For my part, I hold with Julia.
“’Twas Helayna gave the dhrink to the Dane’s coachman! The low curséd thing! There isn’t another one in the place that’d do it! I’m told the priest was near breaking his umbrella on her over it.”
“ MATCHBOX”
It was the event of Mr. John Denny’s life that he valued highest. It is twenty years now since it took place, and many other things have happened to him, such as going to England to give evidence in the Parnell Commission, and matrimony, and taking the second prize in the Lightweight Hunter Class at the Dublin Horse Show. But none of them, not even the trip to London, possesses quite the same fortunate blend of the sublime and the ridiculous that gives this incident such a perennial success at the Hunt and Agricultural Show dinners which are the dazzling breaks in the monotony of Mr. Denny’s life, and he prized it accordingly.
Mr. Johnny Denny—or Dinny Johnny as he was known to his wittier friends—was a young man of the straightest sect of the Cork buckeens, a body whose importance justifies perhaps a particular description of one of their number. His profession was something imperceptibly connected with the County Grand Jury Office, and was quite over-shadowed in winter by the gravities of hunting, and in summer by the gallantries of the Militia training; for, like many of his class, he was a captain in the Militia. He was always neatly dressed; his large moustache looked as if it shared with his boots the attention of the blacking brush. No cavalry sergeant in Ballincollig had a more delicately bowed leg, nor any creature, except, perhaps, a fox-terrier interviewing a rival, a more consummate swagger. He knew every horse and groom in all the leading livery stables, and, in moments of expansion, would volunteer to name the price at which any given animal could be safeguarded from any given veterinary criticism. With all these not specially attractive qualities, however, Dinny Johnny was, and is, a good fellow in his way. His temper was excellent, his courage indisputable; he has never been known to give any horse—not even a hireling—less than fair play, and a tendency to ride too close to hounds has waned since time, like an Irish elector, has taken to emphasising himself by throwing stones, and Dinny Johnny, once ten stone, now admits to riding 13.7.
In those days, before the inertia that creeps like mildew over country householders had begun to form, Mr. Denny was in the habit of making occasional excursions into remote parts of the County Cork in search of those flowers of pony perfection that are supposed to blush unseen in any sufficiently mountainous and unknown country, and the belief in which is the touch of wild poetry that keeps alive the soul of the amateur horse coper. He had never met the pony of his dreams, but he had not lost faith in it, and though he would range through the Bantry fair with a sour eye, behind the sourness there was ever a kindling spark of hope.
Towards the end of October, in the year ’83, Mr. Denny received an invitation from an old friend to go down to “the West”—thus are those regions east of the moon, and west of the sun, and south-west of Drimoleague Junction, designated in the tongue of Cork civilisation—to “look at a colt,” and with a saddle and bridle in the netting and a tooth-brush in his pocket he set his face for the wilderness. I have no time to linger over the circumstances of the deal. Suffice it to say that, after an arduous haggle, Mr. Denny bought the colt, and set forth the same day to ride him by easy stages to his future home.
It was a wet day, wet with the solid determination of a western day, and the loaded clouds were flinging their burden down on the furze, and the rocks, and the steep, narrow road, with vindictive ecstacy. They also flung it upon Mr. Denny, and both he and his new purchase were glad to find a temporary shelter in one of the many public-houses of a village on the line of march. He was sitting warming himself at an indifferent turf fire, and drinking a tumbler of hot punch, when the sound of loud voices outside drew him to the window. In front of a semi-circle of blue frieze coats, brown frieze trousers and slouched black felt hats, stood a dejected grey pony, with a woman at its head and a lanky young man on its back; and it was obvious to Mr. Denny that a transaction, of an even more fervid sort than that in which he had recently engaged, was toward.
“Fifteen pound!” screamed the woman, darting a black head on the end of a skinny neck out of the projecting hood of her cloak with the swiftness of a lizard; “fifteen pound, James Hallahane, and the divil burn the ha’penny less that I’ll take for her!”