“Queen Mab.”
II
MY name is Queen Mab. I am little more than twenty years old, not a great age, counted by years, as the life of a horse goes; but it is the pace that kills, and I have been made to go the pace in my younger days, and have done my duty as far as in me lay, since I have withdrawn from the more active scenes of the world. I have brought up five of my offspring and never lost a foal, and I have gained the admiration and affection of those with whom I have been associated. It is with some hesitation that I undertake the task of recording my own career, for I feel that I must give some account of my personality and qualities, and after the lapse of so many years I know my memory is defective as to the earlier days; but, standing as I do, with the last big fence which we all have to take in front of me, I am only desirous of giving a fair portrait of myself, and am careless of criticism. My days are numbered, but I, who never knew what fear was, feel no dread of the end, and I know I shall soon rest under the green grass of the paddock where I have lived out in comfort the last years of my life. I have seen many of my contemporaries pass away, and I shall lie beside brave comrades. At one time the idea that I might possibly at the last be sent to the kennels was a disagreeable one, but, in a meditative old age, I have derived comfort from the thought that, even if this was my ultimate fate, my poor old body would enter into the young blood of the hounds with whom I spent the best time of my life, and that I ought to consider it a privilege to be incorporated with the flying pack, and so in a sense live for evermore.
Well, then, I was born in the year 1876 on an Irish farm, and here I spent my infant years by the side of my mother when she was not at work. She had been a hunter herself, had been driven in an Irish car, had won a farmer’s race, and been a general slave to the sporting family she worked for. She was a big mare with plenty of bone, and, I believe, if not of the best family, at any rate well connected, and, so far as I could learn, there was no record in her family history of any of those mésalliances with hairy-heeled families which are such a curse to hunters. My sire was a thoroughbred, with the blood of Sir Hercules and Blair Athol in his veins, but, alas! I have forgotten his name; and, indeed, it is a wonder that I know anything of my pedigree at all, for, till I passed into my present owner’s hands, I heard so many different accounts of my descent that I was quite bewildered. But I have long seen enough of the world to know that the great proportion of the pedigrees given to hunters are fictitious, and quite understand why I am always described as “pedigree unknown.” Anyhow, I know that my sire, like my dam, had been a slave, and been run in almost a hundred races and steeplechases. I have always felt that I owed most of my own qualities of endurance and sound constitution to being the offspring of parents whose soundness was due to their hard life, as well as to their freedom from hereditary complaints.
In colour, I was a full, rich chestnut, with a white blaze, and was certainly pretty when young. I was not an ideal hunter-made mare, for when I was foaled I stood over at the knees, and always had a tendency to do this: I have heard connoisseurs say that this is a fault on the right side, and certainly I had it in common with many of the best cross-country horses I have known.
I had fairly good shoulders and a nicely-placed neck, well-sprung ribs, a strong, muscular loin and good arms and thighs, while the quality of my coat, my clean, sinewy limbs, and quick ears and eyes proved my good descent better than any paper pedigree. Throughout my life I have been blessed with robust health and a great appetite. I have often been leg-weary, but I never felt depressed in spirits, and at the end of the longest day I was always impatient to get to my manger. I have still the soundest of wind, and have escaped all the most serious kinds of accidents, and I never had the iron on me. I have had my share of over-reaches, cuts, bruises, and have now an enormous knee, caused by some osseous growth, resulting from the non-removal of a thorn.
My young days spent in Ireland left but little impression on me, beyond the fact that the grass was sweeter and better than any I have tasted since; and though I was less cared for than the youngsters I have seen growing up in England, both the pasture and climate seemed to do all that was necessary in stimulating growth and fitting me for the battle of life. I must pass over the months during which I was broken in by a young Irishman, who used to terrify me by his noise and wild ways, but who knew what he was about, and broke my will to his own in a devil-may-care sort of way, but with always a tender hand on the bit. Whether this was natural to him, or because his tackle was always as rotten as pash, I never found out. I remember that when a rising three-year-old I was shipped to Liverpool, and this voyage left me with the worst illness I ever had in my life, which they called a steamboat cold, and I felt wretched for weeks after. I have noticed it takes more than a year to get a young Irish horse into condition, often two years; for in Ireland they will take up a raw young horse, give him a slight education before he has got hard meat into him, and then shut him up in a box and feed him, as if he were a pig, on boiled potatoes, boiled corn and turnips, and anything that comes handy. He is then sold, and goes to England, and often arrives running at the nose, and coughing. This illness has to be got rid of, and all the rotten-potato flesh as well. He is all the time a weak young horse, requiring a year of gentle conditioning, good food and exercise, before he is fit to ride to hounds. I make this digression to expose another injustice to Ireland, and in the hope of saving some Irish horses from the abuse and misery that they endure because their English masters think they have got a made and matured hunter in their hands instead of a weak, inexperienced, and badly-nourished youngster.