“I scarcely think that horse will do,” said my second cousin, after we had walked about half a mile, turning on me a face still purple from her exertions with the whip. “We want a freer animal than that.”
She had scarcely finished when there was a thundering on the road behind us, a sound of furious galloping and shouting, and the car appeared in sight, packed with men, and swinging from side to side as the yellow horse came along with a racing stride.
“Ye can sit up on the car now!” called out the boy as they neared us, “he’ll go aisy from this out.”
The car pulled up, and the volunteers got off it with loud and even devotional assurances of the yellow horse’s perfections.
CHAPTER II.
SHALL we admit that, after all, the first stage of our journey was accomplished by means of the mail-car? We had been assured, on reliable authority, that Oughterard, fourteen Irish miles from Galway, was the place where we should find what we wanted, and with a dubious faith we climbed the steep side of the mail car, and wedged ourselves between a stout priest and an English tourist. Above us towered the mail baskets, and a miscellaneous pile of luggage, roped together with that ingenuity that necessity has developed in the Irish carman, and crowning all, the patriarchal countenance of a goat looked down upon us in severe amazement from over the rim of an immense hamper.
We have said in our haste that we never hold on on jaunting-cars, but as the dromedary to the park hack, so is the mail-car to the ordinary “outside” of its species. It is large enough to hold six people on each side, and is dragged by three horses at a speed that takes no account of ruts and patches of stones and sharp corners, or of the fact that the unstable passenger has nothing to grasp at in time of need, except his equally unstable fellow-traveller. We held on to the priest and the tourist with all the power of our elbows, and derived at least some moral support from the certainty that when we fell off the car we should, like Samson, carry widespread disaster with us. But somehow people do not fall off these cars; and even the most unschooled of Saxons sits and swings and bows on the narrow seat with a security that must surprise himself.
An Irish mile is, roughly speaking, a mile and a quarter English, so we leave to the accomplished reader the computation of the distance from Galway to Oughterard according to the rightful standard. It is not in the ordinary sense a very interesting drive; the guide-books pass it over in a breath in their haste to blossom out into the hotels and fisheries of Connemara; but to the eye that comes fresh to it from the offensively sleek and primly-partitioned pastures of England this first impression of Galway and its untrammelled bogs and rocks will be as lasting as any that come after. We ourselves might have framed many moving sentences about the desolate houses standing amongst the neglected timber within their broken demesne walls, but “all our mind was clouded with a doubt,” and from the peculiar protrusion of my cousin’s nether lip, I could gather that her moodiness was the outward token of an agitated mental parade of all the Oughterard horseflesh with which she was acquainted.
We spent that night at Oughterard in Miss Murphy’s comfortable little hotel, and the next morning found us embarked once more in search of a means of travel. The trap had been unearthed—the trap of our brightest dreams—a governess-cart that would just hold two people and a reasonable amount of luggage; but the horse was the trouble. Various suggestions had been made: some had been feasible, and the one thing on which we were firmly decided, viz., the governess-cart, seemed an impossibility.