“Where is ’e, ’Arry?” he roared.
“Be’ind o’ them rocks ’e went. I wouldn’t ’a seen ’im only for gettin’ into this somethin’ ’ole,” replied Harry, dragging himself out of the slough. “Can’t ye catch me ’orse?”
“That’s all right, ’Arry! You wouldn’t ’a viewed ’im only for the ’ole. All things works together for good with them that loves Gawd!”
With which G. laid on his hounds, and left Harry to comfort himself with this reflection and to catch his horse when he could.
G.’s word in season reminds me of a prayer that my nephew, Paddy Coghill (whose infant devotions have already been referred to), offered on his sixth birthday, one “Patrick’s Day in the morning.”
“And oh, Lord God, make it a good day for hunting, and make me sit straight on Kelpie, and show me how to hold my reins.”
He subsequently went to the meet, himself and pony so covered with shamrock that Tim C. (the then huntsman) told him the goats would eat him. I cannot now vouch for the first clause of the petition having been granted, but the R.F.A. Riding School has guaranteed that the latter ones were fulfilled.
It is impossible for me to write a chapter about hunting without speaking of Bridget, a little grey mare who is bracketed with Candy, “Equal First.” I have been so happy as to have owned many good hunters. Lottery, by Speculation, a chestnut mare who died untimely, staked by a broken bough in a gap (and, strangely enough, her brother, “Spec,” is the only other horse who has in this country, thank heaven, had the same hard fate); Tarbrush, a black but comely lady, of whom it was said that she was “a jumper in airnest, who would face up and beyond anything she could see,” and would, if perturbed in temper, go very near to “kicking the stars out of the sky”; Little Tim, a pocket Hercules, worthy to be named with George Borrow’s tremendous “Irish cob”; and Kitty, whose flippancy is such that it has been said to have consoled the country boys for a blank day. “They were well satisfied,” said a competent judge, “Kitty filled their eye.”
But, as with Candy among dogs, so, among horses, Bridget leads, the rest nowhere. Her father was a thoroughbred horse, her mother a Bantry mountain pony. She herself was very little over 15 hands 1 inch, and she succeeded in combining the cunning and goat-like activity of the spindle side of the house with all the heroic qualities of her father’s family.
“She has a plain head,” said a rival horse-coper, who had been so unfortunate as not to have seen her before I did, “but that suits the rest of her!”