“Oh, but aren’t you glad they don’t make wire-fences!” Norah broke out. “They’re so hideous: and these hedges are just exquisite.”
“Not being a landholder, I am, indeed,” said her father. “The idea of this landscape given up to wire-fences is depressing—long may they stick to their banks! And their shelter must be valuable in this country; they don’t seem to have many trees.” His eye ran over the bare little fields. “Don’t you grow trees, in Donegal?” he asked of the back of Mr. Burke.
That gentleman, feeling himself addressed, swung round.
“There do be plenty in the woods and in gentlemen’s grounds, sir. I never seen any in the fields. They do say there was any amount in the ould ancient days, or how would the bogs be there? Forests, no less; and quare beasts in them. I’ve seen ould heads of deer with horns that wide you’d never get them up a boreen. There were no fields and no fences in those days, and people lived by hunting—great hunting those big deer would give them, to be sure. If you’d kill a rabbit nowadays it’d be as much as you’d do to ate it before the polis had you!”
“If killing rabbits is what you care for, you might come to Australia,” said Jim, laughing. “You would certainly be welcome there. Only after a little while, you wouldn’t eat any.”
“There was a lad I knew in Derry went out to them parts,” said Mr. Burke, “and he sent home letters with such tales of his doings you wouldn’t believe them. He said there were beasts that hopped on their tails faster than a horse ’ud gallop, and rabbits that had the face ate off the country. Like a carpet on the floor, he says. But sure he was always the boy that’d spin you a yarn.”
“It was a true yarn, anyhow,” Jim remarked.
“Do ye tell me, now?” The long face of Patsy Burke was respectful, but incredulous, “And another thing he said, that a man couldn’t believe: that the genthry’d go out and poison foxes!”
“They would,” said Mr. Linton. “Gladly.”
“But——” Words failed Mr. Burke. He gaped at his passengers. The horse dropped to a walk, unheeded.