Almost the first thing that I can remember is the duplicity of my grandfather on my behalf in the matter of the hounds. He had been forbidden by his doctor to hunt; he had also been forbidden by the ladies of his household to permit the junior lady of that establishment, then aged five, to “go anywhere near the hounds.” None the less, by a succession of remarkable accidents, not wholly disconnected with the fact that my grandfather had had the West Carbery hounds himself at one time and knew the country as well as the foxes did, he and I rarely missed a sight of them, and, on one memorable day, we cut in at a moment that bestowed upon us the finish of the run and gained for me the brush. Absurdly bestowed, of course, but none the less glorious. The glory was dimmed a little by the fact that just after the presentation had been made my pony rolled, and a kind but tactless young man picked me up, like a puppy, and deposited me on my saddle, instead of mounting me as a gentleman should mount a lady. Nevertheless, I can confidently say that the proudest moment of my life was when I rode home with the brush.
My grandfather had hunted for a few seasons, when he was a young man, with what he, after the fashion of his day, called “the Dook of Beaufort’s” hounds. He brought over a West Carbery horse, Diamond by name, a flea-bitten grey, and he earned for his owner the honourable title of “That damned Irishman.” There is an old saying, “Nothing stops a Carbery man,” and I imagine that the title aforesaid was applied with special fervour when the hunt went into the stone-wall country and Diamond began to sing songs of Zion and enjoy himself.
Hunting in West Carbery died out when I was a child, and the hounds were in abeyance for many years. Political troubles and bad times generally had led to their temporary extinction, and such hunting as came my way was in countries far from Carbery. Of the Masters of those days not one is now left. Hard goers and good sportsmen all round, and men too, many of them, of the old-fashioned classical culture. It is told of the last of that old brigade that during his last illness, a short time before he died, he said he supposed he “would d——d soon be shooting woodcock in Mars with Johnny B.” (who was another of the same heroic mould), and if his supposition was justified, the Martian cock are likely to have had a bad time of it.
In 1891 my brother Aylmer restarted the old West Carbery foxhounds, and then indeed did that madness of the chase, of which we have treated in “Dan Russel the Fox,” descend upon us all. The first step in the affair was the raising, by means of concerts, public meetings, and mendicancy generally, a sum of money; the second was the purchase of a small pack from a private owner. These arrived with the title of “B.’s Rioters,” and it is not too much to say that we rioted with them. It was, at first, all thoroughly informal and entirely delightful; later we fell into the grip of professionals, who did things as they should be done, and inflicted decorum upon us and the Rioters. The days of “Danny-O” and “Patsey Sweeny” passed, and the thrill died out of the diaries.
No longer are such items to be found as:
“Jack, Martin, and I took hounds to walk out with Patsey. Came on a hare.” (This means that we went to look for a hare, ardently and with patience.) “Ran her for two and a half hours, all on our own miserable legs. Lost her in darkness. All pretty tired when we got back to kennels.”
Or again. “Aylmer, Martin, and I went to kennels and christened the new draft, seven and a half couple of puppies. Coupled them and tried to take them out. The instant they were coupled they went stark mad and fought, mostly in the air; it looked like a battle of German heraldic eagles.”
Other entries, which I decline to make public, relate to drags, disreputably laid, for disreputable reasons, and usually dedicated to English visitors, who did not always appreciate the attention.
My brother kept the hounds going for twelve seasons, during which we had the best of sport and learned to know the people and the country in the way that hunting alone can teach. After his long term