the Kennys.
+
+"Come on, Tom!  Come on, Jimmy!  Begor' the father have it!" yelled the
+crowd, as Kenny _pere_, flourishing his whip over his grey head,
+finished half a length in front of his son.
+
+"Them two tight wheels at the corner, 'twas there he squeezed the
+advantage on the son."
+
+"No, but the father had a drop taken, 'twas that that gave him the
+heart."
+
+Dr. Fraser and I got off our fence and steered for Lyney.
+
+He was in the act of throwing the reins on the pony's neck and himself
+off her back as we arrived.
+
+"Here!" he said to the owner, "take your old skin!"--he tossed his whip
+on to the ground--"and your old whip too!"
+
+The owner took the "old skin" by her drooping and dripping head, and
+picked up the whip, in reverential submission, and the ring of admirers
+evidently accepted this mood of the hero as entirely befitting his
+dignity.
+
+Dr. Fraser advanced through them with the effortless impressiveness of
+a big woman, and made her enquiries about the pony.  Lyney dropped the
+hero manner.
+
+"I don't at all doubt but John Sullivan's gone up to Lynch's for her,
+Doctor; you needn't be uneasy at all," he said, with a respect that
+must have greatly enhanced our position in the eyes of the crowd.  "I
+told him he shouldn't bring her too soon for fear she'd sour on us.  We
+have an hour yet."
+
+Soothed by this assurance we moved on, and even, in this moment of
+unexpected leisure, dallied with the roulette table.  I had, in fact,
+lost ninepence, when the remainder of the search-party bore down upon
+us at speed.
+
+"The pony is _not_ here!" said Miss Longmuir, regarding our outspread
+coppers with an eye of burning indignation, "and Sullivan's brother
+doesn't know where he is--says he went up to the town two hours ago.
+I'm going up to look for him, but of course if you'd rather stay and
+play roulette--"  Her voice shook.  I need hardly say that we went.
+
+On our arrival at the town of Poundlick we found it to be exclusively
+inhabited by grandmothers.  Lynch's public-house was garrisoned by a
+very competent member of the force, who emerged from the kitchen with
+an infant in her arms, and another attached to her clothing.  She knew
+nothing of the pony, she knew nothing of John Sullivan.  There was
+certainly a young lad that came in, and he having drink taken, and
+wherever he got it, it wasn't in this house, and what did he do but to
+commence jumping the counter, you'd think he'd jump the house.  She
+paused, and I murmured to Dr. Fraser that she was like a Holbein, and
+Dr. Fraser replied that she did not believe one word she said, which
+was rather my own idea, only more so.  It appeared that her son Peter
+had, an hour ago, expelled the young lad from the house (lest its fair
+fame should be sullied), and as for Peter, the dear knew where he was,
+she didn't see him since.
+
+Miss Longmuir and Andrew here left the shop, very purposefully; we
+pursued, and saw them open the gate of Lynch's yard and stride in.  The
+yard was a small one, littered with cases of bottles, and congested by
+the outside cars and carts of race-goers; such level spaces as it
+possessed had been dug out of the side of the hill, and slatternly
+stables and outhouses were perched on the different levels.  Through a
+low-browed doorway might be seen the horses of race-goers, standing
+"ready dight," like the steeds of Branksome Hall, with heads hanging,
+in resigned depression, before empty ranks and mangers.  But of the
+maroan pony there was no sign.
+
+Fierce as terriers on a rat-hunt, Miss Longmuir and Andrew dashed in
+and out of the dark sheds and outhouses, till there remained unexplored
+but one hovel, whose open door revealed only semi-darkness, edged with
+fern-litter.  None the less, the leading terrier determined to make
+good the ground.  A sharp yelp told of a find, and Miss Longmuir
+emerged, holding aloft a new check horse-sheet, with the initials
+"M.L." large upon it.
+
+"They must have taken her down to the race-course, after all--" I began.
+
+"Thoughtless of them to take her without her saddle or bridle," said
+Andrew bitingly.  "Here they are behind the door!"
+
+The silence that followed this discovery was broken by Philippa.
+
+"I hear some one snoring!" she said in a conspirator's whisper.  "Do
+come away.  I'm sure it's a drunken man."
+
+"Quite so," said Andrew, who had been pursuing his researches.  "Allow
+me to introduce Mr. John Sullivan."
+
+In the dark corner behind the door lay a stout youth, comfortably
+extended, with his flushed face half hidden in the dry and tawny
+bracken, and his open mouth framing long and quiet snores.  He was
+obviously at peace with all the world.
+
+Some heartless assaults on the part of Captain Larpent had no
+appreciable result, so inveterate was the peace, so potent the means by
+which it had been invoked.  The ladies had retired during the
+interview, and, as we rejoined them in the yard, we all became aware of
+muffled and thunderous sounds near at hand; they were suggestive of a
+ponderous and chaotic clog-dance, and proceeded from an outhouse, built
+against the bank that formed the upper side of the yard, with its gable
+askew to the other buildings.
+
+"'Lots of things is coor'us,' as Anthony said when I told him about
+Jonah and the Whale," remarked Philippa, who, throughout, had not taken
+the affair as seriously as it deserved.  "I suppose the party that John
+Sullivan was at is going on up there."
+
+Miss Longmuir darted round the gable of the house, a wild and summoning
+cry followed, the call of the terrier who has run his rat to ground.
+
+We found her at the foot of a low flight of irregular stone steps (in
+telling the story I have formed the habit of saying that there were ten
+of them) that led to a doorway in a loft.  In the doorway, with a
+cabbage leaf in her mouth, was the maroan pony, looking down at us with
+an expression of mild surprise.
+
+We all said unanimously, and with equal futility, "How--on--earth----?"
+
+After which Andrew, who dislikes miracles, arranged that she had, of
+course, got into the loft from the back, where the ground was high.
+Unfortunately the theory did not work, an inspection of the loft
+revealing nothing but four walls, a large store of dried bracken, and a
+donkey-panier filled with cabbages.
+
+"These mountainy ponies climb like monkeys," said Philippa, with her
+inevitable effort to shelter the discomfited, as Andrew returned with
+the ruins of his theory, "she must have walked up the steps!"
+
+Miss Longmuir, snatching out her watch, said she didn't care how the
+pony got there, the point was to get her down as quickly as possible.
+"If people would only do something and not talk!" she added, under her
+breath.
+
+"If she walked up she can walk down," said Andrew firmly.
+
+He mounted the steps and took the pony by the halter.  The pony
+immediately backed thunderously out of sight, taking Andrew with her.
+Miss Longmuir flew up the steps to his assistance, and unseen sarabands
+pummelled the floor of the loft.
+
+"Go up and help them, you great lazy thing!" said Philippa to me.
+
+"There's no room for any one else," I protested.
+
+Here the combatants reappeared in the doorway, gradually, with
+endearments on one side, and suspicious snortings on the other.  The
+steps were broad and not too intimidating; the pony advanced almost to
+the sill, repented in haste, and in her retreat flung Andrew against
+the panier of cabbages.  A donkey's panier is made to resist shocks; in
+this case it apparently gave more than it took; Andrew said nothing,
+but he dragged the basket over the sill and hurled it down the steps
+with considerable emotion.  I joined the party in the loft, and
+Philippa collected the cabbages, and laid them in rows upon the steps
+as if it were a harvest festival, in the hope of luring the pony to the
+descent.  The lure was rejected with indignation, and I proceeded to
+offer a few plain truths.  That the floor would come down before the
+mare did.  That it would take six men, and planks, and cartloads of
+straw, to get her out.  Finally, that her race was due to start in
+twenty minutes.
+
+"We're done," said Miss Longmuir tragically, addressing Philippa and
+Dr. Fraser from the top of the steps, as if they were a stage mob.
+"These brutes have beaten us!  Don't you remember that Lyney's father
+said, 'Let ye keep out from them lads in Poundlick'?  And after all our
+trouble, and the training, and everything--"  She turned abruptly away
+from the door.
+
+Dr. Fraser stood still, with her hand to her forehead, as though she
+were trying to remember something.  Then she too came up into the loft.
+The pony had now backed into the pile of bracken; Andrew, whose back
+teeth were evidently set tight, was tugging at her halter, and she was
+responding by throwing her nose in the air and showing the whites of
+her eyes.
+
+"Meg," said Dr. Fraser, at the doorway, "I've remembered something that
+I was once told--"  She peered into the darkness of the loft.  "May I
+try?" she said, advancing quietly to the pony's head.
+
+"By all means," said Andrew, as chillingly as was possible for a man
+who was very red in the face and was draped with cobwebs.
+
+Looking back now to the affair, I cannot remember that Dr. Fraser did
+anything in the least remarkable.  She took hold of the halter with one
+hand and with the other patted the pony's neck, high up, near the ears.
+She also spoke to it, the sort of things anyone might say.  For the
+life of me I could not see that she did more than anyone else had done,
+but Nancy lowered her head and put her ears forward.
+
+Dr. Fraser gave the halter a gentle pull, and said, "Come on, old
+girl!" and the pony started forward with a little run.
+
+At the doorway she stopped.  We held our breaths.  Dr. Fraser patted
+her again and placidly descended the first step; the maroan pony placed
+a trembling foot upon the threshold, steadied herself, poked her nose
+forward, and dropped her forefeet on to the second step.
+
+"She'll come down on top of her!" said Andrew, starting forward.
+
+"Don't touch her!" exclaimed Miss Longmuir, grasping his arm.
+
+With the tense caution of an old dog, the pony let herself down from
+step to step, planting her little hoofs cunningly on the rough-set
+stones, bracing herself with the skill learned on the rocky staircases
+of her native hills.  Dr. Fraser kept a step in advance of her.  Thus,
+with slow clattering, and in deep gravity, they joined Philippa in the
+yard.
+
+Five people cannot advantageously collaborate in putting a saddle and
+bridle on a pony, but we tried, and in the grim hustle that resulted no
+one asked questions or made comments.  Amongst us the thing was done,
+and there were still seven minutes in hand when Andrew shot out of the
+yard on her back.  Hard on her heels followed Philippa and Miss
+Longmuir, with scarcely inferior velocity.  I returned to the remaining
+member of the party and found that she had seated herself on the steps.
+
+She said she was tired, and she looked it.
+
+"I daresay getting that beast down the steps was rather a strain?" I
+said, spreading the pony's rug for her to sit on.
+
+"Oh, that was nothing.  Please don't wait for me."
+
+I said in my best ironic manner that doctors were of course impervious
+to fatigue, and indeed superior to all human ills.
+
+She laughed.  "I admit that I was rather nervous that the thing
+wouldn't work, or would break down half-way."
+
+"What thing?" I demanded.  "The pony?"
+
+"No.  The secret.  It _is_ a secret, you know.  My grandfather gave
+Rarey thirty pounds for it.  I've never had much to say to horses, but
+I have started a jibbing hansom horse in Oxford Street with it."  She
+laughed again, apologetically.
+
+"You needn't believe it unless you like.  I must say I was afraid it
+mightn't include a flight of steps!"  She paused and put back her
+abundant fair hair.  "How hot it was up in that loft!  I wonder if you
+could get me a glass of water?"
+
+I told her that I was old enough to believe anything, but added that
+after what she had told me I would get a second glass of water, with
+sal volatile in it, for myself.
+
+The Holbein grandmother was standing at the back door of the house,
+with the baby still on her arm.  She and the baby fetched the glass of
+water.  She said wasn't the pony a Fright for ever after the way he
+came down them steps, but why wouldn't the lady take him out through
+the other door into the field above?
+
+I made no reply, but while Dr. Fraser was drinking the water, I went up
+into the loft, and cleared away the bracken that had been piled in
+front of the "door into the field above."  I opened the door, and
+walked out into the field, and viewed the small hoof-prints that led to
+the door of the loft.
+
+I returned to Dr. Fraser, and very gently broke the news to her.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Of course Lyney and the maroan pony won the race.  Had this not been a
+foregone conclusion it is possible that John Sullivan might have scored
+less heavily in the matter of free drinks.
+
+As I was conducting my exhausted but triumphant party off the course,
+the Poundlick Sergeant of Police met me and asked me if I would sign a
+few summonses for him, as he was after taking some parties into custody
+for fighting.
+
+"Drunk, I suppose?"
+
+The Sergeant admitted it, and said the dispute had arisen between the
+Kennys and the Lynches on the one side, and the partisans of Lyney
+Garrett on the other, out of "circumstances connected with the last
+race."  The Sergeant's eye rested for an instant, with what may be
+described as a respectful twinkle, upon Miss Longmuir.
+
+"It was mostly heavy offers and small blows, Major," he concluded.
+
+"Look here, Sergeant," I said oracularly, "take them all to the
+water-jump.  Build up the furze in front of it.  Make them jump it.
+Anyone that gets over it may be considered sober.  Anyone that falls in
+will be sober enough when he gets out."
+
+I have not, in my judicial career, delivered a judgment that gave more
+satisfaction to the public.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+MAJOR APOLLO RIGGS
+
+PART I
+
+The leave of Captain Andrew Larpent, R.E., was expiring, dying hard,
+"in rings of strenuous flight," (and my motor) on the road between
+Shreelane and Licknavar, which is the home of the Chicken Farmers.
+Philippa, who regards a flirtation with an enthusiasm that is as
+disinterested as it is inexplicable, assured me that the state of
+affairs was perfectly unmistakable.  She further said that the male
+determination to deny and ignore these things was partly sympathetic
+secretiveness, partly the affectation of despising gossip, and mainly
+stupidity.  She took a long breath after all this, and, seeing Andrew
+approaching along the garden path in apparently romantic meditation,
+enjoined me to be nice to the poor thing, and departed.
+
+The sun was bright, with the shallow brightness of early October, and
+the Virginian creeper made a conflagration on the weather-slated end of
+the house.  The poor thing deposited himself beside me on the garden
+seat.  I noticed that his eye rested upon a white chicken with a
+brilliant scarlet comb; it was one of several, purchased from the
+Chicken Farmers.  I would not for worlds have admitted it to Philippa,
+but there was undoubtedly sentiment in the glance.
+
+"I hear they're having beastly weather at the Curragh," he said,
+leaning back and looking gloomily up into the melting blue sky.
+"Stunning that red stuff looks on the house!"  He surveyed it, and
+sighed; then, suddenly, sentiment faded from his glance.  "D'you know,
+old boy, that chimney up there is well out of the perpendicular.  It'll
+be down about your ears some day."
+
+I replied that it had maintained that angle for the seven years of my
+tenancy.
+
+"It won't do it much longer," returned my guest.  "Look at that crack
+in the plaster!"
+
+"Which crack?" I said coldly.  (Mr. Flurry Knox is my landlord, and it
+is my misfortune to have a repairing lease.)
+
+"Take your choice," said Andrew, scanning the chimneys with the alert
+and pitiful eye of the Royal Engineer.  "My money's on the northern
+one, under the jackdaw."
+
+"Oh, confound you and the jackdaws!" I said pettishly.  "The chimney
+draws all right."
+
+But the matter did not end there.  Before luncheon, Andrew and I had
+made a tour of the roof, and he had demonstrated unanswerably, and with
+appalling examples from barracks that he had repaired in Central India,
+and built in Wei-hai-Wei, that nothing but habit and family feeling
+induced any one of the chimney stacks to stand up.
+
+At luncheon he told Philippa that he hoped she would insure the
+children before the next westerly gale.  Philippa replied by asking if
+he, or anyone else, had ever heard of a chimney falling, unless it had
+been struck by lightning, in which case it wouldn't matter if it were
+straight or crooked; and though this was manifestly worthless as an
+argument, neither Andrew nor I could remember an instance in support of
+our case.  That the case had now become mine as well as Andrew's was
+the logical result of illogical opposition, and at Philippa's door I
+deposit the responsibility for a winter of as varied discomforts as it
+has been our lot to endure.
+
+The matter matured rapidly.  In the mellow moment that comes with
+coffee and cigarettes, I began, almost pleasurably, to lay out the
+campaign.
+
+"I can't see any point in wasting money on a contractor," said Andrew
+airily.  "Any of your local masons could do it if I explained the job
+to him.  A fortnight ought to see it through."
+
+It was at this point that I should have sat heavily upon Andrew.  I was
+not without experience of the local mason and his fortnights; what
+could Andrew know of such?  I had a brief and warning vision of Captain
+Larpent, seated at an office table adorned with sheets of perfect
+ground-plans and elevations, issuing instructions to a tensely
+intelligent Sapper Sergeant.  I saw the Sergeant, supreme in scientific
+skill (and invariably sober), passing on the orders to a scarcely less
+skilled company of prompt subordinates--but my "worser angel"
+obliterated it.  And that very afternoon, on our way to Aussolas, we
+chanced to meet upon the road the local mason himself, William
+Shanahan, better known to fame as "Walkin' Aisy."  He was progressing
+at a rate of speed that accorded with his sub-title, and, as I
+approached him, a line of half-forgotten verse came back:
+
+  "Entreat her not, her eyes are full of dreams."
+
+Nevertheless, I stopped the car.
+
+[Illustration: "Walkin' Aisy."]
+
+In answer to enquiries, he mused, with his apostolic countenance bent
+upon the ground; after a period of profound meditation, he asked me why
+wouldn't I get one of the big fellas out from the town?  I have never
+known Walkin' Aisy to accept a job without suggesting that some one
+else could do it better than he (in which he was probably quite right).
+This may have been humility, due to the fact that his father had been
+that despised thing, "a dry-wall builder"; it may have been from
+coquetry, but I am inclined to think it was due to a mixture of
+other-worldliness and sloth.
+
+On pressure he said that he had still a small pieceen of work to
+finish, but he might be able to come down to-morrow to travel the roof
+and see what would be wanting to us, and on Monday week, with the help
+of God, he would come in it.  His blue eyes wavered towards the
+horizon.  The interview closed.
+
+"'Fair and young were they when in hope they began that long journey,'"
+cooed Philippa, as we moved away.  The quotation did not, as I well
+knew, refer to our visit to the Knoxes.
+
+At Aussolas I aired my project to my landlord.  Flurry is not a person
+to whom it is agreeable to air a project.
+
+"Rebuild the chimneys, is it?  Oh, with all my heart.  Is there
+anything the matter with them?"
+
+Andrew explained the imminence of our peril, and Flurry listened to him
+with his inscrutable eye on me.
+
+"Well, it'll be some fun for you during the winter, Major, but be
+careful when you're cutting the ivy!"
+
+I was betrayed into asking why.
+
+"Because there's only it and the weather-slating keeping the walls
+standing."
+
+"If I may presume to contradict one so much younger than myself," said
+old Mrs. Knox, "Shreelane is as well built a house as there is in the
+county."  Her voice was, as ever, reminiscent of a bygone century and
+society; it was also keen-edged, as became a weapon of many wars,
+ancient and modern.  She turned to me.  "In the storm of '39 I remember
+that my father said that if Shreelane fell not a house in Ireland would
+stand.  Every one in the house spent that night in the kitchen."
+
+"May be that was nothing new to them," suggested Flurry.
+
+Mrs. Knox regarded her grandson steadfastly and continued her story.
+It has already been noted that when he and she were of the same company
+they considered no other antagonist worthy of their steel.
+
+"It was my great-grandfather who built Shreelane in honour of his
+marriage," she went on.  "He married a Riggs of Castle Riggs, a cousin
+of the celebrated Major Apollo--and thereby hangs a tale!"  She blinked
+her eyes like an old rat, and looked round at each of us in turn.  I
+felt as if I were being regarded through a telescope, from the
+standpoint of a distant century.
+
+"They knew how to build in those days," she began again.  "The basement
+story of Shreelane is all vaulted."
+
+"I daresay the kitchen would make a nice vault," said Flurry.
+
+His grandmother looked hard at him, and was silent, which seemed to me
+a rather remarkable occurrence.
+
+On the following day, Andrew and Walkin' Aisy "travelled the roof," and
+I accompanied them--that is to say, I sat on the warm lead, with my
+back against the sunny side of a chimney, and smoked torpidly, while
+Andrew preached, firmly and distinctly, from the top of a ladder.
+Walkin' Aisy stood at the foot of the ladder, submissive, with folded
+hands, and upturned bearded face, looking like an elderly saint in the
+lower corner of a stained-glass window.  At the conclusion of the
+lecture he said that surely the chimneys might fall any minute, but,
+for all, they might stand a hundred years; a criticism almost
+stupefying in its width of outlook.
+
+The following day Captain Larpent departed to the Curragh, and, as is
+often the way of human beings with regard to their guests, we partly
+breathed more freely, and partly regretted him.  On the whole it was
+restful.
+
+A fortnight passed, and I had almost forgotten about the chimneys; I
+was in the act of making an early start for an absence of a couple of
+days at the farther side of my district, when I encountered Walkin'
+Aisy at the hall door.
+
+"I'm here since six o'clock this morning, but I had no one to tend me,"
+he began.
+
+I was familiar with this plaint, and proffered him the yard boy.
+
+"The young fella's too wake," replied Walkin' Aisy, in his slow and
+dreamy voice, "and they takes him from me."  His mild eyes rested upon
+me in saddened reverie.  "And there should be morthar mixed," he
+resumed slowly, "and there's not a pick of gravel in the yard."
+
+I said, as I pulled on my gloves, that he could have Johnny Brien from
+the garden to minister to him, and that there was no hurry about the
+mortar.
+
+"Well, it's what I was saying to the gardener," returned Walkin' Aisy
+very slowly, "I have no business coming here at all till those chimneys
+is taken down.  The sahmint that's on them is very strong.  It's what
+the gardener said, that quarry-men would be wanting."
+
+"Why the devil didn't you say this at first?" I demanded, not without
+heat.  "You and Captain Larpent told me that the old cement had no more
+hold than the sugar on a cake."
+
+"Well, the Captain knows best," replied Walkin' Aisy gently, "we should
+do what he says."
+
+"Well, get the chimneys down; I don't care who does it."
+
+I drove away, and from the turn of the drive saw Walkin' Aisy, in
+motionless trance, looking after the car as if it were a chariot of
+fire.
+
+The well-known routine followed; the long and airless day in the
+Court-house, the roar of battle of the rival solicitors, the wearisome
+iteration of drunks and trespasses, the intricacies of family feuds;
+the stodgy and solitary dinner at the hotel, followed by the evening in
+the arid smoking-room, the stale politics of its habitues, the stagnant
+pessimism of the proprietor, the same thing over again next day and the
+day after.
+
+It was not until the afternoon of the third day that I found myself
+serenely gliding homeward, with the wind behind me, and before me the
+prospect of that idleness that, like the only thirst worth having, has
+been earned.  I was in the straight for the hall door, when I saw my
+wife dart from the house, gesticulating, and waving her handkerchief as
+if to check my approach.  She was followed, at no great interval, by an
+avalanche of rubble and bricks from the roof, that fell like a portent
+from heaven, and joined itself to a considerable heap by the steps.
+
+"You never know when it's coming!" she cried breathlessly.  "I've been
+watching for you.  It's impossible to make them hear from below, and I
+can't find any of the men--they're all on the roof."
+
+The restoration had begun, but that fact might not have occurred to a
+stranger.  Next day, and for many days--six weeks, to be exact--the
+house shook as from the blows of a battering-ram, in response to the
+efforts of the quarrymen to remove from the chimneys the cement that
+had no more hold on them than the sugar on a cake, and at frequent and
+uncertain intervals various debris rumbled down the roof and fell
+heavily below.  There were days when it fell in front of the house,
+there were days when it fell in the flower garden; where it fell, there
+it lay, because there was no one to take it away; all were absorbed in
+tending Walkin' Aisy, and the murmurs of their inexhaustible
+conversation came to us down the chimneys like the hoarse cooing of
+wood pigeons.  There were also days when by reason of storms and rain
+nothing was done, and black and evil floods descended into the rooms
+down the ruins of the chimneys, and through the slates, broken by the
+feet of the quarrymen.  At Christmas the kitchen chimney alone remained
+in action, and we ate our Christmas dinner in fur coats and a fireless
+dining-room.  Philippa refrained from any allusion to the quotation
+from Longfellow that she had made after that first interview with
+Walkin' Aisy.  She even denied herself the gratification of adding its
+context:
+
+"Faded and old were they when in disappointment it ended," but I knew
+that she was thinking it.
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+It was somewhere towards the end of March that one chimney stack
+re-entered the list of combatants, trim in new cement, and crowned with
+tall and hideous chimney-pots.  They all smoked, a thing that had never
+occurred before, but Walkin' Aisy said that the chimneys were cold, and
+that they wouldn't do it when they'd come to themselves; and (this was
+a little later on) that any chimney would smoke in an east wind.  It
+was true that a period of east wind and drought had set in.  The pump
+in the yard went dry; carts had to be sent half a mile for water, and
+it was reported to me that the masons had as much water put astray,
+mixing mortar and all sorts, as would drown a herring.
+
+Other unpleasant things occurred.  The housemaid gave half-an-hour's
+warning, and married one of the quarry men, and Mrs. Cadogan then
+revealed that it wasn't once nor twice during the winter that she had
+given that particular quarryman the full of the poker, to put him out
+from under her feet when she'd be dishing up the dinner.  Shreelane was
+twice drawn blank by Flurry Knox's hounds, and their master said that
+as long as I had every idle blackguard in the country tending Walkin'
+Aisy, and making short cuts through the covert, how would I have foxes
+there?  I ignored the conundrum, and hoped that the quarryman's yellow
+dog would remain where I had last seen him, in the ashpit, till Flurry
+had left the premises.
+
+It was some little time after this that Captain Larpent advanced upon
+us on a week's leave from the Curragh; he wrote to say that I evidently
+wanted a Clerk of the Works, and that he would see if he couldn't get a
+move on Shanahan.  I was away when he arrived, and on my return
+Philippa met me in the hall.
+
+"Meg Longmuir is here!" she said, not without a touch of defiance.
+"Doctor Catherine had to go to Scotland, so I asked Meg here for a few
+days.  She'll play duets with Andrew.  She's up on the roof with him
+now."
+
+"Better have a string band up there at once," I said, "and open it as a
+public recreation ground."
+
+"And the Flurry Knoxes and Bernard Shute are coming to dinner,"
+continued my wife, ignoring this _jeu d'esprit_; "the smoking-room
+chimney is all right, and we can have the oil stove and some music in
+the drawing-room."
+
+With this agreeable prospect in store, we sat down to dinner.  We were
+too many for general conversation, and the table was round, which is
+unfavourable for _tete-a-tetes_.  Yet it was not round enough to
+frustrate Miss Meg Longmuir's peculiar gift for duets, and I was
+presently aware that she was unwarrantably devoting herself to Bernard
+Shute, leaving Captain Larpent derelict, and that the latter was, after
+the manner of derelicts, becoming a danger to navigation, and was
+laying down laws and arguing about them acridly with Mr. Knox.  I
+realised too late that there should have been champagne.  Whisky and
+soda is all very well, but it will not warm wet blankets.
+
+Meg Longmuir, however, was doing remarkably well without either; she
+wore something intricate that was either green or blue or both, and
+glittered.  I recognised it as the panoply of war, and knew that the
+tomahawk was concealed in its folds.  So also was Andrew's scalp; I
+don't know why I felt some pleasure in remembering that it had a bald
+patch on it.
+
+After the ladies had gone, Bernard, to whose head Miss Longmuir had
+mounted as effectively as if she had been the missing champagne,
+rejoined the lesser world of men by asking Flurry why he had shut up
+the season so early, and suggested a by-day, if only for the sake of
+giving the horses something to do.
+
+Flurry put the end of his cigarette into his finger-glass, and lit
+another at the flaming tongue of my tame Chinese dragon.
+
+"I didn't know you had one that would carry a lady?" he said.
+
+"Oh rot!" said Bernard helplessly.
+
+"I haven't one that will carry myself," went on Flurry.  "There's five
+lame legs among three of them this minute.  Anyway the hounds are in
+sulphur."
+
+The discussion progressed with the prolixity proper to such themes; I
+think it was Andrew who suggested the paper-chase.  He had, he said,
+ridden in paper-chases in Egypt, and he gave us details of the stark
+mud walls and fathomless water-courses that were common-places of these
+events.  We were left with the impression that none of us had ever seen
+obstacles so intimidating, and, more than that, if we had seen them we
+should have gone home in tears.
+
+"I think we'd better make a hare of _you_," said Flurry, fixing
+expressionless eyes upon Captain Larpent.  "It mightn't be hard."
+
+The double edge of this suggestion was lost upon Andrew, who accepted
+it as a tribute, but said he was afraid he didn't know the country well
+enough.
+
+"That's your Egyptian darkness," said Flurry with unexpected erudition.
+
+Andrew glanced sideways and suspiciously at him over the bridge of his
+sunburnt nose, and said rather defiantly that if he could get hold of a
+decent horse he wouldn't mind having a try.
+
+"I suppose you ride about 11.6?" asked Flurry, after a moment or two of
+silence.  His manner had softened; I thought I knew what was coming.
+"I've a little horse that I was thinking of parting..." he began.
+
+A yell, sharp and sudden as a flash of lightning, was uttered outside
+the door, followed by a sliding crash of crockery, and more yells.  We
+plunged into the hall, and saw Julia, the elderly parlourmaid,
+struggling on the floor amid ruins of coffee cups and their adjuncts.
+
+"The rat!  He went in under me foot!" she shrieked.  "He's in under me
+this minute!"
+
+Here the rat emerged from the ruins.  Simultaneously the drawing-room
+door burst open, and the streaming shrieks of Minx and her son and
+daughter were added to those of the still prostrate Julia.
+
+The chase swept down the passage to the kitchen stairs, the pack
+augmented by Bob, the red setter, and closely followed by the dinner
+party.  A rat is a poor performer on a staircase, and, at the door
+leading into the turf-house, the dogs seemed to be on top of him.  The
+bolt-hole under the door, that his own teeth had prepared, gave him an
+instant of advantage; Flurry had the door open in a second, someone
+snatched the passage lamp from the wall, but it was obviously six to
+four on the rat.
+
+The turf-house was a large space at the very root of the house, vaulted
+and mysterious, bearing Shreelane on its back like the tortoise that
+supports the world.  Barrels draped with cobwebs stood along one wall,
+but the rat was not behind them, and Minx and her family drove like
+hawks into a corner, in which, beneath a chaotic heap of broken
+furniture and household debris, the rat had gone to ground.  We
+followed, treading softly in the turf-mould of unnumbered winters.  We
+tore out the furniture, which yielded itself in fragments; the delirium
+of the terriers mounting with each crash, and being, if possible,
+enhanced by the well-meant but intolerable efforts of the red setter to
+assist them.  Finally we worked down to an old door, lying on its face
+on something that raised it a few inches from the ground.
+
+"Now!  Mind yourselves!" said Flurry, heaving up the door and flinging
+it back against the wall.
+
+The rat bolted gallantly, and darted into an old box, of singular
+shape, that lay, half open, among the debris, and there, in a storm of
+tattered paper, met his fate.  Minx jumped out of the box very
+deliberately, with the rat across her jaws, and a scarlet bite in her
+white muzzle.  With frozen calm, and a menacing eye directed at the red
+setter, she laid it on the turf mould, and stiffly withdrew.  Her son
+and daughter advanced in turn, smelt it respectfully and retired.
+There was no swagger; all complied with the ritual of fox-terrier form
+laid down for such occasions.
+
+I was then for the first time aware that the ladies, in all the glitter
+and glory of their evening dresses, had each mounted herself upon a
+barrel; in the theatrical gloom of the vaulted turf-house, they
+suggested the resurrection of Ali Baba's Forty Thieves.
+
+"Look where he had his nest in among the old letters!" said Flurry to
+Philippa, as she descended from her barrel to felicitate Minx and to
+condole with the rat.  "That box came out of the rumble of an old
+coach, the Lord knows when!"
+
+"There's some sort of a ring in the floor here," said Andrew, who was
+rooting with a rusty crowbar in the turf-mould where the door had lain.
+"Bring the light, someone----"
+
+The lamp revealed a large iron ring which was fixed in a flat stone; we
+scraped away the turf-mould and found that the stone was fastened down
+with an iron bar, passing through a staple at either end, and padlocked.
+
+"As long as I'm in this place," said Flurry, "I never saw this outfit
+before."
+
+"There's a seal over the keyhole," said Andrew, turning over the
+padlock.
+
+"That means it was not intended it should be opened," said Meg Longmuir
+quickly.
+
+I looked round, and, bad as the light was, I thought her face looked
+pale.
+
+Andrew did not answer her.  He poised the crowbar scientifically, and
+drove it at the padlock.  It broke at the second blow, releasing the
+bar.
+
+"No trouble about that!" he said, addressing himself to the gallery,
+and not looking at Miss Longmuir.  "Now, then, shall we have the flag
+up?"
+
+There were only two dissentients; one was Flurry, who put his hands in
+his pockets, and said he wasn't going to destroy his best evening
+pants; the other was Miss Longmuir, who said that to break an old seal
+like that was to break luck.  She also looked at Andrew in a way that
+should have gone far to redress the injuries inflicted during dinner.
+Apparently it did not suffice.  Captain Larpent firmly inserted the end
+of the bar under the edge of the flag.  Bernard Shute took hold of the
+ring.
+
+"All together!" said Andrew.
+
+There was a moment of effort, the flag came up abruptly, and, as
+abruptly, Bernard sat down in the turf-mould with the flag between his
+legs.  The crowbar slipped forward, and vanished with a hollow-sounding
+splash down a black chasm; Andrew, thrown off his balance, also slipped
+forward, and would have followed it, head first, had not Flurry and I
+caught him.
+
+The chasm was a well, nearly full; the water twinkled at us,
+impenetrably black; it made me think of the ink in the hollowed palm of
+a native who had told my fortune, up at Peshawur.
+
+"That was about as near as makes no difference!" said Bernard.  "You've
+cut your cheek, Larpent."
+
+"Have I?" said Andrew vaguely, putting up a rather shaky hand to his
+face.  "I think my head took the edge of the well."
+
+We covered the hole with the old door, and Andrew was taken away to
+have his wound attended to.  It was not a severe wound, but the process
+was lengthy, and involved the collaboration of all the ladies.  It
+seemed to the three neglected males, waiting for a fourth to play
+bridge, that this mobilisation of ministering angels was somewhat
+overdone.
+
+Andrew came down to breakfast next morning with a headache, and said he
+had slept badly.  Had he discovered the source of the Nile in the
+turf-house the night before, my wife and Miss Longmuir could not have
+been more adulatory and sympathetic, nor could the projects, based upon
+the discovery, have been more ambitious.  I went forth to my work and
+to my labour without so much as a dog to wave me farewell; all were in
+the turf-house, surrounded by visionary force-pumps, bath-rooms, and
+even by miraged fountains in the garden.
+
+When I drove the car into the yard on my return that afternoon, I was
+confronted by a long chestnut face with a white blaze, looking at me
+out of the spare loose-box--the face, in fact, of "the little horse" of
+whom Flurry had spoken to Andrew.  There was also, added to the more
+familiar heaps of mortar, gravel, and stones, a considerable deposit of
+black and evil-smelling sludge.  It seemed, as was not uncommonly the
+case, that a good many things had been happening during my absence.
+The stone floor of the hall was stencilled with an intricate pattern of
+black paw-marks, and was further decorated with scraps of torn paper; a
+cold stench pervaded the smoking-room (which was situated above the
+turf-house); far away, a sound as of a gramophone in the next world
+indicated that Captain Andrew's _affaire de coeur_ was finding an
+outlet in song.
+
+I followed the sounds to the drawing-room, and found Andrew and Miss
+Longmuir at the piano, in a harmony obviously world-forgetting, though
+not likely to be by the world forgot.  Philippa was sitting by the oil
+stove, and was, I hope, deriving some satisfaction from inhaling its
+fumes, its effect upon the temperature being negligible.
+
+Andrew's song was a Hungarian ditty, truculent and amorous, and very
+loud; under cover of it my wife told me that he, assisted by Walkin'
+Aisy and the quarrymen, and attended by Miss Longmuir, had baled out
+the newly discovered well, and that the quarrymen had exacted whisky to
+sustain them during the later stages of the process, and that the
+sludge would be ideal for the roses.  They believed the well was
+filling again beautifully, but they had to leave it because Flurry came
+over with the horse for Andrew for the paper-chase, and Andrew and Meg
+went out schooling.
+
+"What paper-chase?" I interpolated coldly.
+
+"Oh, they've got one up for Monday," said Philippa airily.  "The
+children have been tearing up paper all day.  I found--rather with
+horror--that Flurry had given them those old letters out of the
+turf-house to tear up--I said you and I would ride, of course"--she
+looked at me with apprehension veiled by defiance, and I said it was
+thoughtful of her.--"But I want to tell you about old Mrs. Knox," she
+said, hurrying on.  "She told Flurry that the well had never been used
+since the time of the Famine, when they got up a soup-kitchen here, and
+the day after they opened the well she said the servants flew in a body
+out of the house, like wild geese!"
+
+"I don't wonder, if it smelt as it does now," I said.  "Was that why
+they flew?"
+
+"Flurry said he didn't know what lifted them.  But Flurry never says he
+doesn't know unless he _does_ know and doesn't want to tell!"
+
+The following day was Saturday, and for the first time for many weeks a
+Sabbath stillness prevailed on the roof.  Walkin' Aisy was absent; no
+explanation was forthcoming, and I diagnosed a funeral in the
+neighbourhood.  It was on Sunday afternoon that I was roused from my
+usual meditation--consequent upon Sunday roast beef--by the
+intelligence that Mrs. William Shanahan wanted to speak to me.  Mrs.
+Shanahan was a fair freckled woman, with a loud voice and a red face
+and the reputation of ruling Walkin' Aisy with a rod of iron.  It
+appeared that Walkin' Aisy was confined to his bed; that he had had a
+reel in his head after getting home on Friday, and that whatever work
+it was that young gentleman gave him to do, he wasn't the better of it.
+
+"And he was as wake in himself and as troubled in his mind as that he
+couldn't walk to Mass.  I told him he should mind the chickens while
+I'd be out, and when I came in the dog had three of me chickens dead on
+the floor, and where was himself, only back in the room, and he
+kneeling there with the two hands up, sayin' his prayers!  'What ails
+ye?' says I, 'ye old gommoch, that ye'd let the dog kill me chickens?'
+'Sure, I was sayin' me prayers,' says he; 'That the Lord mightn't hear
+your prayers!' says I.  God forgive me, I had to say it!"
+
+I recalled her to the question of the chimneys, pointing out that the
+gable chimney was half down, and could not be left as it was.
+
+To this Mrs. Walkin' Aisy replied at great length that William's father
+had given him an advice not to go in it, and that the father was dark
+these scores of years, and it was what he blamed for it was the work he
+done in Shreelane House in the time of the Famine.  It was after that
+the sight went bandy with him.
+
+She declined to offer any opinion as to when Walkin' Aisy would return
+to work, and withdrew, leaving me to consider my position under the
+Employers' Liability Act in the event of her husband's demise, and to
+wish, not for the first time, that Andrew (now strolling at his ease
+with Miss Longmuir, reviewing a course for the paper-chase), had been
+at Jericho, or any other resort of the superfluous, before he
+interfered with the tranquil progress of the chimneys towards
+dissolution.
+
+There were strange lapses at dinner,--delays, omissions, disasters, and
+Julia the parlourmaid had a trembling hand and a general suggestion of
+nerve-storm.  After dinner it was reported to Philippa that Anthony was
+not well, and after a prolonged absence she returned with the
+information that he had had a nightmare, and that there was a rumour in
+the house that all the servants were going to give warning the
+following morning.  Their reason for this was obscure, but was somehow
+connected with Mrs. Walkin' Aisy's visit, and the fact that the
+swing-door leading to the turf-house had opened and shut twice, of its
+own volition.  We did not mention these matters to our guests, and
+retired to rest in perturbation.  I admit that at some time during the
+night, which was a still one, I heard the turf-house door groan on its
+hinges, and slam.  I went downstairs and found nothing; it was
+certainly unusual, however, that Bob, the red setter, had abandoned his
+lair in the smoking-room, and was spending the night on the mat outside
+my dressing-room door.
+
+Next morning Philippa, considering that a thrust was better than a
+parry, held a court of enquiry in the lower regions, and, according to
+her own report, spoke seriously on the grave responsibility incurred by
+those who frightened other people about nonsense.  Julia's version of
+the proceedings, I heard at a later date.  She said that "the Misthress
+spoke to us lovely, and the Priest couldn't speak better than her.  She
+told us that the divils in hell wasn't worse than us."
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+It has been said of Ireland that the inevitable never happens, and that
+the impossible invariably occurs.  When on Monday morning I learned
+that Flurry was to be one of the hares, and beheld him mounted on his
+best horse, as covered with bags as a postman on Christmas Day, I
+recalled the epigram.  Another confirmation of the law of the
+unexpected was the fact that Meg Longmuir, on the "maroan" pony, was
+his fellow hare, very smart, much elated, and quite unaware that she
+had been substituted for Sally Knox at the last moment, in order that
+she might be as a millstone hung round the neck of Flurry.  That this
+arrangement was not what Captain Larpent had desired was sufficiently
+apparent to the naked eye: why Flurry submitted to it was less obvious.
+
+About a dozen riders had been whipped up to take part in this
+preposterous affair, and were standing about on the grass in front of
+Shreelane, cutting up the turf as much as the hardness of the ground
+would permit, and making as much noise as a pack of hounds at feeding
+time.  The April sun glared hot, the better part of a north-easterly
+gale was blowing, the horses had over-eaten themselves with the bread
+of idleness, and were fat and frisky.
+
+"Is he any good?" said Flurry to me in a low voice, with his eye on
+Andrew, who was sitting, shrouded in gloom and remoteness, on the
+chestnut horse.
+
+"Ask Miss Longmuir," I said.  "She was schooling with him on Saturday."
+
+"I'll have plenty to do minding her, without asking her questions that
+she couldn't answer," returned Flurry.  He resumed his survey of
+Andrew.  "I wonder will he be able to hold that horse in a snaffle?  He
+catches hold an odd time."
+
+"Stand by!" said Doctor Hickey, his watch in his hand.  "Fifteen
+seconds more before the hares start!"
+
+"Well, if Larpent goes as big as he talks, he'll do," said Flurry,
+gathering up his reins.
+
+The ten minutes of grace ebbed slowly away, and preposterous though I
+still held the affair to be, I do not deny that I was aware of an
+inward simmering of impatience.
+
+"I'll have the face worn off my watch looking at it if you don't let us
+start soon!" said Miss Larkie McRory to Hickey.
+
+She was mounted on a long-legged animal that had been summarised by
+Flurry as "the latter end of a car-horse," and was certainly in need of
+all the time it could get.
+
+"Don't excite yourself now, or I'll be having to order you a cooling
+draught!" returned the Doctor, but I perceived that he, in common with
+everyone else, was edging his horse towards the point of departure.
+
+"Go!"
+
+In the riot of the break-away, I was able to think of nothing but of
+keeping Daniel from bucking me over his head, but during the hustle at
+the avenue gates I observed Andrew riding off Bernard, and getting to
+the front with pale and ferocious determination.  The "scent" took us
+along the road; we followed it over a stony bank and across two fields,
+at steeplechase pace, and then it ceased.  By this time any lingering
+sense of absurdity had ceased also.  We cast ourselves feverishly, like
+hounds; we galloped great circles; someone found the paper again, and
+yelled like a maniac.  We all yelled in response, a variety of yells,
+from "Tally Ho" to "Cooee," as, like Bedlam let loose, we rushed to the
+discoverer.  We were up on high land now, and the wind was whirling in
+our ears, snatching our voices away to infinity, and blowing up the
+temperatures of horses and riders like a bellows.  It had caught away
+the torn paper and flung it to leeward, into furze brakes, against the
+sides of the banks, and checks were many, and the horses, convinced
+that the hounds were somewhere ahead, pulled double.  In the bare
+fields, with their scanty April grass, everything showed up; we were
+deceived by white stones, by daisies, by dandelion puff-balls, by
+goose-feathers; most of all we were deceived by country-people, whom, I
+have no doubt, Flurry had instructed to mislead us.
+
+We had had a long check, consequent on a false trail, when, three
+fields away, Andrew held up his hat.
+
+"Look at him now, running mute!" giggled Sally Knox in my ear, as we
+battered down a road.  "He's too cross to shout.  He's frantic because
+he's not the hare, and Meg Longmuir was sent with Flurry!  And poor
+Flurry, who's going such a nice safe line!"
+
+"I suppose we may thank Miss Longmuir for the safe line?" I responded
+with some difficulty, because Daniel was enjoying himself on the road,
+according to the idiotic manner of horses.
+
+"No!  You may thank the chestnut horse!" ejaculated Flurry Knox's wife,
+as she hoisted out of the road over a loose wall.
+
+Remembering that Andrew was intended to buy the chestnut horse, the
+deduction was a simple one.  It was also quite clear that,
+disappointing as it might be, and contrary to the most cherished
+convention, Andrew was going as big as he talked, and even bigger.
+
+"'Them that's in love is like no one'!" I quoted to Mrs. Flurry, as
+Captain Larpent, taking the shortest way to a drift of paper on a
+hillside, charged a tall, furze-tufted fence, and got over with a
+scramble.  We followed, less heroically, by a gap, and ascended the
+hill, with the torn paper scurrying in front of us in the gusty wind.
+We had now been going for thirty-five minutes, and were all, horses and
+riders, something blown; Miss Larkie's car-horse could have been heard
+down-wind for half a mile, and I would have backed Daniel to out-roar
+any lion in the den.
+
+Nothing but the checks held us together.  Doctor Hickey, and Irving,
+the District Inspector, were taking the matter seriously, and were
+riding hard to catch Andrew, for the honour of the country.  Bernard
+Shute and two or three other heavy-weights were afoot, dragging their
+dripping horses over a bank with an up-hill take off; Miss McRory and
+the car-horse were making an extremely gradual progress in the rear,
+and Philippa had pulled back to give her leads, with an unselfishness
+that was not only futile, but was also a reproach to me and my
+fellow-men.
+
+We had been going in a big ring, and from the top of the hill we could
+again see Shreelane, below us among its trees.  It was there also that
+we caught the first sight of the hares, now heading for home and
+safety.  The wind had strengthened to half a gale, and the wild and
+composite yell with which the hounds viewed their quarry was blown back
+into their throats.  The maroan pony had fulfilled her mission as a
+handicap; twice we saw Flurry dismount and pull down a gap; once, at a
+bank, he got behind her and whipped her over like a peg-top.  Another
+field took them to the high road.  A puff of white paper fluttered out,
+and Miss Longmuir looked back and flourished a defiant whip; they
+turned, and galloped in a cloud of dust along the road for Shreelane.
+
+It was not a nice hill to get down in a hurry, and I should think the
+chestnut horse dreams of it now, somewhere in the level English
+Midlands, after he has over-eaten himself on fat English oats.  For my
+part, I remembered a humble but useful path, that links a little group
+of cottages with the rest of the world.
+
+The paper lay thick on the road in the shelter of the fences; everyone
+began to ride for a finish, and after a quarter of a mile of pounding
+in the dust at the heel of the hunt, I considered that Daniel and I had
+satisfied the demands of honour, and ignobly turned in at the back way
+to the stable yard, permitting the chase to sweep on to the front gates
+without me.
+
+In the stable yard I found several objects of interest.  The hares were
+there, dismounted, very hot, and uncaptured; Mrs. Knox was there,
+seated in her phaeton; there was a cluster of servants at the back
+door; there were McRorys, leaning on bicycles; there was Cecilia Shute,
+in her motor, with unknown rank and fashion billowing in motor veils
+beside her.
+
+All were gazing at a mass of sooty bricks and shattered chimney-pots
+that lay, scattered wide, in and about the black dredgings of the
+turf-house well.
+
+"That's the gable chimney," said Flurry coolly; "it got tired of
+waiting for Walkin' Aisy.  We heard the roar of it as we came in the
+front gate!"  He turned his mail-bag upside down so that its ultimate
+dregs were blown far and wide.  "How did the chestnut horse go
+with----?"
+
+As if in reply, hoofs clattered outside the yard, and the white nose of
+the chestnut shot into the opening of the yard gate.  He plunged past
+me, with Andrew lying back and tugging at the snaffle.  The Shreelane
+yard was fairly spacious, but I began to think that the thing wasn't as
+funny as it looked.  The horse swerved at Mrs. Knox's phaeton, swerved
+again as Flurry turned him from his stable door with a flourish of the
+mail-bag.  Andrew wrenched his head straight for the open back gate,
+and might have got him out without disaster, had not the widespread
+ruin of the chimney intervened.  The chestnut once more tried to
+swerve, his legs went from under him, and he fell, striking fire from
+the cobble stones of the yard.  Andrew stuck to him to the last
+instant, but was shot clear, and was flung, head first, into the heap
+of stones and black mud.
+
+It seemed long, long hours between this catastrophe, and a sufficient
+subsidence of things in general, for me to be able, without inhumanity,
+to envisage a whisky and soda.  Old Mrs. Knox watched me with approval.
+
+"I'm tired of looking at young men drinking tea," she commented.  (It
+was Mrs. Knox's pleasing idiosyncrasy to look upon me as a young man.)
+"They were like a pack of curates at a school-feast!  Not that I was
+ever at a school-feast, thank God!" she added, with an abandoned
+chuckle.
+
+We were sitting in a corner of the dining-room, surrounded by empty
+cups and crumby plates; tides of tea and of talkers had ebbed and
+flowed, but Mrs. Knox had sat on--to hear my personal report of Andrew,
+she said.
+
+"Upon my honour, he escaped very well!  A dislocated shoulder is
+nothing, and the young lady is there to 'tend the wounded Deloraine!'"
+
+She paused, and put her head on one side, as if waiting for the
+prompter.  "How does it go?  'She thought some spirit of the sky had
+done the bold mosstrooper wrong!'"
+
+She paused again, and looked at me; the evening light shone on her
+spectacles, and made them impenetrable.
+
+"Now I'm going to give you a piece of advice; "'And I'll not take it!'
+says Major Yeates, R.M.!"
+
+I protested that I had said nothing of the kind.  She prodded me in the
+knee with a goblin finger.
+
+"_Close that well_!  Put on the flagstone, and seal it down again!"
+She fumbled in her shawls, and pulled out a thin old gold chain.
+"Here's the seal, the same one that my father sealed it with at the
+time of the Famine!"
+
+I said that I was ready to do anything that she told me, but it would
+be interesting to know why.
+
+Mrs. Knox detached the seal from her chain, to which it was knotted by
+something that I darkly suspected to be a bit of bootlace.  It was a
+cornelian seal, made in the grand manner; massively wrought, the gold
+smooth from age.
+
+"I daresay you never heard of Major Apollo Riggs?  He drove up to this
+house one fine day in a coach-and-four.  Next day the coach-and-four
+drove away, but Major Apollo Riggs was not in it!"
+
+"He found himself a success at Shreelane?" I suggested.
+
+"Not so much with his host as his hostess!" returned Mrs. Knox
+portentously.
+
+"A duel?" I asked.
+
+"He was never seen again, my dear!" replied Mrs. Knox.  (There are
+moments, in Ireland, when this term of affection is used not so much
+affectionately as confidentially.)
+
+At this point the door opened.  Mrs. Knox put the goblin finger on her
+lips, as Philippa, still in her habit, slid into the room.
+
+"The patient and Meg are extremely self-sufficing," she said, dropping
+into a chair.  "His face is turning all colours of the rainbow, and one
+eye has disappeared, but the other is full of expression and is fixed
+on Meg!"
+
+"There's not much colour about _you_," I said.  "You ought to have a
+whisky and soda."
+
+"Nonsense!" said Philippa, waving me away; "we've got most of the black
+stuff out of his hair; even his waistcoat pocket was full of it!  And
+bits of the torn paper had stuck to it, like confetti."
+
+"That suggests a wedding," I observed.
+
+"Quite," said Philippa.  "But the absurd thing was that one of the
+confetti--obviously a bit of those old letters that the children tore
+up--had the word 'Apollo' on it!  It was stuck on to him like a label."
+
+Mrs. Knox clasped her hands, and lay back in her chair.
+
+"I said it was, of course, a tribute to his beauty, but Meg was not at
+all amused.  She thought it was 'lese majeste.'"
+
+"She'll get over that in time," I said, putting the seal in my pocket.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+WHEN I FIRST MET DR. HICKEY
+
+There was a wonderful chandelier in the hotel dining-room.  Fine bronze
+it was made of, with mermaids, and Tritons, and dolphins flourishing
+their tails up towards the dingy ceiling-paper, and beaked galleys, on
+whose prows sat six small lamps, with white china receptacles for
+paraffin, and smoky brown chimneys.  Gone were the brave days when each
+prow had borne a galaxy of tall wax candles; the chandelier might
+consider itself lucky in that it had even the paraffin lamps to justify
+its existence, and that it still hung from a ceiling, instead of
+sharing the last resting-place of its twin brother, in the bed of the
+tidal river under the hotel windows.
+
+James, the hotel waiter, knew the family history of the chandelier, as
+he knew that of most people and things in the county.  I commented upon
+it to a young gentleman with a pointed beard, who sat next to me at
+dinner, and said that it looked to me like Renaissance.  The young
+gentleman suggested, alternatively, that it looked more like bronze.  I
+did not dispute the point, but I think he found the subject precarious,
+as he turned to the young lady on his left, and I heard him embark upon
+a new theme.
+
+[Illustration: James.]
+
+"I was half dead with the toothache all day," he observed.
+
+The young lady replied sympathetically that toothache was a fright.
+
+"Well, indeed, that's true," said James, smoothly entering the
+conversation from behind my chair.  "I got my own share of it.  Sure
+there was one time I used to be roaring like a Banshee all night with
+it."
+
+"Were you so?" said the gentleman, with a wink at me.  "That must have
+been a long time ago, James."
+
+"Well, indeed, it is too, Doctor," replied James meditatively, "going
+on forty years, I daresay.  I went to Dublin, and I went to a great
+dentist that was in it that time, and he pulled all the teeth I had,
+and he gave me a new set entirely."
+
+"Oh, my!" said the young lady, "that must have been very expensive."
+
+"It was so," said James, not without pride.  "Twenty pounds I gave him."
+
+"That was awful," said the young lady, feelingly; "it was well to be
+you that had it to spend."
+
+"Well, it wasn't all out so bad," said James; "sure I only wore them a
+few times--I wouldn't be bothered with them, and a doctor that was a
+friend of mine gave me ten pounds for them."
+
+"I suppose they were a fit for a patient of his?" said the doctor.
+
+"They were a bad fit for me, anyway," returned James, glancing over his
+shoulder at the clattering operations of his two female subordinates,
+with the eye of the sergeant-major--the eye that always contains a
+grievance.  "I was a footman with the old Lord Garretmore that time.
+Sure that was where the chandelier came from.  A grand house it was,
+too--big slobs of marble on the tables, and gold legs under them, and
+ye'd bog to the knees in the carpets.  Well, it was the first night
+after me getting the teeth, there was a gentleman stayed for dinner,
+and he was to go away by the night train.  Forty horses were in the
+stables, and there wasn't one but was out at grass, and I had to go out
+beating the bushes for an old mare that was round the house always,
+herself and her foal, to put her under the side car.  'Prua!  Prua!'
+says I, calling the mare in the dark, and with that the teeth lepped
+out of my mouth, with respects to you!"
+
+"Oh, fie!" said the mother of the young lady.
+
+"What did you do then, James?" inquired the Doctor.
+
+"I took the white tie off me, and I tied it to the bush that was next
+me, for a token, and 'twas that way I got them again the next morning,
+thanks be to God."
+
+Having concluded his story, James started on a perfunctory tour of the
+table with the wine card.  He stopped to pull the turf fire together,
+and, with a furtive eye at the glass over the chimney-piece, he
+rearranged the long lock of hair that draped his bald pate.  It was
+dyed, of that peculiar shade of chestnut that disdains subterfuge, and
+the fact and its suggestions were distressing where an old servant was
+concerned; so also was the manner in which he hobbled on his heels.
+
+"His walk's full of corns," said the young doctor, eyeing him not
+without sympathy.  "He's a great old character.  I believe they keep
+him here to talk to the tourists."
+
+It is a melancholy fact that in Ireland, in these later days,
+"characters" have become aware of their position, and palpably live up
+to their reputation.  But James was in a class of his own.
+
+I said didactically, even combatively, that "characters" were free and
+easy, but that James was easy without being free.
+
+"I'll bet he's not easy in his feet, anyhow!" said the Doctor brutally.
+"Have you any more soup there, James?"
+
+The mother of the young lady, who had hitherto preserved a silence,
+broken only by the audible assimilation of her soup, here laid down her
+spoon and said in cryptic disparagement:
+
+"Tin!"
+
+"Well, I'd say it was the best we had yet," said the Doctor.  "I'd
+undertake to pull a puppy through distemper with it."
+
+"That's the soup she has always for th'assizes," said James.  "Grand
+soup it is, and I declare to ye, she makes it out of egg shells and
+every old rubbish!"
+
+The young lady's mother emitted a short laugh, but her empty soup-plate
+told heavily against her.
+
+The meal wore slowly on.  A sea fish, of a genus unknown to me, and
+amazingly endowed with bones, was consumed in distracted silence.
+
+"I hear you have a fish shop opened in Ballinagar, Mrs. M'Evoy,"
+remarked the Doctor, taking his last fish bone out of action with
+professional adroitness, and addressing the mother of the young lady,
+"That's very up-to-date.  There wasn't one I met from Ballinagar but
+was bragging of it."
+
+"It was the Hoolahanes that had it," said Mrs. M'Evoy.  "It's closed."
+
+"Oh dear, why so?" said the Doctor.  "Why did they do that, I wonder?"
+
+"They said that morning, noon, and night people were bothering them for
+fish," returned Mrs. M'Evoy, to whom this triumph of the artistic
+temperament presented no exceptional feature.
+
+"Unless it might be on a fast day, I'd never ask to taste a bit of
+fish," remarked James, giving a helping hand to the conversation.
+"There was a man I knew from this place got his death in Liverpool from
+a bit of fish.  It stuck to the upper gum.  'Bill,' says he to the one
+that was with him, 'so help me God,' says he, 'I'm dyin',' says he; and
+sure that's how he met his death!  It was in some grand hotel he was,
+and he was too shy to give the puff to send out the bit."
+
+"I'd like to send that to the 'B.M.J.'," said the Doctor gravely.
+"Maybe you could give me the man's name, James?"
+
+"There was them that could swear to it," said James, depositing a
+syphon on the table in a determined manner, "but they were before your
+day, Doctor Hickey."
+
+"How young he is!" said Miss M'Evoy archly.  "Don't be flattering him,
+James."
+
+"Indeed I'll not flatter him," returned James, "there's plenty doing
+that."
+
+It was at about this point that a dish containing three roast ducks was
+placed in front of me.  Circumstances had decreed that I sat at the end
+of the table; it was my task to deal with the ducks, and during the
+breathless and steamy struggle that ensued, I passed out of the
+conversation, which, indeed, had resolved itself into a more personal
+affair between Dr. Hickey and Miss M'Evoy.
+
+It was somewhere in the reposeful period that came with the cheese,
+that Dr. Hickey ordered a bottle of port, of which he very handsomely
+invited the ladies and me to partake.  He leaned back in his chair.
+
+"Was this in the cellar the time of the flood?" he said, putting down
+his glass.  "I don't mean Noah's flood, James; you mightn't remember
+that; but the time the river came up in the town here."
+
+"If it was Noah's flood itself," said James, instantly accepting
+combat, "it couldn't get into our cellars.  But, faith, it was up in
+this room you're sitting in, and I had to get up on the table from it,
+and it ruz to the table, and I had to hang out of the chandelier, and a
+boat came into the room then and took me out.  Sure that was the time
+that the porpoise came up the river, with the dint of the flood, and
+she was in it for a week, in front of the hotel."
+
+"In compliment to the visitors, I suppose?" said the Doctor.  "And what
+happened her, James?"
+
+"She was in it till a whale came up the river," replied James, with the
+simplicity of Holy Writ, "and b'Jove he banished her!"
+
+"It's a wonder you'd let him treat a lady that way, James," said Dr.
+Hickey.
+
+It was still twilight when we left the dining-room, and strayed to the
+open hall door, and out into the September evening.  In the east a
+rose-pink moon was rising in lavender haze, and a faint wind blew from
+it; the subtle east wind of September, warmed by its journey across the
+cornfields, turf-scented by the bogs.  There was a narrow garden
+between the hotel and the river, a place where were new and
+already-neglected flower-beds, and paths heavy with coarse river
+gravel, and grass that had been cut, not too recently, with a scythe.
+A thatched summer-house completed the spasmodic effort of the hotel to
+rise to smartness.  The West of Ireland cannot be smart, nor should any
+right-minded person desire that it should be so.
+
+Dr. Hickey and I sat and smoked on the parapet wall above the river,
+while the slated and whitewashed town darkened into mystery.  Little
+lights came slowly out, and behind the town the grey shape of Dreelish
+mountain lowered in uncompromising abruptness, a brooding presence,
+felt rather than seen.  In the summer-house James was lighting a
+Chinese lantern, of a somewhat crumpled and rheumatic outline.
+
+"Well, now, that's a great notion!" said Dr. Hickey, with the lethargic
+and pessimistic humour of his type.  "That'll be in the
+prospectus--'Hotel grounds illuminated every night.'  I wonder did they
+buy that at the Jumble Sale after the Fancy Fair in the Town Hall?"
+
+We sat there, and the moon and the round red Chinese lantern looked at
+each other across the evening, and had a certain resemblance, and I
+reflected on the fact that an Irishman is always the critic in the
+stalls, and is also, in spirit, behind the scenes.
+
+"Look at James now," said the Doctor.  "He's inviting the ladies out to
+have coffee in the summer-house.  That's very fashionable.  I suppose
+we should go there too."
+
+We sat with Mrs. and Miss M'Evoy in the summer-house, and drank
+something that was unearthly black in the red light, and was singularly
+unsuggestive of coffee.  The seats were what is known as "rustic," and
+had aggressive knobs in unexpected places; the floor held the
+invincible dampness of the West, yet the situation was not
+disagreeable.  At the other side of the river men were sitting on a
+wall, and talking, quietly, inexhaustibly; now and then a shout of
+laughter broke from one of them, like a flame from a smouldering fire.
+
+"These lads are waiting to go back on the night mail," said the Doctor;
+"you wouldn't think they're up since maybe three this morning to come
+in to the fair."
+
+Here a railway whistle made a thin bar of sound somewhere out under the
+low moon, that had now lifted herself clear of the haze.  A voice
+called from the hill-side:
+
+"Hora-thu!  Tommeen!  Let yee be coming on!"
+
+The men tumbled on to the road, and hurried, heavy-footed, in the
+direction of the station.
+
+"Sure, they've half an hour yet, the creatures," said Mrs. M'Evoy.
+
+"They have, and maybe an hour before they have the pigs shunted," said
+James, re-entering with a plate of biscuits, adorned with pink and
+white sugar.
+
+"Ah! what signifies half an hour here or there on this line!" said Dr.
+Hickey.  "I'm told there was a lady travelling on it last week, and she
+had a canary in a cage, and the canary got loose and flew out of the
+window, and by George, the lady pulled the communication cord, and
+stopped the train!"
+
+"Well, now, she showed her sense," said Mrs. M'Evoy, with an utterance
+slightly muffled in pink biscuit.
+
+"She and the guard went then trying to catch the canary," continued Dr.
+Hickey, "and he'd sit till they'd get near him, and then he'd fly on
+another piece.  Everyone that was in the train was hanging out of it,
+and betting on it, from one carriage to another, and some would back
+the lady and some would back the bird, and everyone telling them what
+to do."
+
+"It's a pity _you_ weren't in it," said Miss M'Evoy, "they'd have been
+all right then."
+
+"It was that bare bit of bog near Bohirmeen," pursued Dr. Hickey,
+without a stagger, "not a tree in it.  'If he have a fly left in him at
+all,' says a chap out of a Third Smoker, 'ye'll get him in Mike
+Doogan's bush.'  That was the only bush in the country."
+
+"'Twas true for him," said James.
+
+"Well, they got him in the bush," proceeded Dr. Hickey, "singing away
+for himself; but they had some trouble crossing the drains.  I'm told
+the guard said the lady lepped like a horse!"
+
+"You had it right, all to the singing," commented Mrs. M'Evoy,
+advancing as it were to the footlights.  "I have the little bird
+upstairs this minute, and she never sang a note yet!"
+
+Mrs. M'Evoy here permitted herself to subside into fat and deep-seated
+chuckles, and Miss M'Evoy, James, and I gave way suitably to our
+feelings.
+
+"Well, now, I thought it was a nice idea, the canary to be singing,"
+said Dr. Hickey, emerging from the situation as from a football
+scrimmage, in which he had retained possession of the ball.  "The next
+time I tell the story, I'll leave that out, and I can say that the lady
+that lepped like a horse was Mrs. M'Evoy.  They'll believe me then."
+
+"Why wouldn't you say the canary was an eagle?" said Miss M'Evoy.
+"There used to be plenty eagles in these mountains back here."
+
+"Well, indeed, I might too," said Dr. Hickey.  "I remember it was
+somewhere in these parts that an uncle of mine was staying one time,
+and a man came to the hotel with an eagle to sell to the tourists.  My
+uncle was like Mrs. M'Evoy here, he was very fond of birds; and the man
+said the eagle'd be a lovely pet.  Whatever way it was, he bought it."
+He paused to light a cigarette, and James pretended to collect the
+coffee cups.
+
+"He gave the eagle to the Boots to mind for him," resumed the Doctor,
+"and the Boots put it into an empty bedroom.  It wasn't more than seven
+o'clock next morning when my uncle was wakened up, and the waiter came
+in.  'There's a man in the kitchen, your honour,' says he, 'and he has
+a great fighting aigle, and he says he'll fight your honour's aigle in
+the passage.'  They had a grand fight between the two o' them in the
+spare room, and in the end my uncle's eagle went up the chimney, and
+the man's eagle went out through the glass in the window.  My uncle had
+a nice bill to pay for all that was broken in the room, and in the end
+he gave the eagle to the Zoo."
+
+"Faith, he did not!" shouted James suddenly.  "He left him stuck in the
+chimbley!  And sure it was I that got him out, and meself that sold him
+to a gentleman that was going to Ameriky.  Sure, I was the waiter!"
+
+Dr. Hickey threw himself back in his rustic chair.
+
+"Holy smoke!  This is no place for me," he said; "every story I have is
+true in spite of me."
+
+Soon afterwards the ladies went to bed, and Dr. Hickey and I smoked on
+for a time.  He explained to me that he was here as "locum" for a
+friend of his; it wasn't much of a catch, but he was only just after
+passing for his Medical, and you'd nearly go as locum for a tinker's
+dog after you had three years' grinding in Dublin put in.  This was a
+God-forsaken sort of a hole, not a hound within fifty miles, nor anyone
+that would know a hound if they saw one, but the fishing was middling
+good.  From this point the conversation flowed smoothly into channels
+of sport, and the dual goals of Dr. Hickey's ambition were divulged to
+me.
+
+"There was a chap I was at school with--Knox his name was--that has a
+little pack of foxhounds down in the South, and he's as good as
+promised me I'm to whip in to him if I can get the Skebawn Dispensary
+that's vacant now, and I might have as good a chance of it as another."
+
+My own ambitions were also, at the moment, dual, being matrimonial,
+with a Resident Magistracy attached, but I did not feel it necessary to
+reveal them.  I mentioned that I was having a day's fishing here on my
+way to Donegal to shoot grouse, but did not add that Philippa, to whom
+I was newly engaged, was implicated in the grouse party, still less
+that it was my intention to meet her the next afternoon at Carrow Cross
+Junction, an hour away, and proceed with her to the home of her uncle,
+an hour or so further on.
+
+"You might have three hours, or maybe four, to wait at Carrow Cross,"
+said Dr. Hickey, as if tracking my thought; "why wouldn't you drive out
+to the Sports at Carrow Bay?  It's only four miles, and there's a
+Regatta there to-morrow, and when the tide goes out they have races on
+the sands.  I believe there's a trotting-match too, and an exhibition
+of crochet."
+
+It did not seem to me that I wanted to go to Carrow Bay, but it was not
+necessary to say so.
+
+Trucks at the station were banging into their neighbours, with much
+comment from the engine; I thought of Tommeen and his comrades, up
+since 3 A.M., and still waiting to get home, and it suggested the
+privileges of those who could go to bed.
+
+It was over a whisky and soda in the heavily reminiscent atmosphere of
+the smoking-room that Dr. Hickey told me he was going to take the
+ladies to the Sports, and mentioned that there would be a train at
+eleven, and a spare seat on the car from Carrow Cross.  It required no
+special effort to see the position that I was to occupy in relation to
+Mrs. M'Evoy; I followed the diplomatic method of my country; I looked
+sympathetic, and knew certainly that I should not be there.
+
+I leaned out of my window that night, to look at the river, with the
+moon on it, hustling over the shallows, and thought of the porpoise,
+who had been so unchivalrously banished by the whale.  I also wondered
+when the English post got in.  I was presently aware of a head
+projecting from a window just below, and a female voice said, as if in
+continuance of a conversation:
+
+"We should coax James for the cold duck to take with us."
+
+"That's a good idea," replied the rotund voice of Mrs. M'Evoy; "we'll
+get nothing out there that a Christian could eat, and there might be
+that gentleman too."  (That gentleman closed one eye.)  "Come in now,
+Ally!  There's an east wind coming in that would perish the crows."
+
+The guillotine slam of the sash followed.  The river warbled and washed
+through the stillness; its current was not colder, more clear, than
+"that gentleman's" resolve that he would not grace the luncheon party
+at Carrow Bay Sports.
+
+I breakfasted late and in solitude, ministered to by one of the female
+underlings of James; the voice of James himself, I heard distantly, in
+war and slaughtering, somewhere behind the scenes.  The letter that I
+wanted had not failed me, and I smoked a very honeyed cigarette over it
+in the garden afterwards.  A glimpse of Dr. Hickey at the hotel door in
+a palpably new tie, and of Mrs. and Miss M'Evoy in splendour in the
+hall, broke into my peace.  I quietly but unhesitatingly got over the
+wall of the garden, and withdrew by way of the river bank.
+
+When the 11 o'clock train had left I returned to the halcyon stillness
+of the hotel; my own train left at 1.30; it was a time favourable, and
+almost attractive, for letter writing.  As I wrote, I heard the voice
+of James demanding in thunder where was Festus O'Flaherty, and why
+hadn't he the chickens plucked.  A small female voice replied that the
+Doctor and the ladies had left their lunch after them, and that Festus
+had run up to the station to try would he overtake them with it, and
+the thrain was gone.
+
+"And if it was themselves they left after them," retorted James, still
+in thunder, "what was that to him?"
+
+To this conundrum no answer was attempted; I bestowed upon Mrs. M'Evoy
+some transient compassion, and she and her company departed, hull down,
+below the horizon of my thoughts.
+
+A few hours afterwards, I trod the solitudes of Carrow Cross Junction,
+and saw the train that had brought me there bend like a caterpillar
+round a spur of hill, and disappear.  When I looked round again the
+little bookstall was shuttered up, and the bookstall lady was vanishing
+down a flight of steps; the porter had entrenched himself in the goods
+store; the stationmaster was withdrawn from human ken with the
+completeness only achievable by his kind.  I was suspended in space for
+three hours, and the indifference of my fellow-creatures was
+unconcealed.  A long walk to nowhere and back again was the obvious
+resource of the destitute.
+
+The town of Carrow Cross lay in a hollow below the station, with the
+blue turf smoke stagnant above its muddle of slate and thatched roofs;
+I skirted it, and struck out into the country.  I did not find it
+attractive.  Potato fields in September are not looking their best;
+there were no trees, and loose, crooked walls overran the landscape.
+The peak of Dreelish mountain was visible, but the dingy green country
+rose high between me and it, like the cope on the neck of a priest.  I
+walked for an hour; I sat on a wall and read Philippa's letter again,
+and found, with a shock, that I had only one cigarette left.  A fatuous
+fear of missing the train turned me back in the direction of the
+station, slightly hungry, and profoundly bored.  I came into the town
+by a convent, and saw the nuns walking flowingly in twos, under
+chestnut trees; asceticism in its most pictorial aspect, with the
+orange leaves and the blue September haze, and the black robes and
+white headgear.  I wondered how they managed to go on walking neatly to
+nowhere and back again with such purpose, and if they felt as jaded as
+I, and as little enlivened by the environs of Carrow Cross.
+
+The town was an unprepossessing affair of two or three streets,
+whitewash and thatch squeezed between green and gold pubs, like old
+country-women among fashionable daughters.  Everything was closed; as I
+looked along the empty street an outside car drawn by a dun pony turned
+into it at high speed, the pony forging with a double click-clack.  As
+the car swung towards me some one flourished a stick, some one else a
+red parasol.
+
+"We got a bit tired waiting for the sports," Dr. Hickey said, as he
+assisted Mrs. M'Evoy to alight at a house labelled Lynch's Railway
+Hotel, in royal blue; "it seemed that the tide wasn't going out as fast
+as the Committee expected.  It might be another hour or more before the
+race-course would be above water, and we thought we might as well come
+on here and get something to eat at the Hotel."
+
+"It has the appearance of being closed," said Mrs. M'Evoy, in a voice
+thinned by famine.
+
+"That might be a fashion it has in the afternoon, when themselves does
+be at their dinner," said the car-driver.
+
+The front door was certainly closed, and there was neither knocker nor
+bell, nothing but a large well-thumbed keyhole.  Dr. Hickey hammered
+with his stick; nothing happened.
+
+"They're gone to the races so," said the car-driver.
+
+In the silence that followed it seemed that I could hear the flagging
+beat of Mrs. M'Evoy's heart.
+
+"Wait awhile," said Dr. Hickey; "the window isn't bolted!"
+
+The sill was no more than two feet from the ground, the sash yielded to
+pressure and went up; Dr. Hickey dived in, and we presently heard him
+assail the front door from inside.
+
+It was locked, and its key had apparently gone to the races.  I
+followed Dr. Hickey by way of the window, so did Miss M'Evoy; we pooled
+our forces, and drew her mamma after us through the opening of two foot
+by three, steadily, as the great god Pan drew the pith from the reed.
+
+We found ourselves in a small sitting-room, almost filled by a table;
+there was a mature smell of cabbage, but there was nothing else to
+suggest the presence of food.  We proceeded to the nether regions,
+which were like a chapter in a modern realistic novel, and found a
+sickly kitchen fire, the horrid remains of the Lynch family breakfast,
+an empty larder, and some of the home attire of the race-goers, lying,
+as the tree lies, where it fell.
+
+"There's a sort of a butcher in the town," said Dr. Hickey, when the
+search-parties had converged on each other, empty-handed, "maybe we
+could cook something----"
+
+"If it was even a bit of salt pork--" said Mrs. M'Evoy, seizing the
+poker and attacking the sleepy fire.
+
+"Let you get some water, and I'll wash the plates," said Miss M'Evoy to
+Dr. Hickey.
+
+I looked at my watch, saw that I had still an hour and a half to play
+with, and departed to look for the butcher.
+
+Neither by sign-board nor by shop front did the Carrow Cross butcher
+reveal himself.  I was finally investigating a side street, where the
+houses were one-storeyed, and thatched, and wholly unpromising, when a
+heavy running step, that might have been a horse's, thundered behind
+me, and a cumbrous pale woman, with the face of a fugitive, plunged
+past me, and burst in at a cottage door like a mighty blast of wind.  A
+little girl, in tears, thudded barefooted after her.  The big woman
+turned in the doorway, and shrieked to me.
+
+"Thim's madmen, from th' Asylum!  Come inside from them, for God's
+sake!"
+
+I looked behind me up the street, and saw a small, decorous party of
+men, flanked by a couple of stalwart keepers in uniform.  One of the
+men, a white-faced being in seedy black, headed them, playing an
+imaginary fiddle on his left arm, and smiling secretly to himself.
+Whether the lady had invited me to her house as a protector, or as a
+refugee, I did not know: she herself had vanished, but through the
+still open door I saw, miraculously, a fragment or two of meat, hanging
+in the interior.  I had apparently chanced upon the home of the Carrow
+Cross butcher.
+
+A greasy counter and a chopping-block put the matter beyond doubt; I
+beat upon an inner door: a wail of terror responded, and then a muffled
+voice:
+
+"Come in under the bed to me, Chrissie, before they'd ketch ye!"
+
+There was nothing for it but to take from a hook a grey and white
+fragment that looked like bacon, place half-a-crown on the counter, and
+depart swiftly.
+
+"I gave a few of the Asylum patients leave to go to the Sports," said
+Dr. Hickey, a little later, when we were seated between the large bare
+table and the wall of the little sitting-room, with slices of fried
+pork weltering on our plates.  "I saw the fellow waltzing down the
+street.  Ah! he's fairly harmless, and they've a couple o' keepers with
+them anyway."
+
+"The only pity was that you left the half-crown," said Mrs. M'Evoy; "a
+shilling was too much for it."
+
+Mrs. M'Evoy was considerably flushed, and had an effective black smear
+on her forehead, but her voice had recovered its timbre.  There was a
+tin of biscuits on the table, there was a war-worn brown teapot, and
+some bottles of porter; it was now four hours since I had eaten
+anything; in spite of the cold and clear resolve of the night before, I
+was feeding, grossly yet enjoyably, with Dr. Hickey and his friends.
+
+"This is a Temperance Hotel for the past year," remarked Dr. Hickey,
+delicately knocking off the head of a porter bottle with the
+sitting-room poker.  "That's why it was upstairs I found the porter.  I
+suppose they took the corkscrew to the Sports with them."
+
+"How did they lose the license at all?" said Mrs. M'Evoy; "I thought
+there wasn't a house in Carrow Cross but had one."
+
+"It was taken from them over some little mistake about selling
+potheen," replied Dr. Hickey, courteously applying the broken neck of
+the bottle to Mrs. M'Evoy's tumbler.  "The police came to search the
+house, and old Lynch, that was in bed upstairs, heard them, and threw a
+two-gallon jar of potheen out of the top back window, to break it.  The
+unlucky thing was that there was a goose in the yard, and it was on the
+goose it fell."
+
+"The creature!" said Miss M'Evoy, "was she killed?"
+
+"Killed to the bone, as they say," replied the Doctor; "but the trouble
+was, that on account of falling on the goose the jar wasn't broken, so
+the bobbies got the potheen."
+
+"Supposing they summons you now for the porter!" said Mrs. M'Evoy,
+facetiously, casting her eye through the open window into the bare
+sunshiny street.
+
+"They'll have summonses enough at Carrow Bay to keep them out of
+mischief," returned Dr. Hickey.  "It's a pity now, Major, you didn't
+patronise the Sports.  They might have put you on judging the cakes
+with Mrs. M'Evoy."
+
+"Why then, the one they put on with me was the man they had judging the
+vegetables," said Mrs. M'Evoy, after a comfortable pull at the
+contraband porter.  "'That's a fine weighty cake,' says me lad,
+weighing a sponge-cake on his hand.  'We'll give that one the prize.'"
+
+"I wish you brought it here with you," said her daughter, "as weighty
+as it was."
+
+"They put _me_ judging the row-boats," said Dr. Hickey, "but after the
+third race I had to give up, and put five stitches in one of the men
+that was in the mark-boat."
+
+I said that the mark-boat ought to have been a fairly safe place.
+
+"Safe!" said Dr. Hickey.  "It was the hottest corner in the course.  I
+thought they were sunk twice, but they might have been all right if
+they hadn't out-oars and joined in the race on the second round.  They
+got in first, as it happened, and it was in the course of the protest
+that I had to put in the stitches.  It was a good day's sport, as far
+as it went."
+
+"Ah, there's no life in a Regatta without a band," said Miss M'Evoy
+languidly, with her elbows on the table and her cup in her hand.  "Now
+Ringsend Regatta's sweet!"
+
+"I'm afraid Miss M'Evoy didn't enjoy herself to-day," said Dr. Hickey.
+"Of course she's used to so much attention in Dublin----"
+
+"It's kind of you to say that," said Miss M'Evoy; "I'm sure you're
+quite an authority on Dublin young ladies."
+
+"Is it me?" said Dr. Hickey; "I'd be afraid to say Boo to a goose.  But
+I've a brother that could tell you all about them.  He's not as shy as
+I am."
+
+"He must be a great help and comfort to you," returned Miss M'Evoy.
+
+"He's very romantic," said Dr. Hickey, "and poetical.  He was greatly
+struck with two young ladies he met at the Ringsend Regatta last month.
+He mistook their address, someway, and when he couldn't find them, what
+did he do but put a poem in the papers--the Agony Column, y'know----"
+
+"We'd like to hear that," said Mrs. M'Evoy, putting her knife into the
+salt with unhurried dexterity.
+
+"I forget it all, only the last verse," said Dr. Hickey, "it went this
+way:
+
+  'You are indeed a charming creature,
+  Perfect alike in form and feature,
+  I love you and none other.
+  Oh, Letitia--Here's your Mother!'"
+
+
+As Dr. Hickey, his eyes modestly on his plate, concluded the ode, I
+certainly intercepted a peculiar glance between the ladies.
+
+"I call that very impident," said Mrs. M'Evoy, winking at me.
+
+"It was worth paying a good deal to put that in print!" commented Miss
+M'Evoy unkindly.  "But that was a lovely Regatta," she continued, "and
+the music and the fireworks were grand, but the society's very mixed.
+Do you remember, M'ma, what happened to Mary and me that evening, the
+time we missed you in the dark?"
+
+"Indeed'n I do," said Mrs. M'Evoy, her eyes still communing with her
+daughter's, "and I remember telling you it was the last evening I'd let
+you out of my sight."
+
+"It was a gentleman that picked up my umbrella," began Miss M'Evoy
+artlessly.
+
+Dr. Hickey dropped his knife on the floor, and took some time to pick
+it up.
+
+"And he passed the remark to me that it was a nice evening," went on
+Miss M'Evoy.  "'It is,' said I.  Now, M'ma, why wouldn't I give him a
+civil answer?"
+
+"That's according to taste," said Mrs. M'Evoy.
+
+"Well indeed I didn't fancy his looks at all.  It was pitch dark only
+for the fireworks, but I thought he had a nasty kind of a foreign look,
+and a little pointed beard on him too.  If you saw the roll of his eye
+when the green fire fell out of the rockets you'd think of
+Mephistopheles----"
+
+"There's no doubt Mephistopheles was one of Shakespeare's grandest
+creations," said Dr. Hickey hurriedly.  His eyes besought my aid.  It
+struck me that this literary digression was an attempt to change the
+conversation.
+
+Miss M'Evoy resumed her narrative.
+
+"'That's a pretty flower you have in your button-hole,' said he.  'It
+is,' said I."
+
+"You didn't tell him a great deal he didn't know," said her mother.
+
+"'Maybe you might give it to me?' said he.  'Maybe I might not!' said
+I.  'And where do you live?' said he.  'Percy Place,' says Mary, before
+you could wink.  Anyone would have to believe her.  'Upon my soul,'
+said he, 'I'll have the pleasure of calling upon you.  Might I ask what
+your name is?'  'O'Rooney,' says Mary, 'and this is my cousin, Miss
+Letitia Gollagher.'  Well, when Mary said 'Gollagher,' I _burst!_"
+
+Miss M'Evoy here put down her cup, and to some slight extent repeated
+the operation.
+
+"I suppose the foreign gentleman told you his own name then?" said Dr.
+Hickey, whose complexion had warmed up remarkably.
+
+"He did not," said Miss M'Evoy; "but perhaps that was because he wasn't
+asked, and it was then M'ma came up.  I can tell you he didn't wait to
+be introduced!"
+
+"I have a sister-in-law living in Percy Place," said Mrs. M'Evoy,
+passing her handkerchief over her brow, and addressing no one in
+particular, "and it was some day last month she was telling me of a
+young man that was knocking at all the doors down the street, and she
+thought he was a Collector of some sort.  He came to her house too, and
+he told the girl he was looking for some ladies of the name of
+Gollagher or O'Rooney."
+
+She paused, and regarded Dr. Hickey.
+
+"I wonder did he find them?" asked Dr. Hickey, who was obviously being
+forced on to the ropes.
+
+"I thought you might be able to tell us that!" said Mrs. M'Evoy,
+delivering her knock-out blow with the suddenness that belongs to the
+highest walks of the art.
+
+Miss M'Evoy, with equal suddenness, uttered a long and strident yell,
+and lay back in her place, grasping my arm as she did so, in what I am
+convinced was wholly unconscious sympathy.  She and I were side by
+side, facing the window, and through the window, which, as I have
+mentioned, was wide open, I was aware of a new element in the situation.
+
+It was a figure in blue in the street outside; a soft and familiar
+blue, and it bore a parasol of the same colour.  The figure was at a
+standstill; and very blue, the burning blue of tropical heavens, were
+the eyes that met mine beneath the canopy of the parasol.  Even before
+my own had time to blink I foreknew that never, in time or in eternity,
+should I be able to make Philippa accept thoroughly my explanation.
+
+
+Philippa's explanation was extremely brief, and was addressed rather to
+the empty street of Carrow Cross than to me, as I crawled by her side.
+There had been, she said, half an hour to wait, and as I was not at the
+station--the blue eyes met mine for a steely moment--she had gone for a
+little walk.  She had met some horrid drunken men, and turned into
+another street to avoid them, and then----
+
+A brimming silence followed.  We turned up the road that led to the
+station.
+
+"There are those men again!" exclaimed Philippa, coming a little nearer
+to me.
+
+In front of us, deviously ascending the long slope, was the Asylum
+party; the keepers, exceedingly drunk, being assisted to the station by
+the Lunatics.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE BOSOM OF THE McRORYS
+
+Since the day when fate had shipwrecked us at the end of the Temple
+Braney shrubbery, and flung us, dripping, into the bosoms of the
+McRorys, we had been the victims of an indissoluble friendship with the
+family.  This fulfilled itself in many ways.
+
+Gratitude, what is known as Common Gratitude (which is merely a hollow
+compliance with the voice of conscience), impelled us to lunch Mr. and
+Mrs. McRory, heavily and elaborately (but without any one to meet
+them); to invite the whole family to a lawn-tennis party (and the whole
+family came); and, at other people's tennis parties, to fawn upon them
+(when it was no longer possible to elude them).  It was a despicable
+position, and had I at all foreseen, when the picnic sank at Temple
+Braney pier, that the result would have been dinner-parties, I should
+unhesitatingly have left Philippa to drown.
+
+The intimacies imposed by Common Gratitude had, under the healing hand
+of time, become less acute, and might, indeed, have ceased to affect
+us, had not fate again intervened, and cemented the family friendship
+in the most public way possible.  There befell a Harvest Festival in
+Skebawn Church, with a Bishop, and an Anthem, and a special collection.
+To it the McRorys, forsaking their own place of worship, came in power,
+and my wife, very superfluously, indicated to Mrs. McRory a seat in our
+pew.  The pew is a front one, and Mrs. McRory became at once a
+figure-head to the rest of the congregation--a buxom figure-head,
+upholstered tightly in royal blue satin, that paled the ineffectual
+fires of the pulpit dahlias, and shouted in a terrible major chord with
+the sunflowers in the east window.  She creaked mysteriously and
+rhythmically with every breath; a large gold butterfly, poised on an
+invisible spring, quivered and glittered above her bonnet.  It was
+while waiting for the service to begin that Philippa was inspired to
+whisper to Mrs McRory some information, quite immaterial, connected
+with the hymns.  The next moment I perceived that Mrs. McRory's
+butterfly had fixed its antennae into some adjunct of my wife's hat that
+was at once diaphanous and sinewy, with the result that the heads of
+the two ladies were locked together.  A silent struggle ensued; the
+butterfly's grappling-irons held, so also did the hat-trimming, and
+Philippa and Mrs. McRory remained brow to brow in what seemed to be a
+prolonged embrace.  At this point Philippa showed signs of collapse;
+she said that Mrs. McRory's nose, glowing like a ruby within two inches
+of her own, made her hysterical.  I affected unconsciousness, while my
+soul thirsted for an axe with which to decapitate one or both of the
+combatants, and subsequently to run amok among the congregation, now,
+as the poet says, "abashlessly abandoned to delight."  The butterfly's
+vitals slowly uncoiled, and were drawn out into a single yet
+indomitable strand of gold wire; the Bishop was imminent, when a female
+McRory in the pew behind (known to the Fancy as "Larkie") intervened
+with what were, I believe, a pair of manicure scissors, and the
+incident closed.
+
+It was clear that our blood-brotherhood with the McRorys was
+foreordained and predestined.  We evaded two invitations to dinner, but
+a third was inescapable, even though an alarming intimacy was
+foreshadowed by the request that we should come "in a very quiet way."
+
+"Do they expect us to creep in in tennis shoes?" I demanded.
+
+"I think it only means a black tie," said Philippa, with the idea that
+she was soothing me.
+
+"If I have to go to a McRory Free-and-Easy, I shall not act as such," I
+returned, slamming myself into my dressing-room, and dragging forth
+ceremonial attire.
+
+As, with a docility that I was far from feeling, I followed my wife
+into the drawing-room at Temple Braney, and surveyed the semicircle of
+McRorys and unknown notabilities (summarised as "Friends from Dublin")
+that silently awaited us, I felt that neither freedom nor ease would be
+my lot.  But few things in life are quite as bad as one expects them to
+be--always excepting sea-sickness.  In its dreary circuit of the room,
+my eye met that of my old friend Miss Bobby Bennett, of the Curranhilty
+Hunt, niece of its Master, and consultant and referee in all its
+affairs.  My friendship with Miss Bennett was of an ideal nature; when
+we met, which was seldom, we were delighted to see one another; in the
+intervals we forgot one another with, I felt sure, an equal
+completeness.  Her social orbit was incalculable; she resembled a fox
+of whom I heard an earth-stopper say that you "couldn't tell any
+certain place where he wouldn't puck out."  Whether it was at
+Punchestown, or at a Skebawn Parish tea, or judging cakes and crochet
+at an Agricultural Show, wherever she appeared it was with the same air
+of being on top of the situation and of extracting the utmost from it.
+
+To me befell the onerous task of taking the Lady of the House in to
+dinner, but upon my other hand sat Miss Bennett (squired by a Friend
+from Dublin of apparently negligible quality), and before I had
+recovered from the soup--a hell-broth of liquid mustard that called
+itself mulligatawny--I found that to concentrate upon her was no more
+than was expected of me by both ladies.  Mrs. McRory's energies were
+indeed fully engrossed by the marshalling of a drove of heated females,
+who hurried stertorously and spasmodically round the table, driven as
+leaves before the wind by fierce signals from their trainer.  Opposite
+to me sat that daughter of the house whose manicure scissors had
+terminated the painful episode of the butterfly.  I had always
+maintained that she was the prettiest of the McRorys, and it was
+evident that Irving, the new District Inspector of R.I.C., who sat
+beside her, shared my opinion.  He was a serious, lanky young man, and
+at such moments as he found himself deprived of Miss McRory's exclusive
+attention, he accepted no alternative, and devoted himself austerely to
+his food.
+
+Miss Bennett's intention was, I presently discovered, to hunt with
+Flurry Knox's hounds on the following day: she had brought over a
+horse, and it became clear to me that her secondary intention was to
+return without it.
+
+"Larkie McRory's going to take up hunting," she said in her low swift
+voice.  "The new D.I. hunts, you know."
+
+Miss Bennett's astute grey eyes rested upon the young lady in question,
+and returned to me laden with inference.
+
+"He's got a horse from a farmer for her to ride to-morrow--goodness
+knows what sort of a brute it is!--I hope she won't break her neck.
+She's the best of the lot.  If the old man had sense he'd buy my mare
+for her--he's full of money--and I'd let her go cheap, too, as I have a
+young one coming on."
+
+It is worthy of mention that I have never known Miss Bennett's stable
+composed of anything save old ones to go cheap and young ones coming
+on.  I asked her what she would give me if I didn't tell Mr. McRory
+that her mare was touched in the wind.
+
+"I'll give you in charge for defamation of character," replied Miss
+Bennett, with speed comparable only to the dart of an ant-eater's
+tongue.  "Anything else you'd like to know?  But look at Larkie now, I
+ask of you!  Quick!"
+
+I did as desired, and was fortunate enough to see Miss McRory in the
+act of putting a spoonful of salt in Mr. Irving's champagne, what time
+he was engaged in repulsing one of Mrs. McRory's band of flaming
+ministers, who, with head averted in consultation with a collaborator,
+was continuously offering him melted butter, regardless of the fact
+that he had, at the moment, nothing in front of him but the tablecloth.
+
+"There's Miss Larkie's Dublin manners for you," said Miss Bennett, and
+passed on to other themes.
+
+I should say theme, because, speaking broadly, Miss Bennett had but
+one, and all roads sooner or later led to it.  During the slow progress
+of the meal I was brought up to date in the inner gossip of the
+Curranhilty country.  I learned that Mrs. Albert Dougherty had taken to
+riding astride because she thought it was smart, and it was nothing but
+the grab she got of the noseband that saved her from coming off every
+time she came down a drop.  I asked for that Mr. Tomsy Flood whose
+career had twice, at vital points, been intersected by me.
+
+"Ah, poor Tomsy!  He took to this, y'know," Miss Bennett slightly
+jerked her little finger, "and he wouldn't ride a donkey over a sod of
+turf.  They sent him out to South Africa, to an ostrich farm, and when
+the people found he couldn't ride they put him to bed with a setting of
+ostrich eggs to keep them warm, and he did that grand, till some one
+gave him a bottle of whisky, and he got rather lively and broke all the
+eggs.  They say it's a lay-preacher he's going to be now!"
+
+Across a dish of potatoes, thrust at me for the fourth time, I told
+Miss Bennett that it was all her fault, and that she had been very
+unkind to Tomsy Flood.  Miss Bennett gave me a look that showed me what
+she still could do if she liked, and replied that she supposed I was
+sorry that she hadn't gone to South Africa with him.
+
+"I suppose we'll all be going there soon," she went on.  "Uncle says if
+Home Rule comes there won't be a fox or a Protestant left in Ireland in
+ten years' time; and he said, what's more, that if _he_ had to choose
+it mightn't be the Protestants he'd keep!  But that was because the
+Dissenting Minister's wife sent in a claim of five pounds to the Fowl
+Fund, and said she'd put down poison if she didn't get it."
+
+Not thus did Philippa and old McRory, at their end of the table, fleet
+the time away.  Old McRory, as far as I could judge, spoke not at all,
+but played tunes with his fingers on the tablecloth, or preoccupied
+himself with what seemed to be an endeavour to plait his beard into a
+point.  On my wife's other hand was an unknown gentleman, with rosy
+cheeks, a raven moustache, and a bald head, who was kind enough to
+solace her isolation with facetious stories, garnished with free and
+varied gestures with his knife, suggestive of sword-practice, all
+concluding alike in convulsive tenor laughter.  I was aware, not
+unpleasantly, that Philippa was bearing the brunt of the McRory
+bean-feast.
+
+When at length my wife's release was earned, and the ladies had rustled
+from the room in her wake, with all the conscious majesty of the Mantle
+Department, I attempted some conversation with my host, but found that
+it was more considerate to leave him to devour unmolested the
+crystallised fruits and chocolates that were not, I felt quite sure,
+provided by Mrs. McRory for the Master of the House.  I retired upon
+the D.I., my opinion of whom had risen since I saw him swallow his
+salted champagne without a change of countenance.  That he addressed me
+as "Sir" was painful, but at about my age these shocks have to be
+expected, and are in the same category as lumbago, and what my dentist
+delicately alludes to as "dentures."
+
+The young District Inspector of Irish Constabulary has wisdom beyond
+his years: we talked profoundly of the state of the country until the
+small voice of old McRory interrupted us.
+
+"Major," it said, "if you have enough drink taken we might join the
+ladies."
+
+Most of the other gallants had already preceded us, and as I crossed
+the hall I heard the measured pounding of a waltz on the piano: it
+created an impulse, almost as uncontrollable as that of Spurius Lartius
+and Herminius, to dart back to the dining-room.
+
+"That's the way with them every night," said old McRory
+dispassionately.  "They mightn't go to bed now at all."
+
+Old McRory had a shadowy and imperceptible quality that is not unusual
+in small fathers of large families; it always struck me that he
+understood very thoroughly the privileges of the neglected, and pursued
+an unnoticed, peaceful, and observant path of his own in the
+background.  I watched him creep away in his furtive, stupefied manner,
+like a partly-chloroformed ferret.  "'Oh, well is thee, thou art
+asleep!'--or soon will be," I said to myself, as I turned my back on
+him and faced the music.
+
+I was immediately gratified by the spectacle of Philippa, clasped to
+the heart of the gentleman who had been kind to her at dinner, and
+moving with him in slow and crab-like sidlings round the carpet.  Her
+eyes met mine with passionate appeal; they reminded me of those of her
+own fox-terrier, Minx, when compelled to waltz with my younger son.
+
+The furniture and the elder ladies had been piled up in corners, and
+the dancing element had been reinforced by a gang of lesser McRorys and
+their congeners, beings who had not been deemed worthy of a place at
+the high table.  Immured behind the upright piano sat Mrs. McRory,
+thumping out the time-honoured "Blue Danube" with the plodding rhythm
+of the omnibus horse.  I furtively looked at my watch; we had dined at
+7.30, and it was now but a quarter to ten o'clock.  Not for half an
+hour could we in decency withdraw, and, finding myself at the moment
+beside Miss Larkie McRory, it seemed to me that I could do no less than
+invite her to take the carpet with me.
+
+I am aware that my dancing is that of ten years ago, which places it in
+the same scrap-heap class as a battleship of that date, but Miss McRory
+told me that she preferred it, and that it exactly suited her step.  It
+would be as easy to describe the way of a bird in the air as to define
+Miss McRory's step; scrap-heap or no, it made me feel that I walked the
+carpet like a thing of life.  We were occasionally wrecked upon reefs
+of huddled furniture, and we sustained a collision or two of first-rate
+magnitude: after these episodes my partner imperceptibly steered me to
+a corner, in which I leaned heavily against whatever was most stable,
+and tried to ignore the fact that the floor was rocking and the walls
+were waving, and that it was at least two years since I had exceeded in
+this way.
+
+It was in one of these intervals that Miss McRory told me that she was
+going hunting next day, and that he--her long hazel-grey eyes indicated
+Mr. Irving, now slowly and showily moving a partner about the room--had
+got a horse for her to ride, and she had never hunted before.  She
+hoped to goodness she wouldn't fall off, and (here she dealt me the
+fraction of a glance) she hoped I'd pick her up now and again.  I said
+that the two wishes were incompatible, to which she replied that she
+didn't know what incompatible meant; and I told her to ask Mr. Irving
+whether he had found that salt and champagne were compatible.
+
+"I thought you only wore that old eyeglass for show," replied Miss
+McRory softly, and again looked up at me from under her upcurled Irish
+eyelashes; "it was out of spite he drank it!  A girl did that to my
+brother Curly at a dance, and he poured it down her back."
+
+"I think Mr. Irving treated you better than you deserved," I replied
+paternally, adventuring once more into the tide of dancers.
+
+When, some five minutes afterwards, I resigned my partner to Irving
+D.I., I felt that honour had been satisfied, and that it was now
+possible to leave the revel.  But in this I found that I had reckoned,
+not so much without my host, as without my fellow-guest.  Philippa, to
+my just indignation, had blossomed into the success of the evening.
+Having disposed of the kind-hearted gentleman (with the pink cheeks and
+the black moustache), she was immediately claimed by Mr. De Lacey
+McRory, the eldest son of the house, and with him exhibited a
+proficiency in the latest variant of the waltz that she had hitherto
+concealed from me.  The music, like the unseen orchestra of a
+merry-go-round, was practically continuous.  Scuffles took place at
+intervals behind the upright piano, during which music-books fell
+heavily upon the keys, and one gathered that a change of artist was
+taking place, but the fundamental banging of the bass was maintained,
+and the dancing ceased not.  The efforts of the musicians were
+presently reinforced by a young lady in blue, who supplied a shrill and
+gibbering _obligato_ upon a beribboned mandoline, and even, at some
+passionate moments, added her voice to the _ensemble_.
+
+"Will this go on much longer?" I asked of Miss Bennett, with whom I had
+withdrawn to the asylum of a bow window.
+
+"D'ye mean Miss Cooney O'Rattigan and her mandoline?" replied Miss
+Bennett.  "I can tell you it was twice worse this afternoon when she
+was singing Italian to it.  I never stayed here before, and please
+goodness I never will again; the wardrobe in my room is crammed with
+Mrs. McRory's summer clothes, and the chest of drawers is full of
+apples!  Ah, but after all," went on Miss Bennett largely, "what can
+you expect from a cob but a kick?  Didn't Tomsy Flood find a collection
+of empty soda-water bottles in his bed the time he stayed here for the
+wedding, when you found him stitched up in the feather bed!"
+
+[Illustration: Miss Cooney O'Rattigan.]
+
+I said that the soda-water bottles had probably prepared him for the
+ostrich eggs, and Miss Bennett asked me if it were true that I had once
+found a nest of young mice in the foot of my bed at Aussolas, because
+that was the story she had heard.  I was able to assure her that, on
+the contrary, it had been kittens, and passing from these pleasing
+reminiscences I asked her to come forth and smoke a cigarette in the
+hall with me, as a preliminary to a farther advance in the direction of
+the motor.  I have a sincere regard for Miss Bennett, but her dancing
+is a serious matter, with a Cromwellian quality in it, suggestive of
+jack boots and the march of great events.
+
+The cigarettes were consolatory, and the two basket-chairs by the fire
+in the back-hall were sufficiently comfortable; but the prospect of
+home burned like a beacon before me.  The clock struck eleven.
+
+"They're only beginning now!" said Miss Bennett, interpreting without
+resentment my glance at it.  "Last night it was near one o'clock in the
+morning when they had high tea, and then they took to singing songs,
+and playing 'Are you there, Mike?' and cock-fighting."
+
+I rose hastily, and began to search for my overcoat and cap, prepared
+to plunge into the frosty night, when Miss Bennett offered to show me a
+short way through the house to the stableyard, where I had left the car.
+
+"I slipped out that way after dinner," she said, picking up a fur-lined
+cloak and wrapping it about her.  "I wanted to make sure the mare had a
+second rug on her this cold night."
+
+I followed Miss Bennett through a wheezy swing-door; a flagged passage
+stretched like a tunnel before us, lighted by a solitary candle planted
+in its own grease in a window.  A long battle-line of bicycles occupied
+one side of the passage; there were doors, padlocked and cobwebbed, on
+the other.  A ragged baize door at the end of the tunnel opened into
+darkness that smelt of rat-holes, and was patched by a square or two of
+moonlight.
+
+"This is a sort of a lobby," said Miss Bennett.  "Mind!  There's a
+mangle there--and there are oars on the floor somewhere----"
+
+As she spoke I was aware of a distant humming noise, like bees in a
+chimney.
+
+"That sounds uncommonly like a motor," I said.
+
+"That's only the boiler," replied Miss Bennett; "we're at the back of
+the kitchen here."
+
+She advanced with confidence, and flung open a door.  A most startling
+vista was revealed, of a lighted room with several beds in it.
+Children's faces, swelled and scarlet, loomed at us from the pillows,
+and an old woman, with bare feet and a shawl over her head, stood
+transfixed, with a kettle in one hand and a tumbler in the other.
+
+Miss Bennett swiftly closed the door upon the vision.
+
+"My gracious heavens!" she whispered, "what on earth children are
+those?  I'm sure it's mumps they have, whoever they are.  And how
+secret the McRorys kept it!--and did you see it was punch the old woman
+was giving them?"
+
+"We might have asked her the way to the yard," I said, inwardly
+resolving to tell Philippa it was scarlatina; "and she might have given
+us a light."
+
+"It was this door I should have tried," said my guide, opening another
+with considerable circumspection.
+
+Sounds of hilarity immediately travelled to us along a passage; I
+followed Miss Bennett, feeling much as if I were being led by a
+detective into Chinatown, San Francisco.  A square of light in the wall
+indicated one of those inner windows that are supposed to give light
+mutually to room and passage, and are, as a matter of fact, an
+architect's confession of defeat.  Farther on a door was open, and
+screams of laughter and singing proceeded from it.  I admit, without
+hesitation, that we looked in at the window, and thus obtained a full
+and sufficient view of the _vie intime_ of the Temple Braney kitchen.
+A fat female, obviously the cook, was seated in the midst of a
+remarkably lively crowd of fellow-retainers and camp-followers,
+thumping with massive knuckles on a frying-pan, as though it were a
+banjo, and squalling to it something in an unknown tongue.
+
+"She's taking off Miss Cooney O'Rattigan!" hissed Miss Bennett, in
+ecstasy.  "She's singing Italian, by way of!  And look at those two
+brats of boys, Vincent and Harold, that should have been in their beds
+two hours ago!"
+
+Masters Vincent and Harold McRory were having the time of their lives.
+One of them, seated on the table, was shovelling tipsy-cake into his
+ample mouth with a kitchen spoon; the other was smoking a cigarette,
+and capering to the squalls of the cook.
+
+As noiselessly as two bats Miss Bennett and I flitted past the open
+door, but a silence fell with a unanimity that would have done credit
+to any orchestra.
+
+"They saw us," said Miss Bennett, scudding on, "but we'll not tell on
+them--the creatures!"
+
+An icy draught apprised us of an open door, and through it we escaped
+at length from the nightmare purlieus of the house into the yard, an
+immense quadrangle, where moonlight and black shadows opposed one
+another in a silence that was as severe as they.  Temple Braney House
+and its yard dated from what may be called the Stone Age in Ireland,
+about the middle of the eighteenth century, when money was plenty and
+labour cheap, and the Barons of Temple Braney, now existent only in
+guidebooks, built, as they lived, on the generous scale.
+
+We crossed the yard to the coach-house in which I had left my motor:
+its tall arched doorway was like the mouth of a cave, and I struck a
+match.  It illuminated a mowing-machine, a motor-bicycle, and a flying
+cat.  But not my car.  The first moment of bewilderment was closed by
+the burning of my fingers by the match.
+
+"Are you sure it was here you left it?" said Miss Bennett, with a
+fatuity of which I had not believed her capable.
+
+The presence of a lady was no doubt a salutary restraint, but as I went
+forth into the yard again, I felt as though the things I had to leave
+unsaid would break out all over me like prickly heat.
+
+"It's the medical student one," said Miss Bennett with certainty, "the
+one that owns the motor-bike."
+
+The yard and the moonlight did not receive this statement with a more
+profound silence than I.
+
+"I'm sure he won't do it any harm," she went on, making the elementary
+mistake of applying superficial salves to a wound whose depths she was
+incapable of estimating.  "He's very good about machinery--maybe it's
+only round to the front door he took it."
+
+As Miss Bennett offered these consolations I saw two small figures
+creep from the shadows of the house.  Their white collars shone in the
+moonlight, and, recognising them as the youngest members of the
+inveterate clan of McRory, I hailed them in a roar that revealed very
+effectively the extent of my indignation.  It did not surprise me that
+the pair, in response to this, darted out of the yard gate with the
+speed of a pair of minnows in a stream.
+
+I pursued, not with any hope of overtaking them, but because they were
+the only clue available, and in my wake, over the frosty ground, in her
+satin shoes, followed that sound sportswoman, Miss Bennett.
+
+The route from the stable-yard to the front of Temple Braney House is a
+long and circuitous one, that skirts a plantation of evergreens.  At
+the first bend the moonlight displayed the track of a tyre in the
+grass; at the next bend, where the edge was higher, a similar economy
+of curve had been effected, and that the incident had been of a fairly
+momentous nature was suggested by the circumstance that the tail lamp
+was lying in the middle of the drive.  It was as I picked it up that I
+heard a familiar humming in the vicinity of the hall door.
+
+"He didn't go so far, after all," said Miss Bennett, somewhat blown,
+but holding her own, in spite of the satin shoes.
+
+I turned the last corner at a high rate of speed, and saw the dignified
+Georgian facade of the house, pale and placid in the moonlight; through
+the open hall door a shaft of yellow light fell on the ground.  The car
+was nowhere to be seen, yet somewhere, close at hand, the engine
+throbbed and drummed to me,--a _cri de coeur_, as I felt it, calling to
+me through the accursed jingle of the piano that proceeded from the
+open door.
+
+"Where the devil----?" I began.
+
+Even as I spoke I descried the car.  It was engaged, apparently, in
+forcing its way into the shrubbery that screened one end of the house.
+The bonnet was buried in a holly bush, the engine was working, slowly
+but industriously.  The lamps were not lighted, and there was no one in
+it.
+
+"Those two imps made good use of their legs, never fear them!" puffed
+Miss Bennett; "the 'cuteness of them--cutting away to warn the brother!"
+
+"What's this confounded thing?" I said fiercely, snatching at something
+that was caught in the handle of the brake.
+
+Miss Bennett snatched it in her turn, and held it up in the moonlight,
+while I stilled the fever of the engine.
+
+"Dublin for ever!" she exclaimed.  "What is it but the streamers of
+Miss Cooney's mandoline!  There's the spoils of war for you!  And it's
+all the spoils you'll get--the whole pack of them's hid in the house by
+now!"
+
+From an unlighted window over the hall door a voice added itself to the
+conversation.
+
+"God help the house that holds them!" it said, addressing the universe.
+
+The window was closed.
+
+"That's old McRory!" said Miss Bennett in a horrified whisper.
+
+Again I thought of Chinatown, sleepless, incalculable, with its
+infinite capacity for sheltering the criminal.
+
+
+"--But, darling," said Philippa, some quarter of an hour later, as we
+proceeded down the avenue in the vaulted darkness of the beech-trees
+(and I at once realised that she had undertaken the case for the
+defence), "you've no reason to suppose that they took the car any
+farther than the hall door."
+
+"It is the last time that it will be taken to _that_ hall door," I
+replied, going dead slow, with my head over the side of the car,
+listening to unfamiliar sounds in its interior--sounds that did not
+suggest health.  "I should like to know how many of your young friends
+went on the trip----"
+
+"My dear boy," said Philippa pityingly, "I ask you if it is likely that
+there would have been more than two, when one of them was the lady with
+the mandoline!  And," she proceeded with cat-like sweetness, "I did not
+perceive that you took a party with you when you retired to the hall
+with your old friend Miss Bennett, and left me to cope single-handed
+with the mob for about an hour!"
+
+"Whether there were two or twenty-two of them in the car," I said,
+treating this red herring with suitable contempt, "I've done with your
+McRorys."
+
+I was, very appropriately, in the act of passing through the Temple
+Braney entrance gates as I made this pronouncement, and it was the
+climax of many outrages that the steering-gear, shaken by heaven knows
+what impacts and brutalities, should suddenly have played me false.
+The car swerved in her course--fortunately a slow one--and laid her
+bonnet impulsively against the Temple Braney gate pillar, as against a
+loved one's shoulder.
+
+As we regained our composure, two tall forms appeared in the light of
+the head lamps, and one of them held up his hand.  I recognised a
+police patrol.
+
+"That's the car right enough," said one of them.  He advanced to my
+side.  "I want your name, please.  I summons you for furious driving on
+the high road, without lights, a while ago, and refusing to stop when
+called on to do so.  Go round and take the number, M'Caffery."
+
+
+When, a few days later, the story flowed over and ran about the
+country, some things that were both new and interesting came to my ears.
+
+Flurry Knox said that Bobby Bennett had sold me her old mare by
+moonlight in the Temple Braney yard, and it was a great credit to old
+McRory's champagne.
+
+Mrs. Knox, of Aussolas, was told that I had taken Mrs. McRory for a run
+in the car at one o'clock in the morning, and on hearing it said "De
+gustibus non est disputandum."
+
+Some one, unknown, repeated this to Mrs. McRory, and told her that it
+meant "You cannot touch pitch without being disgusted."
+
+Mrs. Cadogan, my cook, reported to Philippa that the boy who drove the
+bread-cart said that it was what the people on the roads were saying
+that the Major was to be fined ten pounds; to which Mrs. Cadogan had
+replied that it was a pity the Major ever stood in Temple Braney, but
+she supposed that was laid out for him by the Lord.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+PUT DOWN ONE AND CARRY TWO
+
+The promise of that still and moonlit December night, wherein we had
+bean-feasted with the McRorys, was shamelessly broken.
+
+The weather next morning was a welter of wind and mist, with rain flung
+in at intervals.  The golden fox on the stable weathercock was not at
+peace for a moment, facing all the southern points of the compass as if
+they were hounds that held it at bay.  For my part, I do not know why
+people go out hunting on such days, unless it be for the reason that
+many people go to church, to set an example to others.
+
+Philippa said she went because she had done her hair for riding before
+she could see out of the window--a fiction beneath the notice of any
+intelligent husband.  I went because I had told my new groom, Wilson
+(an English disciplinarian), that I was going, and I was therefore
+caught in the cogs of the inexorable wheel of stable routine.  I also
+went because I nourished a faint hope that I might be able to place
+before the general public, and especially before Flurry Knox, an
+authentic first version of the McRory episode.  Moreover, I had a
+headache; but this I was not going to mention, knowing that the sun
+never sets upon the jests consecrated to after-dinner headaches.
+
+As we rode away from Shreelane, and felt the thick small rain in our
+faces, and saw the spray blown off the puddles by the wind, and heard
+the sea-gulls, five miles inland, squealing in the mist overhead, I
+said that it was preposterous to think of hunting at Lonen Hill in such
+weather, and that I was going home.  Philippa said that we might as
+well go on to the meet, to exercise the horses, and that we could then
+come straight home.  (I have a sister who has said that I am a lath
+painted to look like iron, and that Philippa is iron painted to look
+like a lath.)
+
+The meet was in shelter, the generous shelter of Lonen Hill, which
+interposed itself between us and the weather.  There is just space for
+the road, between the shore of Lough Lonen and the southern face of the
+hill, that runs precipitously up into the sky for some six hundred
+feet, dark with fir-trees, and heather, and furze, fortified with
+rock--a place renowned as a fastness for foxes and woodcock (whose
+fancies as to desirable winter residences generally coincide).  One
+would have thought that only a pack of monkeys could deal with such a
+covert, but hounds went through it, and so did beaters--or said they
+did.
+
+We found the hounds waiting in an old quarry under the side of the
+hill, and, a little farther on, a very small and select company of
+waterproofs was huddled under the branches of a fir-tree that hung over
+the road.  As we neared them I recognised Miss Bennett's firm and
+capable back: she was riding the black mare that she had come over to
+"pass on" to old McRory.  It was Philippa who pointed out that she was
+accompanied by Miss Larkie McRory, seated on a stout and shaggy animal,
+whose grey hindquarters were draped by the folds of its rider's
+voluminous black macintosh, in a manner that recalled the historic
+statue of the Iron Duke.  Farther on, Mrs. Flurry and her mother, the
+redoubtable Lady Knox, were getting out of a motor and getting
+themselves on to their horses.
+
+"There's room under the umbrella for Mrs. Yeates!" called out Miss
+Bennett hospitably, "but the Major must find one for himself, and a
+very big one, too!"
+
+"We could make room for him here," said Miss Larkie McRory, "if he
+liked to come."
+
+I maintained, I hope, an imperturbable demeanour, and passed on.
+
+"Who is that?" said Lady Knox, approaching me, on her large and
+competent iron grey.
+
+I informed her, briefly, and without prejudice.
+
+"Oh, one of that crew," said Lady Knox, without further comment.
+
+Lady Knox is not noted for receptive sympathy, yet this simple
+statement indicated so pleasingly our oneness of soul in the matter of
+the McRorys, that I was on the verge of flinging overboard the
+gentlemanlike scruples proper to a guest, and giving her the full
+details of last night's revel.  At this moment, however, her son-in-law
+came forth from the quarry with his hounds, and his coadjutors, Dr.
+Hickey and Michael, and moved past us.
+
+"Yeates!" he called out, "I'd be obliged to you if you'd take that
+point up on the hill, on the down-wind side, where he often breaks."
+He looked at me with a serious, friendly face.  "He won't break _down_,
+you know--it's only motors do that."
+
+This witticism, concocted, no doubt, in the seclusion of the quarry,
+called for no reply on my part--(or, to be accurate, no suitable reply
+presented itself).  There was an undoubted titter among the
+waterproofs; I moved away upon my mission at a dignified trot: a trot
+is seldom dignified, but Daniel has dignity enough for himself and his
+rider.
+
+Daniel stands sixteen hands two inches in his stockings, of which he
+wears one white one, the rest of his enormous body being of that
+unlovely bluish-dun colour to which a dark bay horse turns when
+clipped.  His best friend could not deny that he "made a noise"; his
+worst enemy was fain to admit that he was glad to hear it in front of
+him at a nasty place.  Some one said that he was like a Settled
+Religious Faith, and no lesser simile conveys the restful certainty
+imparted by him.  It was annoying, no doubt, to hear people say, after
+I had accomplished feats of considerable valour, that that horse
+couldn't make a mistake, and a baby could ride him; but these were mere
+chastenings, negligible to the possessor of a Settled Religious Faith.
+
+I trotted on through the rain, up a steep road seamed with
+watercourses, with Lonen Hill towering on my left, and a lesser hill on
+my right.  Looking back, I saw Flurry dismount, give his horse to a
+boy, and clamber on to the wall of the road: he dropped into the wood,
+and the hounds swarmed over after him, looking like midgets beside the
+tremendous citadel that they were to attack.  Hickey and Michael,
+equally dwarfed by the immensities of the position, were already
+betaking themselves through the mist to their allotted outposts in
+space.  Five-and-twenty couple of hounds would have been little enough
+for that great hill-side; Flurry had fifteen, and with them he began
+his tough struggle through the covert, a solitary spot of red among
+pine-stems, and heather, and rocks, cheering his fifteen couple with
+horn and voice, while he climbed up and up by devious ways, seemingly
+as marvellously endowed with wind as the day itself.  I cantered on
+till, at the point where the wood ended, it became my melancholy duty
+to leave the road and enter upon the assault of the hill.  I turned in
+at a gap beside the guardian thorn-bush of a holy well, on whose
+branches votive rags fluttered in the wind, and addressed Daniel to his
+task of carrying thirteen stone up an incline approximating to a rise
+of one in three.
+
+A path with the angles of a flash of lightning indicated the views of
+the local cow as to the best method of dealing with the situation.
+Daniel and I accepted this, as we had done more than once before, and
+we laboured upwards, parallel with the covert, while the wind, heavy
+with mist, came down to meet us, and shoved against us like a living
+thing.  We gained at length a shelf on the hill-side, and halting there
+in the shelter of a furzy hummock, I applied myself to my job.  From
+the shelf I commanded a long stretch of the boundary wall of the wood,
+including a certain gap which was always worthy of special attention,
+and for a quarter of an hour I bent a zealous and travelling gaze upon
+the wall, with the concentration of a professor of a Higher Thought
+Society.
+
+As is not unusual in such cases, nothing happened.  At rare intervals a
+hint of the cry of hounds was carried in the wind, evanescent as a
+whiff from a summer garden.  Once or twice it seemed to swing towards
+me, and at such moments the concentration of my eyeglass upon the gap
+was of such intensity that had the fox appeared I am confident that he
+would instantly have fallen into a hypnotic trance.  As time wore on I
+arrived at the stage of obsession, when the music of the hounds and the
+touches of the horn seemed to be in everything, the wind, the streams,
+the tree branches, and I could almost have sworn hounds were away and
+running hard, until some vagrant voice in the wood would dispel the
+mirage of sound.  This was followed by the reactionary period of
+pessimism, when I seemed to myself merely an imbecile, sitting in heavy
+rain, staring at a stone wall.  Half an hour, or more, passed.
+
+"I'm going out of this," I said to myself defiantly; "there's reason in
+the roasting of eggs."
+
+It seemed, however, my duty to go up rather than down, and I coerced
+Daniel into the bed of a stream, as offering the best going available.
+It led me into a cleft between the hill-side and the wall of the
+covert, which latter was, like a thing in a fairy tale, changing very
+gradually from a wall into a bank.  I ascended the cleft, and presently
+found that it, too, was changing its nature, and becoming a flight of
+stairs.  Daniel clattered slowly and carefully up them, basing his
+feet, like Sir Bedivere, on "juts of slippery crag that rang
+sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels."
+
+We had reached the top in safety when I heard a thin and wavering
+squeal behind me, and looking back saw Miss Larkie McRory ascending the
+rocky staircase on the grey cob, at a speed that had obviously, and
+legitimately, drawn forth the squeal.
+
+"Oh, gracious!  The brute!  I can't stop him!" she cried as she rushed
+upon me.
+
+The grey cob here bumped into Daniel's massive stern, rebounded, and
+subsided, for the excellent reason that no other course was open to it.
+Miss McRory's reins were clutched in a looped confusion, that summoned
+from some corner of my brain a memory of the Sultan's cipher on the
+Order of the Medjidie: her hat was hanging down her back, and there was
+a picturesqueness about her hair that promised disaster later on.  Her
+hazel eyes shone, and her complexion glowed like a rose in rain.
+
+"Mr. Irving's fit to be tied!" she continued.  "His horse jumped about
+like a mad thing when he saw those awful steps----!"
+
+Sounds of conflict and clattering came from below.  I splashed onwards
+in the trough between the hill and the fence, and had emerged into a
+comparatively open space with my closely attendant McRory, when the
+impassioned face of Mr. Irving's Meath mare shot into view at the top
+of the steps.  The water in the trough was apparently for her the limit
+of what should or could be endured.  She made a crooked spring at the
+hill-side, slipped, and, recognising the bank as the one civilised
+feature in a barbarous country, bounced sideways on to the top of it,
+pivoted there, and sat down backwards into a thicket of young ash and
+hazel trees.  A succession of short yells from Miss McRory acclaimed
+each phase of the incident; Mr. Irving's face, as he settled down
+amongst the branches, was as a book where men might read strange
+matters, not of an improving nature.
+
+It was probably the reception accorded to the bay mare by the branches
+and briars in which she had seated herself that caused her to return to
+the top of the bank in a kangaroo-bound, as active as it was
+unexpected.  Horses can do these things when they choose, but they
+seldom choose.  From the top of the bank she dropped into the trough,
+and joined us, with her nerves still in a state of acute indignation,
+and less of her rider in the saddle than is conventional, but a dinge
+in his pot-hat appeared to be the extent of the damage.  Miss McRory's
+eye travelled from it to me, but she abstained from comment.  It was
+the eye of a villain and a conspirator.  I had by no means forgotten
+the injuries inflicted on me by her brothers, nor did I forget that
+Flurry had said that there wasn't one of the family but was as clever
+as the devil and four times as unscrupulous.  Yet, taken in conjunction
+with the genuineness of her complexion, and with the fact that Irving
+was probably twenty years my junior, "I couldn't"--as the song
+says--"help smiling at McRory O'More" (behind the back of young Mr.
+Irving, D.I.).
+
+It transpired that Irving, from some point of vantage below, shared, it
+would appear, with Miss McRory, had seen the hounds running out of the
+top of the wood, and had elected to follow me.  He did not know where
+any one was, had not heard a sound of the horn, and gave it as his
+opinion that Flurry was dead, and that trying to hunt in this country
+was simply farcical.  He bellowed these things at me in his
+consequential voice as we struggled up the hill against the immense
+weight of wind, in all the fuss, anxiety, and uncertainty out of which
+the joys of hunting are born.  It was as we topped the ultimate ridge
+that, through the deafening declamations of the wind, I heard, faint as
+a bar of fairy music, distant harmonies as of hounds running.
+
+The wind blew a hole in the mist, and we had a bird's-eye view of a few
+pale-green fields far below: across one of them some pigmy forms were
+moving; they passed over a dark line that represented a fence, and
+proceeded into the heart of a cloud.
+
+"That's about the limit," shouted Irving, dragging at his mare's mouth,
+as she swerved from a hole in the track.  "It's only in this
+God-forsaken country that a fox'd go away in the teeth of a storm like
+this!"
+
+To justify to Mr. Irving the disregard of the Lonen Hill foxes for the
+laws of the game was not my affair.  It seemed to me that in piloting
+him and Miss McRory I was doing rather more than humanity had any right
+to expect.  I have descended Lonen Hill on various occasions, none of
+them agreeable, but never before with an avalanche travelling hard on
+my heels--a composite avalanche that slid, and rushed, and dropped its
+hind-legs over the edge at bad corners, and was throughout vocal with
+squeals, exclamations, inquiries as to facts of which Providence could
+alone be cognisant, and thunderous with objurgations.  The hill-side
+merged at length into upland pasture, strange little fields, composed
+partly of velvet patches, like putting-greens, predominantly of
+nightmare bunkers of rocks and furze.  We rushed downwards through
+these, at a pace much accelerated by the prevalence of cattle gaps; the
+bay mare, with her head in the air, zigzagging in bounds as
+incalculable as those of a grasshopper; the grey cob, taking sole
+charge of Miss McRory, tobogganing with her hind feet, propping with
+her fore, and tempering her enthusiasm with profound understanding of
+the matter.  Finally, a telegraph-post loomed through the fog upon us,
+and a gate discovered itself, through which we banged in a bunch on to
+the high road.  A cottage faced us, with a couple of women and an old
+man standing outside it.
+
+To them we put the usual question, with the usual vehemence (always
+suggestive of the King's Troopers in romance, hotly demanding
+information about a flying rebel).
+
+"I didn't see a fox this long while," replied the old man deliberately,
+"but there was a few jocks went west the road a while ago."
+
+The King's Troopers, not specially enlightened, turned their steeds and
+went in pursuit of the jocks.  A stone gap, flung in ruins among black
+hoof-marks, soon gave a more precise indication, and we left the road,
+with profound dubiety on my part as to where we were going and how we
+were going to get there.  The first fence decided the matter for
+Irving, D.I.  It was a bank on which slices of slatey stone had been
+laid, much as in Germany slabs of cold sausage are laid upon bread.
+The Meath mare looked at it but once, and fled from it at a tangent;
+the grey pony, without looking at it, followed her.  Daniel selected an
+interval between the slabs, and took me over without comment.  Filled
+by a radiant hope that I had shaken off both my companions, I was
+advancing in the line of the hoof-tracks, when once more I heard behind
+me on the wind cries as of a storm-driven sea-gull, and the grey cob
+came up under my stirrup, like a runaway steam pinnace laying itself
+beside a man-o'-war.  Miss McRory was still in the saddle, but minus
+reins and stirrup; the wind had again removed her hat, which was
+following her at full stretch of its string, like a kite.  Had it not
+been for her cries I should have said, judging by her face, that she
+was thoroughly enjoying herself.
+
+Having achieved Daniel's society the cob pulled up, and her rider, not
+without assistance from me, restored her hat, reins, and stirrup to
+their proper spheres.  I looked back, and saw Irving's mare, still on
+the farther side of the fence, her nose pointing to the sky, as if
+invoking the protection of heaven, and I knew that for better for worse
+Miss McRory was mine until we reached the high road.  No doubt the
+thing was to be: as one of our own poets has sung of Emer and
+Cuchulain, "all who read my name in Erin's story would find its loving
+letters linked with" those of McRory.  The paraphrase even
+rhymed--another finger-mark of Fate.  Yet it was hard that, out of all
+the possible, and doubtless eager, squires of the hunting-field I
+should have been chosen.
+
+The hoof-tracks bent through a long succession of open gaps to a
+farmyard, and there were swallowed in the mire of a lane.  I worked the
+lane out for every inch it was worth, with the misty rain pricking my
+face as it were with needles, and the intention to go home at the
+earliest possible opportunity perfecting itself in my heart.  But the
+lane, instead of conducting us to the high road, melted disastrously
+into a turf bog.  I pulled up, and the long steady booming of the sea
+upon the rocks made a deep undertone to the wind.  There was no voice
+of hound or horn, and I was on the point of returning to the farmhouse
+when the mist, in its stagey, purposeful way, again lifted, and laid
+bare the sky-line of a low hill on our left.  A riderless horse was
+limping very slowly along it, led by something that seemed no higher
+than a toadstool.  Obviously we were on the line of the hunt, and
+obviously, also, it was my duty to enquire into the matter of the
+horse.  I turned aside over a low bank, hotly followed by the grey cob,
+and the wail to which I was now becoming inured.  As Miss McRory
+arrived abruptly at my side, she cried that she would have been off
+that time only for the grab she got of his hair.  (By which I believe
+she meant the mare's mane.)
+
+Fortune favoured us with broken-down fences; we overtook the horse, and
+found it was Flurry Knox's brown mare, hobbling meekly in tow of a very
+small boy.  In one of her hind fetlocks there was a clean, sharp cut
+that might have been done with a knife.
+
+In answer to my questions the small boy pointed ahead.  I polished my
+eyeglass, and, with eyes narrowed against the wind, looked into the
+south-west, and there saw, unexpectedly, even awfully near, the
+Atlantic Ocean, dingy and angry, with a long line, as of battle-smoke,
+marking its assault upon the cliffs.  Between the cliffs and the hill
+on which we were standing a dark plateau, striped with pale grey walls,
+stretched away into the mist.
+
+"There's the huntsman for ye," squeaked the little boy, who looked
+about six years old.
+
+I descried at a distance of perhaps a quarter of a mile a figure in a
+red coat, on foot, in the act of surmounting one of the walls,
+accompanied by a hovering flock of country boys.
+
+"The dogs is out before him," pursued the little boy at the full pitch
+of his lungs.  "I seen the fox, too.  I'll go bail he has himself
+housed in the Coosheen Grohogue by now."
+
+"Gracious!" said Miss McRory.
+
+I said he probably had a simpler telegraphic address, and that, no
+matter where he was, it was now my duty to overtake Mr. Knox and offer
+him my horse; "and you," I added, "had better get this little boy to
+show you the way to the road."
+
+Miss McRory replied confidently that she'd sooner stay with me.
+
+I said, as well as I remember, that her preference was highly
+flattering, but that she might live to regret it.
+
+Miss McRory answered that she wished I wouldn't be spying at her
+through that old glass of mine; she knew well enough she was a show,
+and her hair was coming down, and she'd as soon trust herself to the
+cat as to that little urchin.
+
+As I made my way downwards over the knife-edged ridges of rock and
+along their intervening boggy furrows, I should myself have been
+grateful for the guidance of the cat.  Even the grey cob accepted the
+matter as serious, and kept the brake hard on, accomplishing the last
+horrid incident of the descent--a leap from the slant of the hill on to
+the summit of a heathery bank--without frivolity, even with anxiety.
+We had now arrived at the plateau above the cliffs--a place of brown,
+low-growing ling, complicated by boggy runnels, and heavily sprinkled
+with round stones.  The mist was blowing in thicker than ever, Flurry
+and his retinue were lost as though they had never been, and the near
+thunder of the breakers, combined with the wind, made an impenetrable
+din round me and Miss McRory.
+
+After perhaps a mile, in the course of which I got off several times to
+pull down loose walls for the benefit of my companion, I discovered the
+rudiments of a lane, which gradually developed into a narrow but
+indubitable road.  The rain had gone down the back of my neck and into
+my boots: I determined that if Flurry had to finish the run on
+all-fours, I would stick to the lane until it took me to a road.  What
+it took me to was, as might have been foreseen in any County Cork
+bohireen, a pole jammed across it from wall to wall and reinforced by
+furze-bushes--not a very high pole, but not one easy to remove.  I
+pulled up and looked dubiously from it to Miss McRory.
+
+"D'ye dare me?" she said.
+
+"I bet you sixpence you take a toss if you do," I replied firmly,
+preparing to dismount.
+
+"Done with you!" said Miss McRory, suddenly smiting the grey cob with a
+venomous little cutting whip (one that probably dated from the sixties,
+and had for a handle an ivory greyhound's head with a plaited silver
+collar round its neck).
+
+I have seldom seen a pole better and more liberally dealt with, as far
+as the grey cob's share of the transaction went, and seldom, indeed,
+have I seen a rider sail more freely from a saddle than Miss McRory
+sailed.  She alighted on her hands and knees, and the cob, with the
+sting of the whip still enlivening her movements, galloped on up the
+lane and was lost in the mist.
+
+"Well, you won your sixpence," said Miss McRory dauntlessly, as I
+joined her.  "I suppose you're delighted."
+
+I assured her with entire sincerity that I was very much the reverse,
+and proceeded at high speed in pursuit of the cob.  The result of this
+excursion--a fairly prolonged one--was the discovery that the lane led
+into a road, and that it was impossible to decide in which direction
+the fugitive had gone.  I returned in profound gloom to my young lady,
+and found her rubbing herself down with a bunch of heather.
+
+"So you couldn't ketch her!" she called out as I approached.  "What'll
+we do now?"  She was evidently highly amused.  "I'll tell the Peeler it
+was your fault.  You dared me!"
+
+My reply need not be recorded: I only know it was by no means up to the
+standard to which Miss McRory was accustomed.
+
+I took what seemed to be the only possible course, and established her
+seated sideways on my saddle, with her foot--and it is but fair to say,
+a very small foot--in the leather instead of the stirrup, and her right
+hand knotted in Daniel's mane.  I held the off stirrup, and splashed
+beside her in the ruts and mud.  The mist was thicker than ever, the
+wind was pushing it in from the sea in great masses, and Miss McRory
+and I progressed onward in a magic circle of some twenty yards in
+diameter, occupied only by herself and me, with Daniel thrown in as
+chaperon.
+
+On arriving at the road I relied on the wind for guidance, and turning
+to the right, let it blow us in what was, I trusted, our course.  It
+was by this time past three o'clock, we were at least nine or ten miles
+from home, and one of my boots had begun to rub my heel.  There was
+nothing for it but to keep on as we were going, until we met something,
+or some one, or died.
+
+It is worthy of record that in these afflicting circumstances Miss
+Larkie McRory showed a staying power, attained, probably, in the long
+and hungry bicycle picnics of her tribe, that was altogether
+commendable.  Not for an instant did she fail to maintain in me the
+belief that she found me one of the most agreeable people she had ever
+met, a little older, perhaps, than Irving, D.I., but on that very
+account the more to be confided in.  It was not until the pangs of
+hunger recalled to me the existence of my sandwiches that I discovered
+she had no food with her, nor, as far as could be gathered, had she had
+any breakfast.
+
+"Sure they were all snoring asleep when I started.  I just got a cup o'
+tea in the kitchen----"
+
+This, I suppose, was a point at which I might suitably have said
+something incisive about the feats of her brethren on the previous
+night, but with deplorable weakness I merely offered her my sandwiches.
+Miss McRory replied that she'd fall off in a minute if she were to let
+go the mane, and why wouldn't I eat them myself?  I said if there were
+any shelter left in Ireland I would wait till I got there, and we could
+then decide who should eat them.
+
+AEons of mist and solitude ensued.  I must have walked for an hour or
+more, without meeting anyone except one old woman, who could only speak
+Irish, and I had begun to feel as if my spur were inside my boot
+instead of outside, when I became aware of something familiar about the
+look of the fences.  It was not, however, until I felt shelter rising
+blessedly about us, and saw the thorn bush with the rags hanging from
+it, that I realised that our luck had turned, and we had blundered our
+way back to the holy well under the side of Lonen Hill.  The well was
+like a tiny dripping cave, about as big as a beehive, with a few inches
+of water in it; a great boulder stood guard over it, and above it
+stooped the ancient and twisted thorn bush.  It seemed indicated as a
+place of rest, none the less that my heel was by this time considerably
+galled by my boot.
+
+Miss McRory glissaded from my saddle into my arms, and was assisted by
+me to deposit herself on a flat stone beside the well, stiff, wet, but
+still undefeated.  We shared my sandwiches, we drank whisky mixed with
+the water of the holy well, and Miss McRory dried her face with her
+handkerchief, and her complexion looked better than ever.  Daniel,
+slowly and deliberately, ate the rags off the thorn bush.  I have been
+at many picnics that I have enjoyed less.
+
+By the time we had got to the gingerbread biscuits I had discovered
+that Mr. Irving thought she had talked too much to me after dinner last
+night, and that it was a wonder to her how men could be so cross about
+nothing.  I said I was sorry she called it nothing, at which she looked
+up at me and down again at the gingerbread, and did not reply.  After
+this I felt emboldened to ask her why she had been called so
+inappropriate a name as "Larkie."
+
+Miss McRory agreed that it was indeed a silly old name, and that it was
+a friend of one of her brothers, a Mr. Mulcahy, who had said that she
+and her sisters were "'Lorky little gurls with lorge dork eyes.'  He
+had that way of speaking," she added, "because he thought it was grand,
+and he always kept his watch at English time.  He said he ran over to
+London so often it wasn't worth while to change it."
+
+She herself had never been out of Ireland, and she supposed she'd never
+get the chance.
+
+I said that when she married Mr. Mulcahy she could keep her watch at
+Irish time, so as to equalise things.
+
+Miss McRory suggested that I should give her a watch as a wedding
+present, and that, English or Irish time, it would be all hours of the
+night before we were home.
+
+I realised with a slight shock that the position had indeed become
+inverted when one of the House of McRory had to remind me, after about
+four hours in her undiluted society, of the flight of time.  It was now
+past four, which was bad enough, and a still greater shock awaited me
+in the discovery that I was dead lame, the interval of repose having
+been fatal to my damaged heel.
+
+I have always asserted, and shall continue to do so to my dying day,
+that the way out of the difficulty was suggested by Miss McRory.  I
+mounted Daniel, Miss McRory ascended the boulder by the holy well,
+announcing that she was as stiff as fifty crutches, and that once she
+got up she'd be there for life.  The thing was done somehow, thanks to
+the incomparable forbearance of Daniel, and with Miss McRory seated
+behind me on his broad back, and her arms clasped round my waist, I
+once more, and very cautiously, took the road.
+
+Daniel continued to conduct himself like a gentleman, but considering
+how precarious was the position of Miss McRory, it was unnerving to
+feel her shaken by silent and secret laughter.
+
+"You'll fall off," I warned her.
+
+She replied by a further paroxysm, and asked me what size I took in
+stays--she supposed about forty inches.
+
+Dusk was now an accomplished fact: thickened with fog and rain, it was
+even turning to darkness as we descended the long hill.  But, humanly
+speaking, the end was in sight.  There was, I knew, a public-house a
+couple of miles farther on, where a car might be hired, and there I
+proposed to bid a long farewell to Miss Larkie McRory, and to send her
+home by herself, to have rheumatic fever, as I assured her.
+
+We moved on and on, at a careful foot-pace: we were out in the wind
+again, and it was very cold.  It was also quite dark.  Silence fell
+upon us, and, after a time, the sustained pressure of Miss McRory's
+hat-brim against my shoulder suggested that it was the silence of
+exhaustion, if not of sleep.  I thought of her with compassion.  I
+believe I formulated her to myself as a poor little girl, and found
+myself asserting with defiance to imaginary detractors that no one
+could say she hadn't pluck, and that, in spite of her family, she
+really had a soul to be saved.
+
+Again we found ourselves in shelter, and a greater darkness in the
+darkness told that we were in the lee of a wooded hill.  I knew where I
+was now, and I said to Miss McRory that the pub was just round the
+corner, and she replied at once that that was where they always were,
+in Dublin anyway.  She also said she thought she heard horses' hoofs
+coming up behind us.  I pushed on.
+
+We turned the corner, and were immediately struck blind by the twin
+glare of the lamps of a motor, that lay motionless, as in ambush, at
+the side of the road.  Even the equanimity of Daniel was shattered; he
+swung to one side, he drifted like a blown leaf, and Miss McRory clung
+to me like a knapsack.  As we curveted in the full glare of the
+limelight, I was aware of a figure in a pot-hat and a vast fur coat
+standing near the motor.  Even as I recognised Lady Knox three or four
+muddy hounds trailed wearily into the glare, and a voice behind me
+shouted, "'Ware horse!"
+
+Flurry came on into the light: there was just room in me for a
+sub-conscious recognition of the fact that he was riding the missing
+grey cob, and that this was a typical thing, and one that might have
+been expected.
+
+
+At the hunt dinner that took place soon afterwards some one sang a
+song, one that I have ceased to find amusing.  The first verse runs as
+follows:
+
+  "Throttin' to the Fair,
+    Me and Moll Moloney,
+  Sittin', I declare,
+    On a single pony----"
+
+
+By a singular coincidence, the faces of all those present turned
+towards me.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+THE COMTE DE PRALINES
+
+"I had forgotten how nice London is!" purred Philippa, as we moved
+beautifully across the threshold of Bill Cunningham's club, and were
+conducted to the lift with a tender deference that was no more than was
+due to our best clothes.
+
+The Ladies' Tea-room at Bill's club was a pleasant place, looking
+forth, high above the noise, upon trees that were yellow in the hazy
+October afternoon.  In a very agreeable bow-window were Lady Derryclare
+and the tea-table, and with her were her son, and a small and
+ornamental young man, who was introduced to us as Mr. Simpson-Hodges.
+
+"Front name John, known to a large circle of admirers as 'Mossoo,'"
+supplemented Bill, whose hands were so clean that I found it difficult
+to recognise him.
+
+"So called because of the incredible circumstance that he can speak
+French, in spite of the best Public School education," said Lady
+Derryclare.  "When I think of the money that has been wasted on you!
+You good for nothing creature!"
+
+"It's more his looks," pursued Bill, "his dark foreign beauty----"
+
+"These humorists!" said Mr. Simpson-Hodges indulgently, showing a set
+of white teeth under a diminutive black moustache.  "Please, Lady
+Derryclare, let's talk of something pleasant."
+
+"Ask him about the chickens you made him get from the Chicken Farmers
+for the dance his regiment gave," said Bill to his mother.
+
+"Oh, that was rather a bad business," said Mr. Simpson-Hodges
+apologetically, with an eye on Philippa, who, in a new hat, was looking
+about five-and-twenty.  "I'm sure no one wants to hear about it."
+
+"Mossoo ran the supper and he ordered three brace," said Bill, "but
+they never turned up till the week after the show!  The postman was
+viewed coming up to the Mess towing something after him on a long
+painter.  The painter was superfluous.  The chickens would have
+followed him at a trot if he had been kind to them.  They kept them for
+the drag, I believe.  Didn't you, Mossoo?  He's one of the Whips, you
+know."
+
+"They'd have been quite useful," admitted Mr. Simpson-Hodges.
+
+"How interesting to be a Whip!" said Philippa, looking at him with
+egregious respect.
+
+"Rather too interesting, sometimes," replied Simpson-Hodges, expanding
+to the glance in a way not unfamiliar to me.  "Last time we were out
+the fellow with the drag started from the cross-roads where we were
+going to meet, and was asinine enough to take it a bit down the road
+before he went into the country, and, as it happened, we were bringing
+the hounds up to the meet by that particular road.  They simply put
+down their heads and ran it heel for all they were worth!  The First
+Whip and I galloped our best, but we couldn't get to their heads, and
+we all charged into the middle of the meet full-cry!"
+
+"Oh!  I wish I had been there!" said Philippa ardently.
+
+"We wished we were anywhere else," replied Mr. Simpson-Hodges; "the
+Brigadier was there, and everybody.  We heard all about it afterwards,
+I can tell you!"
+
+"That ought to have happened in Mr. Knox's country, Major Yeates!" said
+Lady Derryclare, whose interest in fox-hunting was more sympathetic
+than technical.
+
+"We don't run drags, Lady Derryclare," I said reproachfully, but Lady
+Derryclare had already entered upon another topic.
+
+Simpson-Hodges, however, did not end there.
+
+A week afterwards Philippa and I crept home, third class, with full
+trunks and empty pockets, sustained only by the aphorism, evolved by my
+wife, that economies, and not extravagances, are what one really
+regrets.  It was approaching the end of November before we next heard
+of Simpson-Hodges.  The Derryclares had come down for their first
+woodcock shoot, and Bill swooped over one morning in the big Daimler
+and whirled us back with him over the forty intervening miles of bog
+and mountain, to shoot, and to dance on the carpet after dinner, and to
+act charades; to further, in short, the various devices for exercising
+and disciplining a house party.  Mr. John Simpson-Hodges was there, no
+less ornamental than in London, and as useful as he was ornamental.  He
+shot well, he danced beautifully, and he made of the part of a French
+Count in a charade so surprising a work of art that people said--as is
+the habit of people--that he ought to be making a hundred a week on the
+stage.
+
+Before we left the Derryclares Philippa told me that she had arranged
+with "those boys"--by which she referred to Mr. Cunningham and the
+French Count--to come over next week and have a hunt with Flurry Knox's
+hounds.  Something whispered to me that there was more in this than met
+the eye, but as they were to provide their own mounts the position was
+unassailable, and I contented myself with telling her that a
+predilection for the society of the young was one of the surest signs
+of old age.
+
+It was not till we were all seated at breakfast on the morning of the
+meet (which was to be at Castle Knox), that it was suggested, with all
+the spontaneity of a happy thought, by Bill, that "Mossoo" should be
+introduced to the members of the Hunt as a Frenchman who was unable to
+speak English.
+
+"Call him the Comte de Pralines," said Philippa, with suspicious
+promptitude.
+
+"You can call him Napoleon Buonaparte if you like," I said defiantly,
+"_I_ shall stay at home!"
+
+"All the Curranhilty people will be there," said Philippa softly.
+
+The thought of introducing the Comte de Pralines to Miss Bobbie Bennett
+was certainly attractive.
+
+"I refuse to introduce him to Lady Knox," I said with determination,
+and knew that I had yielded.
+
+A meet at Castle Knox always brought out a crowd; there were generally
+foxes, and always luncheon, and there was a touch of the G.O.C. about
+Lady Knox that added a pleasing edge of anxiety, and raised the meet to
+something of the nature of a full-dress parade.  I held to my point
+about Lady Knox, and did nothing more compromising than tremble in the
+background, while Bill Cunningham presented the Comte de Pralines to
+the lady of the house, supplementing the presentation with the
+statements that this was his first visit to Ireland, and that he spoke
+no English.
+
+The Comte de Pralines, in the newest of pink coats, and the whitest of
+breeches, and the most glittering of boots and spurs, stood on the step
+below Lady Knox, with the bridle of his hireling over his arm, and his
+shining silk hat in his hand.  Still with his hat in his hand, and
+looking, as Miss Larkie McRory whispered to me, "as pretty as a
+Christmas card," the Count rippled forth a stream of mellifluous
+French, commenting upon the beauty of the day, of the place, of the
+scene.
+
+Lady Knox's face deepened to so apoplectic a crimson, and her eyes
+became so fixed that I, watching the scene apprehensively, doubted if
+it were not my duty to rush at her and cut open her hunting-stock.
+When the Count ceased, having, as far as I could gather, enquired as to
+when she had last been to Auteuil, and if she had ever hunted in
+France, Lady Knox paused, and said very slowly:
+
+"Er--_j'espere que nous aurons un bon jour aujourdhui_."  Then,
+rapidly, to me, "Take your friend in for a drink, Major Yeates."
+
+My heart bled for her, and also quaked for myself, but I was into it
+now, up to my chin.
+
+During the next ten minutes Bill Cunningham, feebly abetted by me,
+played the game remorselessly, sparing neither age nor sex.  In the
+hall, amidst the sloe-gins and the whiskies and sodas (to which the
+Count, for a foreigner, took remarkably kindly), introductions slipped
+between cup and lip, poisoning the former and paralysing the latter.
+The victims took it variously; some sought refuge in bright smiles and
+large foreign gestures; some, in complete mental overthrow, replied in
+broken English to Mossoo's sugared periods; all were alike in one
+point, they moved as swiftly as might be, and as far as possible, out
+of the immediate neighbourhood of the Comte de Pralines.  Philippa,
+who, without any solid attainment, can put up a very good bluff in
+French, joined spasmodically in these encounters, alternately goading
+Mossoo to fresh outrages, and backing out when the situation became too
+acute.  I found her, affecting to put her sandwiches into the case on
+her saddle, and giving way to her feelings, with her face pressed
+against her mare's shoulder.
+
+"I introduced him to Bobbie Bennett," she said brokenly; "and he asked
+her if she spoke French.  She looked at me as if she were drowning, and
+said, '_Seulement tres petit_'!"
+
+I said, repressively, that Lady Knox could see her, and that people
+would think, firstly, that she was crying, and secondly, that she was
+mad.
+
+"But I am mad, darling!" replied my wife, turning a streaming face to
+me.
+
+I informed her of my contempt for her, and, removing myself from her
+vicinity, collected myself for the introduction of the Count to Flurry
+Knox and Dr. Hickey.  By this time most of the Field were mounted, and
+the Comte de Pralines bent to his horse's mane as he uncovered with
+grave courtesy on his presentation to the Master and the First Whip,
+and proceeded to express the profundity of his gratification at meeting
+an Irish Master of Hounds.  The objects of the attention were palpably
+discomposed by it; Flurry put a finger to his cap, with a look at me
+expressive of No Surrender; Dr. Hickey, in unconscious imitation of the
+Count, bowed low, but forgot about his cap.
+
+"He has no English, I'm told," said Flurry, eyeing the Count
+suspiciously.
+
+I stopped myself on the verge of bowing assent, so infectious was the
+grace of the Pralines manner.
+
+"Is he come to buy horses for the German Army?" went on Flurry.  (It
+need hardly be said that this occurred before the War.)
+
+I explained that he was French.
+
+"You wouldn't know what these foreigners might be up to," returned Mr.
+Knox, quite unconvinced.  "I'm going on now----"
+
+He too moved expeditiously out of the danger zone.
+
+The Field straggled down the avenue, and progressed over tracts of
+tussocky grass in the wake of the hounds, towards the plantation that
+was the first draw.  The Keeper was outside the wood, with the
+assurance that there was a score of foxes in it, and that they had the
+country ate.
+
+"Maybe they'll eat the hounds, so," said Flurry.  "Let you all stay
+outside.  You can be talking French now for a bit----"
+
+I looked round to see who were availing themselves of this permission.
+The Count had by this time been introduced to Miss Larkie McRory;
+Philippa was apparently acting as interpreter, and Miss McRory was
+showing no disposition to close the interview.  The Field had
+withdrawn, and had formed itself into a committee-meeting on the Count.
+
+[Illustration: Miss Larkie McRory.]
+
+It was warm and sunny in the shelter of the wood.  Although the time
+was November there were still green leaves on some of the trees; it was
+a steamy day after a wet night, and I thought to myself that if the
+hounds _did_ run--Here came a challenge from the wood, answered
+multitudinously, and the next minute they were driving through the
+laurels towards the entrance gates, with a cry that stimulated even the
+many-wintered Daniel to capers quite unbefitting his time of life, or
+mine.  The Castle Knox demesne is a large one, and being surrounded by
+a prohibitively high and coped wall, it is easier to find a fox there
+than to get away with one.  Mighty galloping on the avenues followed,
+with interludes in the big demesne fields, where every gate had been
+considerately left open, and in which every horse with any pretensions
+to _savoir faire_ stiffened his neck, and put up his back, and pulled.
+The hounds, a choir invisible, carried their music on through the
+plantations, with whimpering, scurrying pauses, with strophe and
+anti-strophe of soprano and bass.  Sometimes the cry bore away to the
+demesne wall, and some one would shout "They're away!" and the question
+of the Front Gate versus the Western Gate would divide us like a sword.
+Twice, in the undergrowth, above the sunk fence that separated us from
+the wood, the quick, composed face of the fox showed itself; at last,
+when things were getting too hot in the covert, he sprang like a cat
+over the ditch, and flitted across the park with that gliding gait that
+dissimulates its own speed, while I and my fellows offered a painful
+example of the discordance of the human voice when compared with that
+of the hound, and five or six couple pitched themselves out of the wood
+and stretched away over the grass.
+
+It was fortunate for the Comte de Pralines that his entirely British
+view-holloa was projected for the most part into my ear (the drum of
+which it nearly split) and was merged in the general enthusiasm as we
+let ourselves go.
+
+"For God's sake, Major Yeates!" said Michael, the Second Whip,
+thundering up beside me as we neared the covert on the further side of
+the park, "come into the wood with me and turn them hounds!  Mr.
+Flurry's back on another fox with the body of the pack, and he's very
+near his curse!"
+
+I followed Michael into the covert, and was myself followed by a
+section of the Field, who might, with great advantage, have remained
+outside.  In the twinkling of an eye Michael was absorbed into the
+depths of the wood; so also were the six couple, but not so my retinue,
+who pursued me like sleuth-hounds, as I traversed the covert at such
+speed as the narrow rides permitted.  I made at length the negative
+discovery that it contained nothing save myself and my followers, a
+select party, consisting of the Comte de Pralines, Miss McRory, Miss
+Bobbie Bennett, Lady Knox's coachman on a three-year-old, and a little
+boy in knickerbockers, on a midget pony with the bearing of a war-horse
+and a soul to match.  We had come to a baffled pause at the cross-ways,
+when faint and far away, an indisputable holloa was borne to us.
+
+"They've gone out the West Gate," said the coachman, from among the
+tree-trunks into which he had considerately manoeuvred the kicking end
+of the three-year-old.  "It must be they ran him straight out into the
+country----"
+
+We made for the West Gate, reached it without sight or sound of Flurry
+or anyone else, and, on the farm road outside it, pulled up to listen.
+
+The holloa was repeated; half a mile ahead a gesticulating figure
+signalled to us to come on.  I wish to put it on record that I said I
+could not hear the hounds.  The Comte de Pralines (excitable, like all
+Frenchmen) spurred his hireling at the opposite bank, saying, as he
+shot past me:
+
+"It's no damned use humbugging here any longer!"
+
+As I turned Daniel to follow him, my eyes met those of Miss Larkie
+McRory, alight with infernal intelligence; they challenged, but at the
+same time they offered confederacy.  I jumped into the field after the
+Count; Miss McRory followed.
+
+"I'll tell Lady Knox on you!" she murmured, as she pounded beside me on
+the long-legged spectre, who, it may be remembered, had been described
+as "the latther end of a car-horse."
+
+The holloa had come to us from the side of a smooth green hill, and
+between us and it was a shallow valley, neatly fenced with banks that
+did credit to Sir Valentine Knox's farming.  The horses were fresh, the
+valley smiled in the conventional way, and spread sleek pastures before
+us; we took the down grade at a cheerful pace, and the banks a shade
+faster than was orthodox, and the coachman's three-year-old made up in
+enthusiasm what he lacked in skill, and the pony, who from the first
+was running away, got over everything by methods known only to itself.
+The Comte de Pralines held an undeviating line for the spot whence the
+holloa had proceeded; when we reached it there was no one to be seen,
+but there was another holloa further on.  The pursuit of this took us
+on to a road, and here the Castle Knox coachman, who had scouted on
+ahead, yelled something to the effect that he saw a rider out before
+him, accompanying the statement by an application of the spurs to the
+dripping but undaunted three-year-old.  A stretching gallop up the road
+ensued, headed by the little boy and the coachman, who had both secured
+a commanding lead.  The pace held for about a hundred yards, when the
+road bent sharply to the left, more sharply indeed than was anticipated
+by the leaders, who, as their mounts skidded as it were on one wheel
+round the corner, sailed from their saddles with singular unanimity and
+landed in the ditch.  At the same moment the rider we had been
+following came into view; he was a priest, in immaculate black coat and
+top-hat, seated on a tall chestnut horse, and proceeding at a tranquil
+footpace on his own affairs.
+
+He had seen the fox, he admitted (I am inclined to think he had headed
+him), and he had heard a man shouting, but no hounds had come his way.
+He was entirely sympathetic, and, warm as I was at the moment, a chill
+apprehension warned me that we might presently need sympathy.
+
+"It's my belief," said Miss Bennett, voicing that which I had not put
+into words, "we've been riding after the fox, and the hounds didn't
+leave the covert at all!"
+
+An elaborate French oath from the Count fell, theatrical as a
+drop-scene, on the close of the first act.  Miss Larkie McRory looked
+at him admiringly, and allowed just the last rays of her glance to
+include me.
+
+It was when we had retraced our steps to the bend of the road that we
+had a full view of the Castle Knox coverts, crowning in gold and brown
+those pleasant green slopes, easy as the descent to Avernus, down which
+we had galloped with such generous ardour some fifteen minutes ago.
+Outside the West Gate, through which we had emerged from the demesne,
+were three motionless figures in scarlet; Lady Knox and her grey horse
+were also recognisable; a few hounds were straying undecidedly in the
+first of the grass fields that we had traversed.
+
+A note of the horn leaped to us across the valley, an angry and
+peremptory note.  One of the scarlet figures started at a canter and
+turned the hounds.  Another and longer blast followed.  As if in
+obedience to its summoning, the coachman's three-year-old came ramping,
+riderless, down the road; he passed us with his head high in air and
+his flashing eye fixed upon the distant group, and, with a long shrill
+neigh, put his tail over his back and directed his flight for his owner
+and her grey horse.
+
+"God help poor Tierney!" said Miss Bennett, in a stricken voice, "and
+ourselves too!  I believe they saw us all the time, and we galloping
+away on the line of the fox!"
+
+"I'm going home," I said.  "Will you kindly make my apologies to the
+Master?"
+
+"I'll kindly do no such thing," replied Miss Bennett.  "I'll let Flurry
+Knox cool off a bit before I meet him again, and that won't be this
+side of Christmas, if _I_ can help it!  Good-bye, dear friends!"
+
+She turned her mare, and set her face for her own country.
+
+There now remained only the Count, Miss McRory, and myself, and to
+remove ourselves from the field of vision of the party at the gate was
+our first care.  We had, no doubt, been thoroughly identified,
+nevertheless the immediate sensation of getting a furzy hill between us
+and Flurry was akin to that of escaping from the rays of a
+burning-glass.  In shelter we paused and surveyed each other.
+
+The Comte de Pralines, with his shiny hat very much on the back of his
+head, put down his reins, shoved his crop under his knee, and got out
+his cigarette case.
+
+"Well," he began philosophically, striking a match, "our luck ain't
+in----!"
+
+He broke off, the match went out, and a lively glow suffused his
+unsheltered countenance.
+
+"_Vous voyez mon cher--_" he resumed, very rapidly.  "_J'ai appris
+quelques petits mots----_"
+
+"What a lovely English accent he has!" interrupted Miss McRory
+rapturously; "it's a lot nicer than his French one.  To look at him
+you'd never think he was so clever.  It's a pity he wouldn't try to
+pick up a little more."
+
+"Now, that's hitting a man when he's down," said the Comte de Pralines.
+"I want some one to be kind to me.  I've had a poor day of it; no one
+would talk to me.  I stampeded them wherever I went."
+
+"I didn't notice Miss McRory stampeding to any great extent," I said.
+
+"Wait awhile!" rejoined Miss McRory.  "Maybe the stampeding will be
+going the other way when you and he meet Lady Knox!"
+
+"I shan't wait an instant," said the Comte de Pralines, "you and Major
+Yeates will explain."
+
+
+The horses had been moving on, and the covert was again in sight, about
+a quarter of a mile away on our left.  There was nothing to be seen,
+but hounds were hunting again in the demesne; their cry drove on
+through the woods inside the grey demesne wall; they were hunting in a
+body, and they were hunting hard.
+
+At each moment the cry was becoming more remote, but it was still
+travelling on inside the wall.  The fear of Flurry fell from us as a
+garment, and the only question that presented itself was whether to
+return to the West Gate or to hold on outside.  It was a long-accepted
+theory at Castle Knox that the demesne wall was not negotiable, and
+that the foxes always used the gates, like Christians; bearing this in
+mind, I counselled the Front Gate and the outside of the wall.  A
+couple of lanes favoured us; we presently found ourselves in a series
+of marshy fields, moving along abreast of the invisible hounds in the
+wood.  They were in the thickest and least accessible part of it, and
+Flurry's voice and horn came faintly as from a distance.
+
+I explained that it was impossible to ride that part of the wood, but
+that, if they held on as they were going, the Front Gate would make it
+all right for us, and of course Flurry would----
+
+"Oh! look, look, look!" shrieked Miss McRory, snatching at my arm and
+pointing with her whip.
+
+A short way ahead of us a huge elm tree had fallen upon the wall; the
+greenish-yellow leaves still clinging to its branches showed that the
+catastrophe was recent.  It had broken down the wall to within five or
+six feet of the ground, and was reclining in the breach that it had
+made, with its branches sprawling in the field.  I followed the line of
+Miss Larkie's whip, and was just in time to see a fox float like a red
+leaf from one of these to the ground, and glide straight across our
+front.  He passed out of sight over a bank, and the Count stood up in
+his stirrups, put his finger in his ear, and screamed in a way that
+must have been heard in the next county.  I contributed a not
+ineffective bellow, and Miss McRory decorated the occasion with long
+thin squeals.
+
+The hounds, inside the wall, answered in an agony that was only allayed
+by the discovery that the trunk of the tree formed as handy a bridge
+for them as for the fox.  They came dropping like ripe fruit through
+the branches, and, under our rejoicing eyes, swarmed to the fox's line,
+and flung on, in the fullest of full-cry, over the bank on which we had
+last seen him.  I have not failed to assure Flurry Knox that anything
+less suggestive of "sneaking away with the hounds" than the manner of
+our departure could hardly be conceived, but Mr. Knox has not withdrawn
+the phrase.
+
+It may be conceded that Flurry had grounds for annoyance.  Had I had
+the fox in one hand and the Ordnance Map in the other, I could hardly
+have improved on the course steered by our pilot.  Up hill for a bit,
+when the horses were fresh, with gradients just steep enough to temper
+Daniel's well-sustained tug of war, yet not so steep as to make a
+three-foot bank look like a house, or to guarantee a big knee at each
+"stone gap."  Then high and dry country, with sheep huddled in
+defensive positions in the corners of the fields, and grass like a
+series of putting-greens, minus the holes, and fat, comely banks, and
+thin walls, from which the small round stones rattled harmlessly as
+Miss McRory's car-horse swept through them.  Down into a long valley,
+with little sky-blue lakes, set in yellow sedge; and there was a
+helpful bog road there, that nicked nicely with the bending line of the
+hounds through the accompanying bog, and allayed a spasm of acute
+anxiety as to whether we should ever get near them again.  Then upwards
+once more, deviously, through rougher going, with patches of
+low-growing furze sprouting from blackened tracts where the hillside
+had been set on fire, with the hounds coming to their noses among
+brakes of briars and bracken; finally, in the wind and sun of the
+hill-top, a well-timed check.
+
+We looked back for the first time, half in fear that we might find
+Flurry hot on our track, half in hope that he and his horn were coming
+to our help; but neither in the green country nor in the brown valley
+was there any sign or sound of him.  There was nothing to be seen but a
+couple of men standing on a fence to watch us, nothing to be heard
+except cur dogs vociferating at every cottage.
+
+"Fifteen couple on," said the Count professionally.  "How many does
+Knox usually have out?"
+
+"All he's got," I said, mopping my brow.
+
+"I don't see the two that have no hair on their backs," said Miss
+McRory, whose eyes, much enhanced by the radiant carmine of her cheeks,
+beamed at us through wisps and loops of hair.  "I know them, they're
+always scratching, the poor things!"
+
+That Miss McRory and her steed kept, as they did, their place in what
+is known to history as the Great Castle Knox Run, is a matter that I do
+not pretend to explain.  Some antiquarian has unearthed the fact that
+the car-horse had three strains of breeding, and had twice been second
+in a Point-to-Point; but I maintain that credit must be ascribed to
+Miss Larkie, about whom there is something inevitable; some street-boy
+quality of being in the movement.
+
+We were now on a heathery table-land, with patches of splashy, rushy
+ground, from which the snipe flickered out as the hounds cast
+themselves through it.  Presently, on the top of a hard, peaty bank, a
+hound spoke, hesitatingly, yet hopefully, and plunged down on the other
+side; the pack crowded over, and drove on through the heather.  Daniel
+changed feet on a mat of ling with a large stone in it, and therefrom
+ramped carefully out over a deep cut in the peat, unforeseen, and
+masked by tufts of heather.  The hireling of the Comte de Pralines had,
+up to this, done his work blamelessly, if without originality; he had
+an anxiousness to oblige that had been matured during a dread winter
+when he had been the joint property of three subalterns, but he
+reserved to himself a determination to drop economically off his banks,
+and boggy slits were not in his list of possibilities.
+
+How the matter occurred I do not know, but, when I looked round, his
+head alone was visible, and the Count was standing on his in the
+heather.  Miss McRory's car-horse, who had pulled up in the act of
+following the Count, with a suddenness acquired, no doubt, in the
+shafts of a Cork covered-car, was viewing the scene with horror from
+the summit of the bank.  The hounds were by this time clear of the
+heather, and were beginning to run hard; it was not until I was on the
+further side of the next bank that I cast another fleeting look back;
+this time the Count was standing on his feet, but the hireling was
+still engulfed, and Miss McRory was still on the wrong side of the
+slit.  After that I forgot them, wholly and heartlessly, as is
+invariable in such cases.
+
+As a matter of fact, I had no attention to spare for anyone but myself,
+even though we went, for the first twenty minutes or so, as on rubber
+tyres, through bland dairy farms wherein the sweet influences of the
+dairy-cow had induced gaps in every fence, and gates into every road.
+The scent, mercifully for Daniel, was not quite what it had been; the
+fox had run through cattle, and also through goats (a small and odorous
+party, on whose behalf, indeed, some slight intervention on my part was
+required), and it was here, when crossing a road, that a donkey and her
+foal, moved by some mysterious attraction akin to love at first sight,
+attached themselves to me.  Undeterred by the fact that the mother's
+foreleg was fettered to her hind, the pair sped from field to field in
+my wake; at the checks, which just then were frequent, they brayed
+enthusiastically.  I thought to elude them at a steep drop into a road,
+but they toboganned down it without an effort; when they overtook me
+the fetter-chain was broken, and clanked from the mother's hind-leg as
+if she were a family ghost.
+
+There came at length a moment, outside a farm-house, when it seemed as
+if the fox had beaten us.  Here, on the farther side of Castle Knox, I
+was well out of my own country, and what the fox's point might be was
+represented by the letter X.  Nevertheless it was here that I lifted
+the hounds and brought off the cast of a life-time; I am inclined to
+think that he had lain down under a hayrick and was warned of our
+approach by the voices of my attendant jackasses; my cast was probably
+not much more of a fluke than such inspirations usually are, but the
+luck was with me.  Old Playboy, sole relic of my deputy Mastership,
+lifted his white head and endorsed my suggestion with a single bass
+note; Rally, Philippa's prize puppy, uttered a soprano cadenza, and the
+pack suddenly slid away over the pasture fields, with the smoothness
+and unanimity of the _Petits Chevaux_ over their green cloth.
+
+It was now becoming for Daniel and me something of an effort to keep
+our proud and lonely place in or about the next field to the hounds.
+The fields were coming smaller, the gaps fewer; Daniel had no intention
+of chucking it, but he gave me to understand that he meant to take the
+hills on the second speed.  And, unfortunately, the hills were coming.
+The hounds, by this time three fences ahead, flung over a bank on the
+upgrade, a bank that would give pause for reflection at the beginning
+of a run.  I tried back, scrambled into a lane, followed it up the
+hill, with the cry of the hounds coming fainter each minute, dragged a
+cart wheel and a furze bush out of a gap with my crop, found myself in
+a boggy patch of turnips, surrounded by towering fuchsia hedges, and
+realised that the pack had passed in music out of sight.
+
+I stood still and looked at my watch.  It was already an hour and
+twenty minutes from the word "Go!" and the hounds were not only gone
+but were still going.  A man who has lost hounds inevitably follows the
+line of least resistance.  I retired from the turnip field, and
+abandoned myself to the lane, which seemed not disinclined to follow
+the direction in which the hounds had been heading.  Since the hayrick
+episode they had been running right-handed, and the lane bent
+right-handed over the end of the hill, and presently deposited me on a
+road.  It was one of the moments when the greatness of the world is
+borne in upon the wayfarer.  There was a spacious view from the
+hill-side; three parishes, at least, offered themselves for my
+selection, and I surveyed them, solitary and remote as the evening
+star, and with no more reason than it for favouring one more than
+another.  A harrowing, and, by this time, but too familiar cry, broke
+on my ear, an undulating cry as of a thing that galloped as it roared.
+My admirers were still on my trail; I gave Daniel a touch of the spurs
+and trotted on to the right.
+
+No human being was visible, but some way ahead there was a slated house
+at a cross-roads; there, at all events, I could get my bearings.  There
+were porter-barrels outside it, and from some distance I heard two
+voices, male and female, engaged in loud and ferocious argument; I had
+no difficulty in diagnosing a public-house.  When Daniel and I darkened
+the doorway the shouting ceased abruptly, and I saw a farmer, in his
+Sunday clothes, making an unsteady retreat through a door at the back
+of the shop.  The other disputant, a large, middle-aged woman, remained
+entrenched behind the counter, and regarded me with a tranquil and
+commanding eye.  She informed me, as from a pulpit, that I was six
+miles from Castle Knox, and with dignity, as though leaving a pulpit,
+she moved from behind the counter, and advanced to the door to indicate
+my road.  I asked her if she had seen anything of the hounds.
+
+"There was one of your dogs looked in the door to me a while ago," she
+replied, "but he got a couple of boxes from the cat that have kittens;
+I d'no what way he went.  Indeed I was bothered at the time with that
+poor man that came in to thank me for the compliment I paid him in
+going to his sister's funeral."
+
+I said that he certainly seemed to feel it very much.  At which she
+looked hard at me and said that he was on his way to a wedding, and
+that it might be he had a drop taken to rise his heart.  "He was after
+getting a half a crown from a gentleman--a huntsman like yourself," she
+added, "that was striving to get his horse out of a ditch."
+
+"Was there a lady with him?" I asked.
+
+"There was, faith!  And the two o' them legged it away then through the
+country, and they galloping like the deer!"
+
+So, in all love, we parted; before I reached the next turning renewed
+sounds of battle told me that the compliment was still being pressed
+home.
+
+My road, bending ever to the right, strolled through an untidy
+nondescript country, with little bits of bog, and little lumps of hill,
+and little rags of fields.  I had jogged a mile or so when I saw a
+hound, a few fields away to my right, poking along on what appeared to
+be a line; he flopped into a boggy ditch, and scrambled from it on to a
+fence.  He stood there undecidedly, like any human being, reviewing the
+situation, and then I saw his head and stern go up.  The next moment I
+also heard what he had heard, a faint and far-away note of the horn.
+It came again, a long and questing call.
+
+The road was flat and fairly straight; far away upon it something was
+moving gradually into my scope of vision, something with specks of red
+in it.  It advanced upon me, firmly, and at a smart pace; heading it,
+like the ram of a battleship, was Mr. Knox.  With him, "of all his
+halls had nursed," remained only the two hounds with the hairless
+backs, the two who, according to Miss McRory, were always scratching.
+Behind him was a small and unsmiling selection from those who, like
+him, had lost the hunt.  Lady Knox headed them; my wife and Bill
+brought up the rear.  The hound whom I had seen in the bog had preceded
+me, and was now joining himself to his two comrades, putting the best
+face he could upon it, with a frowning brow and his hackles up.  The
+comrades, in their official position of sole representatives of the
+pack, received him with orthodox sternness, and though unable, for
+obvious reasons, to put their hackles up, the bald places on their
+backs were of an intimidating pink.
+
+My own reception followed the same lines.
+
+"Where are the hounds?" barked Flurry, in the awful tones of a parent
+addressing a governess who, through gross neglect, has mislaid her
+charges.
+
+Before I had had time to make up my mind whether to be truculent or
+pacific, there was a shout away on our left.  At some little distance
+up a by-road, a man was standing on a furze-plumed bank, beckoning to
+us with a driving-whip.  Flurry stood in his stirrups, and held up his
+cap.  The man yelled information that was wholly unintelligible, but
+the driving-whip indicated a point beyond him, and Flurry's brown mare
+jumped from a standstill to a gallop, and swung into the by-road.
+
+The little band of followers swung after him.  When Lady Knox was well
+ahead, I followed, and found myself battering between high banks behind
+Philippa and Bill Cunningham.
+
+"Where's Mossoo?" my wife said breathlessly, as Daniel's head drew
+level with her sandwich case.  "We met the man who pulled him out of
+the ditch--up in the hills there----"
+
+"Yes, by Jove!" said Bill, "Flurry asked him if it was a Frenchman, and
+the chap said, 'French or German, he had curses as good as yourself!'
+I told Flurry it must have been you!"
+
+"I don't mind Flurry, it's Lady Knox----" began Philippa.
+
+Here we all came to a violent full-stop.  Flurry's advance had been
+arrested by a covered-car and horse drawn across the road; the horse
+was eating grass, the driver, with the reins in his hand, was standing
+with his back to us on the top of the bank from which he had hailed us,
+howling plaudits, as if he were watching a race.  There were distant
+shouts, and barking dogs, and bellowing cattle, and blended with them
+was the unmistakable baying of hounds.
+
+I daresay that what Flurry said to the driver did him good--did Flurry
+good, I mean.  The car lurched to one side, and, as we squeezed past
+it, we saw between its black curtains a vision of a scarlet-faced
+bride, embedded in female relatives; two outside cars, driverless, and
+loaded with wedding guests, were drawn up a little farther on.  Flurry,
+still exploding like a shell, thundered on down the lane; the high bank
+ended at a gateway, he turned in, and as we crushed in after him we
+were greeted by a long and piercing "Who-whoop!"
+
+We were in a straggling field with furzy patches in it.  At the farther
+end of it was a crowd of country people on horses and on foot,
+obviously more wedding-guests; back of all, on a road below, was a
+white-washed chapel, and near it, still on the chestnut horse, was the
+priest who had headed the morning fox.  Close to one of the clumps of
+furze the Comte de Pralines was standing, knee-deep in baying hounds,
+holding the body of the fox high above his head, and uttering scream
+upon scream of the most orthodox quality.  He flung the fox to the
+hounds, the onlookers cheered, Miss McRory, seated on the car-horse,
+waved the brush above her head, and squealed at the top of her voice
+something that sounded like "Yoicks!"  Her hair was floating freely
+down her back; a young countryman, in such sacrificial attire as
+suggested the bridegroom, was running across the field with her hat in
+his hand.
+
+Flurry pulled up in silence; so did we.  We were all quite outside the
+picture, and we knew it.
+
+"Oh, the finest hunt ever you see!" cried the bridegroom as he passed
+us; "it was Father Dwyer seen him shnaking into the furze, the villyan!"
+
+"Worry, worry, worry!  Tear him and eat him, old fellows!" shouted the
+Comte de Pralines.  "Give the hounds room, can't you, you chaps!  I
+suppose you never saw them break up a fox before!"  This to the wedding
+guests, who had crowded in, horse and foot, on top of the scuffling,
+growling pack.
+
+Flurry turned an iron face upon me.  His eye was no bigger than a pin's
+head.
+
+"I suppose it's from Larkie McRory he got the English?" he said; "he
+learnt it quick."
+
+"The McRorys don't speak English!" said Lady Knox, in a voice like a
+north-east wind.
+
+"_Seulement tres petit!_" Philippa murmured brazenly.
+
+Whether Lady Knox heard her or not, I am unable to say.  Her face was
+averted from me, and remained as inflexible as a profile on a coin--a
+Roman coin, for choice.
+
+The faculty of not knowing when you are beaten is one that has, I
+think, been lauded beyond its deserving.  Napoleon the Great has
+condemned manoeuvring before a fixed position, and Lady Knox was
+clearly a fixed position.  Accepting these tenets, I began an
+unostentatious retirement, in which I was joined by Philippa.  We were
+nearing safety and the gate of the field, when a yearning, choking wail
+came to us from the lane.
+
+"The Bride?" queried my wife hysterically.
+
+It was repeated; in the same instant my admirers, the jackasses, _mere
+et fils_, advanced upon the scene at a delirious gallop, and, sobbing
+with the ecstasy of reunion, resumed their attendance upon Daniel.
+
+For a moment the attention of the field, including even that of the
+Roman coin, was diverted from the Comte de Pralines, and was
+concentrated upon our retreat.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+THE SHOOTING OF SHINROE
+
+Mr. Joseph Francis M'Cabe rose stiffly from his basket chair, picked up
+the cushion on which he had been seated, looked at it with animosity,
+hit it hard with his fist, and, flinging it into the chair, replaced
+himself upon it, with the single word:
+
+"Flog!"
+
+I was aware that he referred to the flock with which the cushions in
+the lounge of Reardon's Hotel were stuffed.
+
+"They have this hotel destroyed altogether with their improvements,"
+went on Mr. M'Cabe between puffs, as he lit his pipe.  "God be with the
+time this was the old smoking-room, before they knocked it and the hall
+into one and spoilt the two of them!  There were fine solid chairs in
+it that time, that you'd sleep in as good as your bed, but as for these
+wicker affairs, I declare the wind 'd whistle through them the same as
+a crow's nest."  He paused, and brought his heel down heavily on the
+top of the fire.  "And look at that for a grate!  A Well-grate they
+call it,--_I'd_ say, 'Leave Well alone!'  Thirty years I'm coming to
+Sessions here, and putting up in this house, and in place of old Tim
+telling me me own room was ready for me, there's a whipper-snapper of a
+snapdragon in a glass box in the hall, asking me me name in broken
+English" (it may be mentioned that this happened before the War), "and
+'Had I a Cook's ticket?' and down-facing me that I must leave my key in
+what he called the 'Bew-ro.'"
+
+I said I knew of a lady who always took a Cook's ticket when she went
+abroad, because when she got to Paris there would be an Englishman on
+the platform to meet her, or at all events a broken Englishman.
+
+Mr. M'Cabe softened to a temporary smile, but held on to his grievance
+with the tenacity of his profession.  (I don't think I have mentioned
+that he is a Solicitor, of a type now, unfortunately, becoming
+obsolete.)  He had a long grey face, and a short grey moustache; he
+dyed his hair, and his age was known to no man.
+
+"There was one of Cook's tourists sat next me at breakfast," he
+resumed, "and he asked me was I ever in Ireland before, and how long
+was I in it.  'Wan day,' says I!"
+
+"Did he believe you?" I asked.
+
+"He did," replied Mr. M'Cabe, with something that approached compassion.
+
+I have always found old M'Cabe a mitigating circumstance of Sessions at
+Owenford, both in Court and out of it.  He was a sportsman of the
+ingrained variety that grows wild in Ireland, and in any of the
+horse-coping cases that occasionally refresh the innermost soul of
+Munster, it would be safe to assume that Mr. M'Cabe's special gifts had
+ensured his being retained, generally on the shady side.  He fished
+when occasion served, he shot whether it did or not.  He did not
+exactly keep horses, but he always knew some one who was prepared to
+"pass on" a thoroughly useful animal, with some infirmity so
+insignificant that until you tried to dispose of him you did not
+realise that he was yours, until his final passing-on to the next
+world.  He had certain shooting privileges in the mountains behind the
+town of Owenford (bestowed, so he said, by a grateful client), and it
+had often been suggested by him that he and I should anticipate some
+November Sessions by a day, and spend it "on the hill."  We were now in
+the act of carrying out the project.
+
+"Ah, these English," M'Cabe began again, mixing himself a glass of
+whisky and water, "they'd believe anything so long as it wasn't the
+truth.  Talking politics these lads were, and by the time they had
+their ham and eggs swallowed they had the whole country arranged.  'And
+look,' says they--they were anglers, God help us!--'look at all the
+money that's going to waste for want of preserving the rivers!'  'I beg
+your pardon,' says I, 'there's water-bailiffs on the most of the
+rivers.  I was defending a man not long since, that was cot by the
+water-bailiff poaching salmon on the Owen.  'And what proof have you?'
+says I to the water-bailiff.  'How do you know it was a salmon at all?'
+'Is it how would I know?' says the bailiff, 'didn't I gaff the fish for
+him meself!'"
+
+"What did your anglers say to that?" I enquired.
+
+"Well, they didn't quite go so far as to tell me I was a liar," said
+Mr. M'Cabe tranquilly.  "Ah, telling such as them the truth is wasting
+what isn't plenty!  Then they'll meet some fellow that lies like a
+tooth-drawer, and they'll write to the English _Times_ on the head of
+him!"  He stretched forth a long and bony hand for the tumbler of
+whisky and water.  "And talking of tooth-drawers," he went on, "there's
+a dentist comes here once a fortnight, Jeffers his name is, and a great
+sportsman too.  I was with him to-day"--he passed his hand consciously
+over his mouth, and the difference that I had dimly felt in his
+appearance suddenly, and in all senses of the word, flashed upon
+me--"and he was telling me how one time, in the summer that's past,
+he'd been out all night, fishing in the Owen.  He was going home before
+the dawn, and he jumped down off a bank on to what he took to be a
+white stone--and he aimed for the stone, mind you, because he thought
+the ground was wet--and what was it but a man's face!"  M'Cabe paused
+to receive my comment.  "What did he do, is it?  Ran off for his life,
+roaring out, 'There's a first-rate dentist in Owenford!'  The fellow
+was lying asleep there, and he having bundles of spurge with him to
+poison the river!  He had taken drink, I suppose."
+
+"Was he a water-bailiff too?" said I.  "I hope the conservators of the
+river stood him a set of teeth."
+
+"If they did," said M'Cabe, with an unexpected burst of feeling, "I
+pity him!"  He rose to his feet, and put his tumbler down on the
+chimney-piece.  "Well, we should get away early in the morning, and
+it's no harm for me to go to bed."
+
+He yawned--a large yawn that ended abruptly with a metallic click.  His
+eyes met mine, full of unspoken things; we parted in a silence that
+seemed to have been artificially imposed upon Mr. M'Cabe.
+
+The wind boomed intermittently in my chimney during the night, and a
+far and heavy growling told of the dissatisfaction of the sea.  Yet the
+morning was not unfavourable.  There was a broken mist, with shimmers
+of sun in it, and the carman said it would be a thing of nothing, and
+would go out with the tide.  The Boots, a relic of the old _regime_,
+was pessimistic, and mentioned that there were two stars squez up agin
+the moon last night, and he would have no dependence on the day.
+M'Cabe offered no opinion, being occupied in bestowing in a species of
+dog-box beneath the well of the car a young red setter, kindly lent by
+his friend the dentist.  The setter, who had formed at sight an
+unfavourable opinion of the dog-box, had resolved himself into an
+invertebrate mass of jelly and lead, and was with difficulty
+straightened out and rammed home into it.
+
+"Have we all now?" said M'Cabe, slamming the door in the dog's face.
+"Take care we're not like me uncle, old Tom Duffy, that was going
+shooting, and was the whole morning slapping his pockets and saying,
+'Me powder! me shot! me caps! me wads!' and when he got to the bog, 'O
+tare an' ouns!' says he, 'I forgot the gun!'"
+
+There are still moments when I can find some special and
+not-otherwise-to-be-attained flavour in driving on an outside car; a
+sense of personal achievement in sitting, by some method of instinctive
+suction, the lurches and swoops peculiar to these vehicles.  Reardon's
+had given us its roomiest car and its best horse, a yellow mare, with a
+long back and a slinging trot, and a mouth of iron.
+
+"Where did Mr. Reardon get the mare, Jerry?" asked M'Cabe, as we
+zigzagged in successive hairbreadths through the streets of Owenford.
+
+"D-Dublin, sir," replied the driver, who, with both fists extended in
+front of him and both heels planted against his narrow footboard,
+seemed to find utterance difficult.
+
+"She's a goer!" said M'Cabe.
+
+"She is--she killed two men," said Jerry, in two jerks.
+
+"That's a great credit to her.  What way did she do it?"
+
+"P-pulled the lungs out o' them!" ejaculated Jerry, turning the last
+corner and giving the mare a shade more of her head, as a tribute,
+perhaps, to her prowess.
+
+She swung us for some six miles along the ruts of the coast road at the
+same unflinching pace, after which, turning inland and uphill, we began
+the climb of four miles into the mountains.  It was about eleven
+o'clock when we pulled up beside a long and reedy pool, high up in the
+heather; the road went on, illimitably it seemed, and was lost, with
+its attendant telegraph posts, in cloud.
+
+"Away with ye now, Jerry," said M'Cabe; "we'll shoot our way home."
+
+He opened the back of the dog-box, and summoned its occupant.  The
+summons was disregarded.  Far back in the box two sparks of light and a
+dead silence indicated the presence of the dog.
+
+"How, snug you are in there!" said M'Cabe; "here, Jerry, pull him out
+for us.  What the deuce is this his name is?  Jeffers told me
+yesterday, and it's gone from me."
+
+"I d'no would he bite me?" said Jerry, taking a cautious observation
+and giving voice to the feelings of the party.  "Here, poor fellow!
+Here, good lad!"
+
+The good lad remained immovable.  The lure of a sandwich produced no
+better result.
+
+"We can't be losing our day with the brute this way," said M'Cabe.
+"Tip up the car.  He'll come out then, and no thanks to him."
+
+As the shafts rose heavenwards, the law of gravitation proved too many
+for the setter, and he slowly slid to earth.
+
+"If I only knew your dam name we'd be all right now," said M'Cabe.
+
+The carman dropped the shafts on to the mare, and drove on up the pass,
+with one side of the car turned up and himself on the other.  The
+yellow mare had, it seemed, only begun her day's work.  A prophetic
+instinct, of the reliable kind that is strictly founded on fact, warned
+me that we might live to regret her departure.
+
+The dentist's setter had, at sight of the guns, realised that things
+were better than he had expected, and now preceded us along the edge of
+the lake with every appearance of enthusiasm.  He quartered the ground
+with professional zeal, he splashed through the sedge, and rattled
+through thickets of dry reeds, and set successively a heron, a
+water-hen, and something, unseen, that I believe to have been a
+water-rat.  After each of these efforts he rushed in upon his quarry,
+and we called him by all the gun-dog names we had ever heard of, from
+Don to Grouse, from Carlo to Shot, coupled with objurgations on a
+rising scale.  With none of them did we so much as vibrate a chord in
+his bosom.  He was a large dog, with a blunt stupid face, and a faculty
+for excitement about nothing that impelled him to bound back to us as
+often as possible, to gaze in our eyes in brilliant enquiry, and to
+pant and prance before us with all the fatuity of youth.  Had he been
+able to speak, he would have asked idiotic questions, of that special
+breed that exact from their victim a reply of equal imbecility.
+
+The lake and its environs, for the first time in M'Cabe's experience,
+yielded nothing; we struck up on to the mountain side, following the
+course of an angry stream that came racing down from the heights.  We
+worked up through ling and furze, and skirted flocks of pale stones
+that lay in the heather like petrified sheep, and the dog, ranging
+deliriously, set water-wagtails and anything else that could fly; I
+believe he would have set a blue-bottle, and I said so to M'Cabe.
+
+"Ah, give him time; he'll settle down," said M'Cabe, who had a
+thankfulness for small mercies born of a vast experience of makeshifts;
+"he might fill the bag for us yet."
+
+We laboured along the flank of the mountain, climbing in and out of
+small ravines, jumping or wading streams, sloshing through yellow
+sedgery bog; always with the brown heather running up to the misty
+skyline, and always with the same atrocious luck.  Once a small pack of
+grouse got up, very wild, and leagues out of range, thanks to the
+far-reaching activities of the dog, and once a hermit woodcock exploded
+out of a clump of furze, and sailed away down the slope, followed by
+four charges of shot and the red setter, in equally innocuous pursuit.
+And this, up to luncheon time, was the sum of the morning's sport.
+
+We ate our sandwiches on a high ridge, under the lee of a tumbled pile
+of boulders, that looked as if they had been about to hurl themselves
+into the valley, and had thought better of it at the last moment.
+Between the looming, elephant-grey mountains the mist yielded glimpses
+of the far greenness of the sea, the only green thing in sight in this
+world of grey and brown.  The dog sat opposite to me, and willed me to
+share my food with him.  His steady eyes were charged with the
+implication that I was a glutton; personally I abhorred him, yet I
+found it impossible to give him less than twenty-five per cent. of my
+sandwiches.
+
+"I wonder did Jeffers take him for a bad debt," said M'Cabe
+reflectively, as he lit his pipe.
+
+I said I should rather take my chance with the bad debt.
+
+"He might have treated me better," M'Cabe grumbled on, "seeing that I
+paid him seven pound ten the day before yesterday, let alone that it
+was me that was the first to put him up to this--this bit of Shinroe
+Mountain that never was what you might call strictly preserved.  When
+he came here first he didn't as much as know what cartridges he'd want
+for it.  'Six and eight,' says I, 'that's a lawyer's fee, so if you
+think of me you'll not forget it!'  And now, if ye please," went on Mr.
+Jeffers' preceptor in sport, "he's shooting the whole country and
+selling all he gets!  And he wouldn't as much as ask me to go with him;
+and the excuse he gives, he wouldn't like to have an old hand like me
+connyshooring his shots!  How modest he is!"
+
+I taunted M'Cabe with having been weak enough thus to cede his rights,
+and M'Cabe, who was not at all amused, said that after all it wasn't so
+much Jeffers that did the harm, but an infernal English Syndicate that
+had taken the Shinroe shooting this season, and paid old Purcell that
+owned it ten times what it was worth.
+
+"It might be as good for us to get off their ground now," continued
+M'Cabe, rising slowly to his feet, "and try the Lackagreina Valley.
+The stream below is their bounds."
+
+This, I hasten to say, was the first I had heard of the Syndicate, and
+I thought it tactless of M'Cabe to have mentioned it, even though the
+wrong that we had done them was purely technical.  I said to him that I
+thought the sooner we got off their ground the better, and we descended
+the hill and crossed the stream, and M'Cabe said that he could always
+shoot this next stretch of country when he liked.  With this assurance,
+we turned our backs on the sea and struck inland, tramping for an hour
+or more through country whose entire barrenness could only be explained
+on the hypothesis that it has been turned inside out to dry.  So far it
+had failed to achieve even this result.
+
+The weather got thicker, and the sport, if possible, thinner; I had
+long since lost what bearings I possessed, but M'Cabe said he knew of a
+nice patch of scrub in the next valley that always held a cock.  The
+next valley came at last, not without considerable effort, but no patch
+of scrub was apparent.  Some small black and grey cattle stood and
+looked at us, and a young bull showed an inclination to stalk the dog;
+it seemed the only sport the valley was likely to afford.  M'Cabe
+looked round him, and looked at his watch, and looked at the sky, which
+did not seem to be more than a yard above our heads, and said without
+emotion:
+
+"Did ye think of telling the lad in the glass box in the hall that we
+might want some dinner kept hot for us?  I d'no from Adam where we've
+got to!"
+
+There was a cattle track along the side of the valley which might,
+though not necessarily, lead somewhere.  We pursued it, and found that
+it led, in the first instance, to some blackfaced mountain sheep.  A
+cheerful interlude followed, in which the red setter hunted the sheep,
+and we hunted the setter, and what M'Cabe said about the dentist in the
+intervals of the chase was more appropriate to the occasion than to
+these pages.
+
+When justice had been satiated, and the last echo of the last yell of
+the dog had trembled into silence among the hills, we resumed the
+cattle-track, which had become a shade more reliable, and, as we
+proceeded, began to give an impression that it might lead somewhere.
+The day was dying in threatening stillness.  Lethargic layers of mist
+bulged low, like the roof of a marquee, and cloaked every outline that
+could yield us information.  The dog, unchastened by recent events, and
+full of an idiot optimism, continued to range the hillside.
+
+"I suppose I'll never get the chance to tell Jeffers my opinion of that
+tom-fool," said M'Cabe, following with an eye of steel the
+perambulations of the dog; "the best barrister that ever wore a wig
+couldn't argue with a dentist!  He has his fist half way down your
+throat before you can open your mouth; and in any case he'll tell me we
+couldn't expect any dog would work for us when we forgot his name.
+What's the brute at now?"
+
+The brute was high above us on the hillside, setting a solitary furze
+bush with convincing determination, and casting backward looks to see
+if he were being supported.
+
+"It might be a hare," said M'Cabe, cocking his gun, with a revival of
+hope that was almost pathetic, and ascending towards the furze bush.
+
+I neither quickened my pace nor deviated from the cattle track, but I
+may admit that I did so far yield to the theory of the hare as to slip
+a cartridge into my gun.
+
+M'Cabe put his gun to his shoulder, lowered it abruptly, and walked up
+to the furze bush.  He stooped and picked up something.
+
+"He's not such a fool after all!" he called out; "ye said he'd set a
+blue-bottle, and b' Jove ye weren't far out!"
+
+He held up a black object that was neither bird nor beast.
+
+I took the cartridge out of my gun as unobtrusively as possible, and
+M'Cabe and the dog rejoined me with the product of the day's sport.  It
+was a flat-sided bottle, high shouldered, with a short neck; M'Cabe
+extracted the cork and took a sniff.
+
+"Mountain dew no less!" (Mr. M'Cabe adhered faithfully to the stock
+phrases of his youth.)  "This never paid the King a shilling!  Give me
+the cup off your flask, Major, till we see what sort it is."
+
+It was pretty rank, and even that seasoned vessel, old M'Cabe, admitted
+that it might be drinkable in another couple of years, but hardly in
+less; yet as it ran, a rivulet of fire, through my system, it seemed to
+me that even the water in my boots became less chill.
+
+"In the public interest we're bound to remove it," said M'Cabe, putting
+the bottle into his game bag; "any man that drank enough of that 'd rob
+a church!  Well, anyway, we're not the only people travelling this
+path," he continued; "whoever put his afternoon tea to hide there will
+choose a less fashionable promenade next time.  But indeed the poor man
+couldn't be blamed for not knowing such a universal genius of a dog was
+coming this way!  Didn't I tell you he'd fill the bag for us!"
+
+He extracted from his pockets a pair of knitted gloves, and put them
+on; it was equivalent to putting up the shutters.
+
+It was shortly after this that we regained touch with civilisation.
+Above the profile of a hill a telegraph post suddenly showed itself
+against the grey of the misty twilight.  We made as bee-like a line for
+it as the nature of the ground permitted, and found ourselves on a
+narrow road, at a point where it was in the act of making a hairpin
+turn before plunging into a valley.
+
+"The Beacon Bay road, begad!" said M'Cabe; "I didn't think we were so
+far out of our way.  Let me see now, which way is this we'd best go."
+
+He stood still and looked round him, taking his bearings; in the
+solitude the telegraph posts hummed to each other, full of information
+and entirely reticent.
+
+The position was worse than I thought.  By descending into the valley
+we should, a couple or three miles farther on, strike the coast road
+about six miles from home; by ascending the hill and walking four
+miles, we should arrive at the station of Coppeen Road, and, with luck,
+there intercept the evening train for Owenford.
+
+"And that's the best of our play, but we'll have to step out,"
+concluded M'Cabe, shortening the strap of his game-bag, and settling it
+on his back.
+
+"If I were you," I said, "I'd chuck that stuff away.  Apart from
+anything else, it's about half a ton extra to carry."
+
+"There's many a thing, Major, that you might do that I might not do,"
+returned M'Cabe with solemnity, "and in the contrairy sense the
+statement is equally valid."
+
+He faced the hill with humped shoulders, and fell with no more words
+into his poacher's stride, and I followed him with the best imitation
+of it that I could put up after at least six hours of heavy going.
+M'Cabe is fifteen years older than I am, and I hope that when I am his
+age I shall have more consideration than he for those who are younger
+than myself.
+
+It was now nearly half-past five o'clock, and by the time we had
+covered a mile of puddles and broken stones it was too dark to see
+which was which.  I felt considerable dubiety about catching the train
+at Coppeen Road, all the more that it was a flag station, demanding an
+extra five minutes in hand.  Probably the engine-driver had long since
+abandoned any expectation of passengers at Coppeen Road, and, if he
+even noticed the signal, would treat it as a practical joke.  It was
+after another quarter of an hour's trudge that a distant sound entered
+into the silence that had fallen upon M'Cabe and me, an intermittent
+grating of wheels upon patches of broken stone, a steady hammer of
+hoofs.
+
+M'Cabe halted.
+
+"That car's bound to be going to Owenford," he said; "I wonder could
+they give us a lift."
+
+A single light (the economical habit of the South of Ireland) began to
+split the foggy darkness.
+
+"Begad, that's like the go of Reardon's mare!" said M'Cabe, as the
+light swung down upon us.
+
+We held the road like highwaymen, we called upon the unseen driver to
+stop, and he answered to the name of Jerry.  This is not a proof of
+identity in a province where every third man is dignified by the name
+of Jeremiah, but as the car pulled up it was Reardon's yellow mare on
+which the lamplight fell, and we knew that the fates had relented.
+
+We should certainly not catch the train at Coppeen Road, Jerry assured
+us; "she had," he said, "a fashion of running early on Monday nights,
+and in any case if you'd want to catch that thrain, you should make
+like an amber-bush for her."
+
+We agreed that it was too late for the preparation of an ambush.
+
+"If the Sergeant had no objections," continued Jerry, progressing
+smoothly towards the tip that would finally be his, "it would be no
+trouble at all to oblige the gentlemen.  Sure it's the big car I have,
+and it's often I took six, yes, and seven on it, going to the races."
+
+I was now aware of two helmeted presences on the car, and a decorous
+voice said that the gentlemen were welcome to a side of the car if they
+liked.
+
+"Is that Sergeant Leonard?" asked M'Cabe, who knew every policeman in
+the country.  "Well, Sergeant, you've a knack of being on the spot when
+you're wanted!"
+
+"And sometimes when he's not!" said I.
+
+There was a third and unhelmeted presence on the car, and something of
+stillness and aloofness in it had led me to diagnose a prisoner.
+
+The suggested dispositions were accomplished.  The two policemen and
+the prisoner wedged themselves on one side of the car, M'Cabe and I
+mounted the other, and put the dog on the cushion of the well behind us
+(his late quarters in the dog-box being occupied by half a mountain
+sheep, destined for the hotel larder).  The yellow mare went gallantly
+up to her collar, regardless of her augmented load; M'Cabe and the
+Sergeant leaned to each other across the back of the car, and fell into
+profound and low-toned converse; I smoked, and the dog, propping his
+wet back against mine, made friends with the prisoner.  It may be the
+Irish blood in me that is responsible for the illicit sympathy with a
+prisoner that sometimes incommodes me; I certainly bestowed some of it
+upon the captive, sandwiched between two stalwarts of the R.I.C., and
+learning that the strong arm of the Law was a trifle compared with the
+rest of its person.
+
+"What sport had you, Major?" enquired Jerry, as we slackened speed at a
+hill.
+
+I was sitting at the top of the car, under his elbow, and he probably
+thought that I was feeling neglected during the heart-to-heart
+confidences of M'Cabe and the Sergeant.
+
+"Not a feather," I replied.
+
+"Sure the birds couldn't be in it this weather," said Jerry
+considerately; he had in his time condoled with many sportsmen.  "I'm
+after talking to a man in Coppeen Road station, that was carrying the
+game bag for them gentlemen that has Mr. Purcell's shooting on Shinroe
+Mountain, and what had the four o' them after the day--only one
+jack-snipe!"
+
+"They went one better than we did," I said, but, as was intended, I
+felt cheered--"what day were they there?"
+
+"To-day, sure!" answered Jerry, with faint surprise, "and they hadn't
+their luncheon hardly ate when they met one on the mountain that told
+them he seen two fellas walking it, with guns and a dog, no more than
+an hour before them.  'That'll do!' says they, and they turned about
+and back with them to Coppeen Road to tell the police."
+
+"Did they see the fellows?" I asked lightly, after a panic-stricken
+pause.
+
+"They did not.  Sure they said if they seen them, they'd shoot them
+like rooks," replied Jerry, "and they would too.  It's what the man was
+saying if they cot them lads to-day they'd have left them in the way
+they'd be given up by both doctor and priest!  Oh, they're fierce
+altogether!"
+
+I received this information in a silence that was filled to bursting
+with the desire to strangle M'Cabe.
+
+Jerry leaned over my shoulder, and lowered his voice.
+
+"They were saying in Coppeen Road that there was a gentleman that came
+on a mothor-bike this morning early, and he had Shinroe shot out by ten
+o'clock, and on with him then up the country; and it isn't the first
+time he was in it.  It's a pity those gentlemen couldn't ketch _him_!
+_They'd_ mothor-bike him!"
+
+It was apparent that the poaching of the motor-bicycle upon the
+legitimate preserves of carmen was responsible for this remarkable
+sympathy with the law; I, at all events, had it to my credit that I had
+not gone poaching on a motor-bicycle.
+
+Just here M'Cabe emerged from the heart-to-heart, and nudged me in the
+ribs with a confederate elbow.  I did not respond, being in no mood for
+confederacy, certainly not with M'Cabe.
+
+"The Sergeant is after telling me this prisoner he has here is
+prosecuted at the instance of that Syndicate I was telling you about,"
+he whispered hoarsely in my ear, "for hunting Shinroe with greyhounds.
+He was cited to appear last week, and he didn't turn up; he'll be
+before you to-morrow.  I hope the Bench will have a fellow-feeling for
+a fellow-creature!"
+
+The whisper ended in the wheezy cough that was Mr. M'Cabe's equivalent
+for a laugh.  It was very close to my ear, and it had somewhere in it
+the metallic click that I had noticed before.
+
+I grunted forbiddingly, and turned my back upon M'Cabe, as far as it is
+possible to do so on an outside car, and we hammered on through the
+darkness.  Once the solitary lamp illumined the prolonged countenance
+of a donkey, and once or twice we came upon a party of sheep lying on
+the road; they melted into the night at the minatory whistle that is
+dedicated to sheep, and on each of these occasions the dentist's dog
+was shaken by strong shudders, and made a convulsive attempt to spring
+from the car in pursuit.  We were making good travelling on a long
+down-grade, a smell of sea-weed was in the mist, and a salt taste was
+on my lips.  It was very cold; I had no overcoat, my boots had plumbed
+the depths of many bogholes, and I found myself shivering like the dog.
+
+It was at this point that I felt M'Cabe fumbling at his game-bag, that
+lay between us on the seat.  By dint of a sympathy that I would have
+died rather than betray, I divined that he was going to tap that fount
+of contraband fire that he owed to the dentist's dog.  It was,
+apparently, a matter of some difficulty; I felt him groping and tugging
+at the straps.
+
+I said to myself, waveringly: "Old blackguard!  I won't touch it if he
+offers it to me."
+
+M'Cabe went on fumbling:
+
+"Damn these woolly gloves!  I can't do a hand's turn with them."
+
+In the dark I could not see what followed, but I felt him raise his
+arm.  There was a jerk, followed by a howl.
+
+"Hold on!" roared M'Cabe, with a new and strange utterance, "Thtop the
+horth!  I've dropped me teeth!"
+
+The driver did his best, but with the push of the hill behind her the
+mare took some stopping.
+
+"Oh, murder! oh, murder!" wailed M'Cabe, lisping thickly, "I pulled
+them out o' me head with the glove, trying to get it off!" He scrambled
+off the car.  "Give me the lamp!  Me lovely new teeth----"
+
+I detached the lamp from its socket with all speed, and handed it to
+M'Cabe, who hurried back on our tracks.  From motives of delicacy I
+remained on the car, as did also the rest of the party.  A minute or
+two passed in awed silence, while the patch of light went to and fro on
+the dark road.  It seemed an intrusion to offer assistance, and an
+uncertainty as to whether to allude to the loss as "them," or "it,"
+made enquiries a difficulty.
+
+"For goodneth'ake have none o' ye any matcheth, that ye couldn't come
+and help me?" demanded the voice of M'Cabe, in indignation blurred
+pathetically by his gosling-like lisp.
+
+I went to his assistance, and refrained with an effort from suggesting
+the employment of that all-accomplished setter, the dentist's dog, in
+the search; it was not the moment for pleasantry.  Not yet.
+
+We crept along, bent double, like gorillas; the long strips of broken
+stones yielded nothing, the long puddles between them were examined in
+vain.
+
+"What the dooth will I do to-morrow?" raged M'Cabe, pawing in the
+heather at the road's edge.  "How can I plead when I haven't a blathted
+tooth in me head?"
+
+"I'll give you half a crown this minute, M'Cabe," said I brutally, "if
+you'll say 'Sessions'!"
+
+Here the Sergeant joined us, striking matches as he came.  He worked
+his way into the sphere of the car-lamp, he was most painstaking and
+sympathetic, and his oblique allusions to the object of the search were
+a miracle of tact.
+
+"I see something white beyond you, Mr. M'Cabe,"' he said respectfully,
+"might that be them?"
+
+M'Cabe swung the lamp as indicated.
+
+"No, it might not.  It's a pebble," he replied, with pardonable
+irascibility.
+
+Silence followed, and we worked our way up the hill.
+
+"What's that, sir?" ventured the Sergeant, with some excitement,
+stopping again and pointing.  "I think I see the gleam of the gold!"
+
+"Ah, nonthenth, man!  They're vulcanite!" snapped M'Cabe, more
+irascibly than ever.
+
+The word nonsense was a disastrous effort, and I withdrew into the
+darkness to enjoy it.
+
+"What colour might vulcanite be, sir?" murmured a voice beside me.
+
+Jerry had joined the search-party; he lighted, as he spoke, an inch of
+candle.  On hearing my explanation he remarked that it was a bad
+chance, and at the same instant the inch of candle slipped from his
+fingers and fell into a puddle.
+
+"Divil mend ye for a candle!  Have ye a match, sir?  I haven't a one
+left!"
+
+As it happened, I had no matches, my only means of making a light being
+a patent tinder-box.
+
+"Have you a match there?" I called out to the invisible occupants of
+the car, which was about fifteen or twenty yards away, advancing
+towards it as I spoke.  The constable politely jumped off and came to
+meet me.
+
+As he was in the act of handing me his match-box, the car drove away
+down the hill.
+
+I state the fact with the bald simplicity that is appropriate to great
+disaster.  To be exact, the yellow mare sprang from inaction into a
+gallop, as if she had been stung by a wasp, and had a start of at least
+fifty yards before either the carman or the constable could get under
+weigh.  The carman, uttering shrill and menacing whistles, led the
+chase, the constable, though badly hampered by his greatcoat, was a
+good second, and the Sergeant, making the best of a bad start, followed
+them into the night.
+
+The yellow mare's head was for home, and her load was on its own legs
+on the road behind her; hysterical yelps from the dentist's dog
+indicated that he also was on his own legs, and was, in all human
+probability, jumping at the mare's nose.  As the rapturous beat of her
+hoofs died away on the down-grade, I recalled the assertion that she
+had pulled the lungs out of two men, and it seemed to me that the
+prisoner had caught the psychological moment on the hop.
+
+"They'll not ketch him," said M'Cabe, with the flat calm of a broken
+man, "not to-night anyway.  Nor for a week maybe.  He'll take to the
+mountains."
+
+The silence of the hills closed in upon us, and we were left in our
+original position, plus the lamp of the car, and minus our guns, the
+dentist's dog, and M'Cabe's teeth.
+
+Far, far away, from the direction of Coppeen Road, that sinister
+outpost, where evil rumours were launched, and the night trains were
+waylaid by the amber-bushes, a steady tapping sound advanced towards
+us.  Over the crest of the hill, a quarter of a mile away, a blazing
+and many-pointed star sprang into being, and bore down upon us.  "A
+motor-bike!" ejaculated M'Cabe.  "Take the light and thtop him--he
+wouldn't know what I wath thaying--if he ran over them they're done
+for!  For the love o' Merthy tell him to keep the left thide of the
+road!"
+
+I took the lamp, and ran towards the bicyclist, waving it as I ran.
+The star, now a moon of acetylene ferocity, slackened speed, and a
+voice behind it said:
+
+"What's up?"
+
+I stated the case with telegraphic brevity, and the motor-bicycle slid
+slowly past me.  Its rider had a gun slung across his back, my lamp
+revealed a crammed game-bag on the carrier behind him.
+
+"Sorry I can't assist you," he called back to me, keeping carefully at
+the left-hand side of the road, "but I have an appointment."  Then, as
+an afterthought, "There's a first-rate dentist in Owenford!"
+
+The red eye of the tail light glowed a farewell and passed on, like all
+the rest, into the night.
+
+I rejoined M'Cabe.
+
+He clutched my arm, and shook it.
+
+"That wath Jefferth!  _Jefferth_, I tell ye!  The dirty poacher!  And
+hith bag full of our birdth!"
+
+It was not till the lamp went out, which it did some ten minutes
+afterwards, that I drew M 'Cabe from the scene of his loss, gently, as
+one deals with the bereaved, and faced with him the six-mile walk to
+Owenford.
+
+
+
+
+PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. LTD.
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+
+*** _In this volume is included a reprint of "Slipper's
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+
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+status under the laws that apply to them.
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #38062 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/38062)