PART II

A fortnight afterwards—to be precise, it was the 10th of October—I saw the white hounds in the field. I had gone through the dreary routine of the cub-hunter. The alarm clock had shrilled its exulting and age-long summons in the pitchy dark. I had burnt my fingers with the spirit-lamp, and my mouth with hot cocoa; I had accomplished my bathless toilet, I had groped my way through the puddles in the stable yard, and got on to my horse by the light of a lantern, and at 5.30 A.M. I was over the worst, and had met Flurry and the hounds, with Michael and Dr. Jerome Hickey, at the appointed cross-roads. The meet was nine miles away, in a comparatively unknown land, to which Flurry had been summoned by tales of what appeared to be an absolute epidemic of foxes, accompanied by bills for poultry and threats of poison. It was still an hour before sunrise, but a pallor was in the sky, and the hounds, that had at first been like a gliding shoal of fish round the horses' feet, began to take on their own shapes and colours.

The white Irish hounds were the first to disclose themselves, each coupled up with a tried old stager. I had been away from home for the past ten days, and knew nothing of their conduct in their new quarters, and finding Flurry uncommunicative, I fell back presently to talk about them to Michael.

"Is it settling down they are?" said Michael derisively. "That's the fine settling down! Roaring and screeching every minute since they came into the place! And as for fighting! They weren't in the kennel three days before they had Rampant ate, and nothing only his paws left before me in the morning! I didn't give one night in my bed since, with running down to them. The like o' them trash isn't fit for a gentleman's kennels. Them O'Reillys had them rared very pettish; it'd be as good for me to be trying to turn curlews as them!"

The indictment of "The Whiteboys" (a title sarcastically bestowed by Dr. Hickey), their sheep-killing, their dog-hunting, with the setting forth of Michael's trials, talents, and unrequited virtues, lasted, like an Arabian night's tale, till the rising of the sun, and also until our arrival at the place we were first to draw. This was a long and deep ravine, red with bracken, bushy with hazel and alders; a black stream raced downwards through it, spreading at the lower end into bog, green, undefined, entirely treacherous; a place that instantly assures the rider that if hounds get away on its farther side he will not be with them.

A couple of men were waiting for us at the lower end of the ravine.

"They're in it surely!" they said, shoving down a stone gap for our benefit; "there isn't a morning but we'll see the owld fellow and his pups funning away for themselves down by the river. My little fellows, when they does be going to school in the morning, couldn't hardly pass his nest for the fume that'd be from it."

The first ten minutes proved that the foxes were certainly there, and during the following half-hour pandemonium itself raged in the ravine. There were, I believe, a brace and a-half of cubs on foot; they were to me invisible, but they were viewed about twice in every minute by Flurry and his subordinates, and continuously by a few early rising countrymen, who had posted themselves along the edges of the ravine. The yells of the latter went up like steam whistles, and the hounds, among whom were five couple of newly entered puppies, were wilder than I had ever known them. They burst through the bracken and strove in the furze, in incessant full cry, and still the cubs doubled and dodged, and made detours round the valley, and Flurry and Michael roared themselves inside out, without producing the smallest effect upon anything save their own larynxes. No less than three times a fox was frantically holloaed away, and when, by incredible exertions on all our parts, the hounds, or a fair proportion of them, had been got together on to the line, a fresh outburst of yells announced that, having run a ring, he had returned to the covert.

Each of these excursions involved—

1. Scrambling at best speed down a rocky hill-side.

2. Coercing a diffident horse across a noisy stream, masked by briars, out of bog, on to rock.

3. Reverse of the first proceedings.

4. Arrival, blown and heated, at the boggy end of the valley, to find the original conditions prevailing as before.

I should, perhaps, have already mentioned that I was riding a young horse, to whom I was showing hounds for the first time. My idea had been to permit him, strictly as an onlooker, to gather some idea of the rudiments of the game. He was a good young horse, with the large gravity of demeanour that is often the result of a domestic bringing up in the family of a small farmer; and when the moment came, and I was inexorably hustled into acting as Third Whip, he followed in the wake of Dr. Hickey with an anxious goodwill that made even his awkwardness attractive.

Throughout these excursions I noticed, as far as I was able to notice anything, the independent methods of the O'Reilly draft. They ignored the horn, eluded Michael, and laughed at Hickey and me; they hunted with bloodthirsty intentness and entirely after their own devices. Their first achievement was to run the earth-stopper's dog, and having killed him, to eat him. This horrid feat they accomplished, secure from interruption, in the briary depths of the ravine, and while the main body of the pack were industriously tow-rowing up and down the stream after their lawful fox, a couple of goats were only saved from "The Whiteboys" by miracles of agility and courage on the part of the countrymen. The best that could be said for them was that, "linking one virtue to a thousand crimes," whenever the hounds got fairly out of covert, the Whiteboys were together, and were in front.

It was about eight o'clock, and the fierce red and grey sunrise had been over-ridden by a regiment of stormy clouds, when one of the foxes met his fate, amid ear-piercing whoops, and ecstatic comments from the onlookers, who had descended from the hill-tops with the speed of ski-runners.

"Aha! that's the lad had many a fat duck under his rib!"

"He had, faith! I'll go bail 'twas him that picked me wife's fashionable cocks!"

"I'LL GO BAIL 'TWAS HIM THAT PICKED ME WIFE'S FASHIONABLE COCKS"

"Well, I'm told that if ye'll see a fox taking a hen or a goose, and ye'll call to him in Irish, that he'll drop it," remarked an older man to me, as we waited while Flurry and Hickey, in their capacity of butler and footman to the hounds' repast, snatched the few remaining morsels from the elder revellers and endeavoured to force them upon the deeply-reluctant young entry, who, having hunted with the innocent enthusiasm of the débutante, thought as little of the ensuing meal as the débutante thinks of supper at her first ball.

"I wonder why the deuce Michael can't get those Irish hounds," said Flurry, catching at the word and looking round. "I only have Lily here."

(Lily, I should say, was the romantic name of one of the Whiteboys.)

"I believe I seen a two-three of the white dogs running east awhile ago," said the elderly farmer, "and they yowling!"

"They're likely killing a sheep now," murmured Hickey to me.

At the same moment I chanced to look up towards the western end of the ravine, and saw what seemed to be five seagulls gliding up a rift of grass that showed green between rocks and heather.

"There are your white hounds, Flurry," I called out, "and they're hunting."

"Well, well," said the farmer, "they're afther wheeling round the length of the valley in the minute! They're nearly able to fly!"

A distant holloa from Michael, whose head alone was visible above a forest of furze, rose like a rocket at the end of the sentence, and every hound sprang to attention.

Once more we traversed the valley at full speed, and tackled the ladder of mud that formed the cattle track up the ravine; slough up to the horses' knees, furze bushes and briars meeting over their heads and ours, hounds and country boys jostling to get forward, with pistol shots behind from Hickey's thong, and the insistent doubling of Flurry's horn in front. Up that green rift I went on foot, and, as it were, hand in hand with my admirable young horse. The rift, on closer acquaintance, proved to be green with the deceitful verdure of swampy grass; (in Ireland, it may be noted, water runs up hill, and the subtlest bog holes lie in wait for their prey on the mountain tops). As we ascended, the wind that had risen with the sun, fought us every inch of the way, and by the time I had won to level ground, I was speechless, and blowing like the bellows of a forge. A country boy, whose grinning purple face remains a fond and imperishable memory, caught me by the leg and rammed me into my saddle; just in front of me Flurry, also speechless, with his foot not as yet in his off stirrup, was getting up to his hounds. These were casting themselves uncertainly over a sedgy and heathery slope, on which, in this wind, the hottest scent would soon be chilled to its marrow. Of Michael and the Whiteboys nothing was to be seen.

At a little distance a young man was grasping by the ears and nose a donkey with a back-load of bracken, and a misplaced ardour for the chase.

"Did ye see the fox?" bellowed Flurry.

"I did! I did!"

"Which way did he go?"

"Yerrah! aren't yer dogs after ateing him below!" shouted the young man, waltzing strenuously with the donkey.

"Well, there's a pair of you!" replied Flurry, cracking his whip viciously at the donkey's tail, and thereby much stimulating the dance, "and if I was given my choice of ye it's the ass I'd take! Here, come on out of this, Hickey!" He shoved ahead. "Put those hounds on to me, can't you!"

During this interchange of amenities Lily had wandered aside, and now, far to the left of the rest of the pack, was thoughtfully nosing along through tufts of rushes; she worked her way down to a fence, and then, mute as a wraith, slid over it and slipped away across a grass field, still in jealous silence.

"Hark forrad to Lily, hounds!" roared Flurry, with electrical suddenness. "Put them on to her, Jerome!"

"Well, those white hounds are the divil!" said Dr. Hickey, with a break of admiration in his voice, as the hounds, suddenly driving ahead, proclaimed to heaven that they had got the line. They were running up a fierce north-westerly wind, and their cry came brokenly back to us through it like the fragments of the chimes through the turmoil of Tschaikowsky's "1812" symphony. The young horse began to realise that there was something in it, and, with a monster and frog-like leap, flew over the ensuing heathery bank, landing, shatteringly, on all fours. We were travelling down hill, a fact that involved heavy drops, but involved also the privilege, rare for me, of seeing the hounds comfortably. Lily, leading the rest by half a field, was going great guns, so were Flurry and Hickey, so, I may say with all modesty, were the young horse and I. After an eventful and entirely satisfactory ten minutes of racing over the class of country that has, on a low average, seventeen jumps to the mile, we skated down a greasy path, and found ourselves in a deep lane, with the hounds at fault, casting themselves eagerly right and left. It was here that we came upon Michael, a dolorous spectacle, leading his mare towards us. She was dead lame.

"What happened her?" shouted Flurry through the rioting wind.

"The foot's dropping off her, sir," replied Michael, with his usual optimism.

"Well, get away home with her as quick as you can," interrupted Flurry, accepting the diagnosis with the usual discount of 90 per cent. "What way did those white hounds go?"

"The last I seen o' them they were heading west over the hill beyond for Drummig. It might be he was making for an old fort that's back in the land there behind Donovan's farm. There was a fellow driving a bread van above in the road there that told me if the hounds got inside in the fort we'd never see them again. He said there were holes down in it that'd go from here to the sea."

"What the devil good were you that you didn't stop those hounds?" said Flurry, cutting short this harangue with a countenance as black as the weather. "Here, come on!" he called to Hickey and me, "the road'll be the quickest for us."

It was about a mile by the road to Donovan's farm, and as Hickey and I pounded along in the rear of the disgusted hounds, big pellets of rain were flung in our faces, and I began to realise, not for the first time, that to turn up the collar of one's coat is more of a protest than a protection.

The farmhouse of Donovan of Drummig was connected with the high road by the usual narrow and stony lane; as we neared the entrance of the lane we saw through the swirls of rain a baker's van bumping down it. There were two men on the van, and in the shafts was a raking young brown horse, who, having espied the approach of the hounds, was honouring them with what is politically known as a demonstration. One of the men held up his hand, and called out a request to "hold on awhile till they were out on to the road."

"Did you see any hounds?" shouted Flurry, holding back the hounds, as the van bounded round the corner and into the main road, with an activity rare in its species.

"We did, sir," returned the men in chorus, clinging to the rail of their knifeboard seat, like the crew of a racing yacht, "they have him back in the fort above this minute! Ye can take your time, faith!"

The van horse reared and backed, and Flurry turned in his saddle to eye him as he ramped ahead in response to a slash from the driver; so did Dr. Hickey, and so also did Lily, who, with her white nose in the air, snuffed inquisitively in the wake of the departing van.

"You'd say she knew a good one when she saw him," said Hickey as we turned the hounds into the lane.

"Or a good loaf of bread," I suggested.

"It's little bread that lad carries!" answered Hickey, thonging the reluctant Lily on; "I'll go bail, there's as much bottled porter as bread in that van! He supplies half the shebeens in the country."

As we splashed into the farmyard a young man threw open a gate at its farther side, shouting to Flurry to hurry on. He waved us on across a wide field, towards a low hill or mound, red with wet withered bracken, and crested by a group of lean fir trees, flinging their arms about in the wild gusts of wind and rain.

"The fox wasn't the length of himself in front of them!" shouted the young man, running beside us, "and he as big as a donkey! The whole kit of them is inside in the fort together!"

Flurry turned his horse suddenly.

"Two and a half couple underground is enough for one while," he said, riding back into the farmyard. "Have you any place I could shove these hounds into?"

The door of a cow-house was open, and as if in anticipation of his wishes, the hounds jostled emulously into the darkness within. Again, guided by the young man, we faced the storm and rain. What Flurry's intentions were we neither knew nor dared to ask, and, as we followed him over the soaked fields, a back more expressive of profound and wrathful gloom it has never been my lot to contemplate.

The place in which the fox and the Irish hounds had entombed themselves, was one of the prehistoric earthen fortresses that abound in the south-west of Ireland. The fort at Drummig was like a giant flat-topped molehill; the spade work of a forgotten race had turned it into a place of defence, and, like moles, they had burrowed into its depths. The tongue of the young man who guided us did not weary in the recital of the ways, and the passages, and the little rooms that was within in it. He said that a calf belonging to himself was back in it for a week, and she came out three times fatter than the day she went in. He also, but with a certain diffidence, mentioned fairies.

Round and about this place of mystery went Flurry, blowing long and dreary blasts at the mouths of its many holes, uttering "Gone-away" screeches, of a gaiety deplorably at variance with his furious countenance. A more pessimistic priest never trumpeted round the walls of a more impracticable Jericho.

Hickey led the dripping horses to and fro in the lee of the fort, and I was deputed to listen at a rabbit hole from which the calf was said to have emerged. After a period of time which I was too much deadened by misery to compute, Flurry appeared, and told me that he was going home. Judging from his appearance, he had himself been to ground; what he said about the white hounds and the weather was very suitable, but would not read as well as it sounded.

We returned to the farmyard with the wind and rain chivying us from behind.

"I asked a man, one time," said Dr. Hickey, as side by side, and at a well-maintained distance, we followed our leader across the field, "why his father had committed suicide, and he said, 'well, your honour, he was a little annoyed.' I'm thinking, Major, it'd be no harm for us to keep an eye on Flurry."

I stooped my head to let the water flow out of the brim of my hat.

"You needn't neglect me either," I said.

While Hickey was getting the hounds out of the cow-house, my young horse shivered with cold, and gave an ominous cough. I reflected upon the twelve long miles that lay between him and home, and asked our saturated guide if I could get a warm drink for him. There was no difficulty about that; to be sure I could and welcome. I abandoned my comrades; regret, if it were felt, was not expressed by Flurry. When the hounds had paddled forth from the cow-house I put my horse into it, and before they had accomplished half a mile of their direful progress, I was standing with my back to a glowing turf fire, with my coat hanging on a chair, and a cup of scalding tea irradiating the inmost recesses of my person.

My hostess, Mrs. Jeremiah Donovan, was a handsome young woman, tall, fair, and flushed, agonised with hospitality, shy to ferocity. The family dog was lifted from the hearth with a side kick worthy of an International football match; her offspring, clustered, staring, in the chimney-corner, were dispersed with a scorching whisper, of which the words, "ye brazen tinkers," gave some clue to its general trend. Having immured them in an inner room she withdrew, muttering something about another "goleen o' turf," and I was left alone with an excellent cake of soda-bread and two boiled eggs.

Presently a slight and mouse-like rattle made me aware that one of the offspring, aged about five, had escaped from captivity, and was secretly drawing my whip to him along the floor by the thong.

"What have ye the whip for?" said the offspring, undaunted by discovery.

"To bate the dogs with," I replied, attuning my speech to his as best I could.

"Is it the big white dogs?" pursued the offspring.

I paused midway in a mouthful of soda-bread.

"Did you see the white dogs?" I asked very gently.

"God knows I did!" said the offspring, warming to his work, "an' they snapped the bit o' bread out of Joola's hand within in the cow-house! And Joola said they were a fright!"

I sat still and waited while one might count five, fearful of scaring the bird that had perched so near me.

"Are the white dogs here now?" I ventured, wooingly.

"They are not."

The crook of my crop was beginning to prove dangerously engrossing, and the time was short.

"Where did they go?" I persevered.

"Jimmy Mahony and me uncle Lukey took them away in the van," said the offspring with clearness and simplicity, slashing with my whip at a member of the guild of Brazen Tinkers whom I assumed to be the already injured Julia.

As I bestowed at parting a benefaction upon Jeremiah Donovan, I said that I hoped he would let Mr. Knox know if any of the white hounds came out of the fort. He assured me that he would do so. He was, like his wife, a thoroughly good fellow, and he had wisped the young horse until one would have said he had never been out of the stable.

The storm had blown itself away, and the rain was nearly over. I rode home quietly, and in peace and goodwill towards all men; after all, there was no hurry. This was a thing that was going to last me for the rest of my life, and Flurry's.

I overtook Michael on the way home. Michael said that sure he knew all through it was a drag, and if Mr. Flurry had been said by him, he'd have had neither cut, shuffle, nor deal with them O'Reillys. In the course of his life Michael had never been known to be in the wrong.

Dr. Hickey told me (but this was some time afterwards) that often he had to get out of his bed to laugh, when he thought of Flurry getting Jeremiah Donovan to screech in Irish down the holes in the fort, for fear old O'Reilly's hounds had no English. It is hardly necessary to say that Dr. Hickey also had been convinced by the way the hounds ran that it was a drag, but had omitted to mention the fact at the time.

Flurry was lost to home and country for three days. It was darkly said that he had gone to Fahoura to break every bone in young O'Reilly's body, and, incidentally, to bring back the white hounds. At the end of the three days he telegraphed for a man and a saddle to meet the afternoon train. There was nothing in the telegram about hounds. Next day I met him riding a young brown horse, with a wildish eye, and a nasty rub from a misfitting collar.

"I got him in a sort of a swap," said Flurry tranquilly.

"I suppose he got that rub in the bread-van?" I remarked drawing a bow at a venture.

"Well, that might be, too," assented Flurry, regarding me with an eye that was like a stone wall with broken glass on the top.

THE END

Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & Co.
Edinburgh & London

Crown 8vo, 6s.

SOME EXPERIENCES OF
AN IRISH R.M.

E. Œ. SOMERVILLE AND MARTIN ROSS

With 31 Illustrations by E. Œ. SOMERVILLE.

Speaker.—"There are in its pages more good stories, quaint characters, and humorous incidents than we remember to have seen since the days of Lever."

Academy.—"Sheer unadulterated laughter is one of the best things that even literature can give, and we are hard put to it to remember a book of these latter days to which we owe more of it than we do to the Irish R.M."

Pall Mall Gazette.—"We can warmly recommend this book as a sure antidote for melancholy; it is brimful of brilliant wit and harmless mirth; it is a tonic for the dyspeptic and a stimulant to the healthy mind. A more amusing book has not been written for many a year."

Mr. Stephen Gwynn in the "Cornhill Magazine."—"There are few greater attractions than that of open healthy laughter of the contagious sort; and it would be black ingratitude not to pay tribute to the authoresses of 'Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.'—a book that no decorous person can read with comfort in a railway carriage."

The Baron de Book Worms in "Punch."—"Dulness is banished from the opening of the book to the close thereof.... Since Charles Lever was at his best, with 'Harry Lorrequer,' 'Charles O'Malley,' 'Tom Burke of Ours,' and, may be, 'The Knight of Gwynne,' no such rollicking Irish book as this has appeared, at least not within the period whereunto the memory of the Baron runneth not to the contrary.... Nothing of a sedate or gentle character is to be found here; nearly every story is calculated to set the table in a roar."

THE REAL CHARLOTTE

E. Œ. SOMERVILLE AND MARTIN ROSS

Graphic.—"'The Real Charlotte' is indeed a book to enjoy at leisure. It is full of fascinating actuality; and it should be added that the authors have united their work without leaving a single visible seam."

Daily News.—"The story provides a liberal entertainment of pathos and humour. All the actors therein, whether sketched with a few pregnant strokes, or minutely elaborated, are very much alive."

Athenaeum.—"The book may be too long, but there are so many amusing and delightful passages, humorous sayings and doings, with here and there a word or a line which gives away the very heart of an Irish landscape, or a man or woman, that we really cannot complain."

Pall Mall Gazette.—"'The Real Charlotte' is perhaps one of the best modern examples of an English (or rather an Irish) realistic novel extant."

THE SILVER FOX

E. Œ. SOMERVILLE AND MARTIN ROSS

Queen.—"The book is written in a bright and breezy tone, with ever-restrained humour. It displays nice sense of light and shadow and power of characterisation."

Spectator.—"Broadly speaking the novel may be said to exhibit in a dramatic form the extraordinary hold which superstition still possesses on the minds of the Irish peasantry and the drawbacks, and even dangers, which may result from an unsympathetic or intolerant disregard of such prejudices."

Daily Chronicle.—"We cannot do justice to this book by quotation. Its method and its writing are so good that they tempt us to say its authors have nothing to learn from the French novelists."

ALL ON THE IRISH SHORE

E. Œ. SOMERVILLE AND MARTIN ROSS

With 10 Illustrations by E. Œ. SOMERVILLE.

Academy.—"A volume to dispel melancholy and arouse the healthiest laughter."

Badminton Magazine.—"Excellent tales, racy of the soil, full of humour and quaint fancy."

Daily Graphic.—"The world is a good deal gayer for a book of sketches like 'All on the Irish Shore.'"

Daily Telegraph.—"It is fairly safe to predict that the reader who takes up this book will have no inclination to put it down until he has read it through from cover to cover."

Times.—"These stories rise far above the mere sporting level, and exhibit gifts of perception, literary perception, much higher than anything that has yet appeared from the same clever pens."

Scotsman.—"'All on the Irish Shore' has hardly a page between its covers that does not contain some touch of rollicking Irish humour that is calculated to provoke the most serious-minded person to mirth."

Spectator.—"The paramount duty of a reviewer in dealing with this happily-named volume is one of extreme simplicity—namely, to advise any one who loves wit, humour, horses, and Ireland to procure it without delay. The mere fact that it is by the joint authors of 'Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.' will doubtless prove a ready passport in the affections of all who have read and re-read that modern classic."

AN IRISH COUSIN

E. Œ. SOMERVILLE AND MARTIN ROSS

World.—"A clever story brimful of humour."

Irish Monthly.—"This story is very clever and very well written with fine bits of description and proof of keen observation."

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO., 39 PATERNOSTER Row, LONDON
NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA