“Oh, they’re all right,” said Patsy. “Sure, they had it on the hearthstone.”
That evening, just before bedtime, the schoolroom door opened and Patsy’s head appeared.
“Mr Fanshawe’s give me half a crown,” said he. “And he’s got lave for the both of yiz to go to the meet to-morra mornin’ in the cart. I’m to drive you.” He put the half-crown in his eye like an eye-glass, drew the corners of his mouth almost up to his eyes by some extraordinary muscular action known to himself alone, protruded his tongue, waggled it from side to side and vanished, just in time to escape a Principia Latina aimed at him by Lord Gawdor.
CHAPTER XIII
THE MEET OF THE HOUNDS
The next morning was dull and grey, with not a trace of frost—an ideal hunting morning.
The meet was fixed for nine o’clock at the cross-roads, by the village of Castle Knock; and at eight you might have seen Bob Mahony, the sweep, clattering down the main street of Castle Knock in his donkey-cart, his face washed and shining, so that you would never have known he was a sweep, only for the traces of soot round the back of his ears and the nape of his neck that the towel had failed to reach.
He always turned out for a meet of the hounds. His donkey was a tiny mouse-coloured beast, the quickest and the wickedest donkey in the county. “Game as a tarrier,” to use Bob’s expression, “and not to hold or bind when she hears the hounds giving lip.”
He drew up at the sign-post that is set at the cross-roads, and he had scarcely got down to put the nose-bag on the donkey, to keep her “aisy,” when over the fields, from the direction of Tullagh, taking the low stone walls in his strides, came Billy the Buck.