The large, clean yard, with its respectable coaching and fox-hunting associations, was acquiring a new experience. The loafers had detached themselves from the lamp-post, the tide of commerce had flowed from the shops to stand round the stable doors, and discuss in the guttural, shrewish Welsh tongue what manner of she-yeomanry they might be who thus requisitioned Welshpool ponies for their own undivulged purposes. There was a dead silence as we came forth, hobbling and waddling in our fettering safety habit-skirts—a silence, as we hope, of admiration, but we have not inquired into it. The ponies were there—a bay of a little over fourteen hands, a chestnut dun of a hand smaller, both ill-fitted by their big saddles, both possessed of a generous contour that told of long summer days of revelling in the young grass, and summer nights of serious gobbling of it when the flies were asleep. Mr Williams the chemist, and Mr Griffiths the ironmonger, stood at their heads, and began a species of funeral oration upon their virtues, and upon the pangs of parting from them; while an attendant, with his knee against the side of the bay, and his head buried under the flap of the saddle, exerted what strength was in him to overcome the pangs of meeting exhibited by the girths and their buckles: nothing remained for us except to mount, and to trust that we should be spared disaster in the eyes of Welshpool.
Miss O’Flannigan asked the name of the bay pony, and having ascertained that it was Tom, commanded that he should be brought to the mounting-block. Tom, a three-year-old of precocious gravity, erstwhile bearer of the kettle-drum and possessed of the serious good looks of one of Mrs Sherwood’s curates, reluctantly approached the hoary limestone block, with a horrified eye fixed on Miss O’Flannigan as she awaited him in her safety skirt. Persuasion failed to bring him within three yards of a garment which, as he doubtless expressed it, would have made Mrs Sherwood turn in her grave; and Miss O’Flannigan was finally pitched on to his back from an indefinite spot near the stable door, whither, with one foot in the stirrup, she had hopped in pursuit of her steed. It was damping to find that the name of the chemist’s pony was Tommy, but we felt sure that in the first few minutes of our first journey we should think of something clever with which to re-christen both. We subsequently spent several hours of several journeys in this endeavour, but their baptismal names have not as yet been improved on.
“He iss a little unused to the town, marm,” said the chemist’s stable-boy, as Tommy submitted with unexpected calm to the infliction of my weight; “but he iss goot—yes, indeed!”
“He iss a little unused to the town, marm.”
The next moment I was pursuing Miss O’Flannigan up the street like the conventional pattern of a flash of lightning. Happily, the houses, carts, barrels, and other objects possessed of terrors for Tommy alternated on either side with tolerable regularity, so that one shy acted as a corrective to the last; but these advantages were denied to Miss O’Flannigan. Her Tom fled along before me, cantering with the fore and trotting widely with the hind legs, and making startling attempts to turn in at unexpected side entrances—attempts that were only frustrated by serious effort on the part of his rider.
It was somewhere during this rush through Welshpool and its environs, while the saddles rolled and our faces blazed, that we were conscious of passing a building like a Methodist chapel, from which came men’s and women’s voices, singing in harmony. It was only a moment’s hearing, but it lived, ringing and resonant, in our ears, and is notable still to us as our first experience of Welsh voices. When, at sunset, we returned dishevelled and hairpinless, but masters of the situation, Miss O’Flannigan had remembered several quotations from the poets to express the effect of these keen, strong voices flung out into the sleepy afternoon. I, regarding the heat-stained coats of the Tommies and Miss O’Flannigan’s back-hair, could remember nothing except the conversation of two men at a race meeting in Galway—
“Did ye see them skelping round by Glan corner?”
“I did not, faith.”