I have said, that the danger I underwent at Donnybrook sank deep into my memory. The main cause of it was not connected with my rencounter with Counsellor Daly, recited in the second volume of the present work, but with one which was to the full as hazardous, though it involved none of those points of honour or “fire-eating” which forced me to the other conflict.
In the year 1790, Counsellor John Byrne, (afterward one of his majesty’s counsel-at-law,) a very worthy man, and intimate friend of mine, called on me to ride with him and aid him in the purchase of a horse at the fair of Donnybrook. I agreed, and away we rode, little anticipating the sad discomfiture we should experience. We found the fair rich in all its glories of drinking, fighting, kissing, making friends, knocking down, women dragging their husbands out of frays, and wounded men joining as merrily in the dance as if the clout tied round their heads were a Turkish turban. Whatever happened in the fair, neither revenge nor animosity went out of it with any of the parties; to be sure, on the road to town, there were always seen plenty of pulling, hauling, and dragging about, in which the ladies were to the full as busily employed as the gentlemen; but for which the latter offered, next day, one general excuse to their wives, who would be mending their torn coats and washing their stockings and cravats.
“Sure, Moll, it wasn’t myself that was in it when I knocked Tom Sweeny down in the tent; it was the drink, and nothing else.”
“True for you, Pat, my jewel!” would the wife cry, (scrubbing away as hard as she could,) “true for you, my darling: by my sowl, the whisky and water was all spirits. Myself would as soon strike my owld mother, God forgive me for the word! as have struck Mary Casey, only for that last noggin that put the devil into me just when I was aggravated at your head, Pat, my jewel. So I hit Mary Casey a wipe; and by my sowl it’s I that am sorry for that same, becaize Mary had neither act nor part in cutting your head, Pat; but I was aggravated, and did not think of the differ.”
This dialogue, with variations, I have heard a hundred times; and it will serve as a true specimen of the species of quarrels at Donnybrook in former times, and their general conclusion;—and such were the scenes that the visitors of the fair were making full preparation for, when Counsellor John Byrne, myself, and a servant lad of mine (not a very good horseman), entered it in the year 1790. The boy was mounted on a fiery horse, which Byrne wanted to exchange; and as I never liked any thing that was too tame, the horse I rode always had spirit enough, particularly for a gentleman who was not very remarkable for sticking over-fast to those animals.
Into the fair we went, and riding up and down, got here a curse, and there a blessing; sometimes a fellow who knew one of us, starting out of a tent to offer us a glass of the “cratur.” When we had satisfied our reasonable curiosity, and laughed plentifully at the grotesque scenes interspersed through every part, we went to the horse-fair on the green outside. There the jockies were in abundance; and certainly no fair ever exhibited a stranger mélange of the halt and blind, the sound and rotten, rough and smooth—all galloping, leaping, kicking, or tumbling—some in clusters, some singly; now and then a lash of the long whip, and now and then a crack of the loaded butt of it! At length, a horse was produced (which we conceived fit for any counsellor) by Mr. Irvin the jockey, and engaged, upon his honour, to be as sound as a roach, and as steady as any beast between Donnybrook and Loughrea, where he had been the favourite gelding of Father Lynch, the parish priest, who called him “Coadjutor”—(he had broken the holy father’s neck, by the bye, about a year before). “Do just try him, Counsellor Byrne,” said Mr. Irvin; “just mount him a bit, and if ever you get off him again till you grease my fist, I’ll forgive you the luck-penny. He’ll want neither whip nor spur; he’ll know your humour, counsellor, before you’re five minutes on his body, and act accordingly.”
“You’re sure he’s gentle?” said Byrne.
“Gentle, is it? I’ll give you leave to skin both himself and me if you won’t soon like him as well as if he was (begging your pardon) your own cousin-german. If he wasn’t the thing from muzzle to tail that would suit you, I’d hang him before I’d give him to a counsellor—the like of yees at any rate.”
A provisional bargain and exchange was soon struck, and Byrne mounted for trial on the favourite gelding of the late Father Lynch of Loughrea, called Coadjutor;—and in truth he appeared fully to answer all Mr. Irvin’s eulogiums: we rode through the fair, much amused—I trotting carelessly close by the side of Byrne, and our servant on the fiery mare behind us; when, on a sudden, a drunken shoemaker, or master cobbler, as he called himself, whom my family had employed in heeling, soling, &c. seeing me pass by, rushed out of his tent with a bottle of whisky in one hand and a glass in the other, and roared, “Ough! by J—s, Barnton, you go no further till you take a drop with me, like your father’s son, that I’ve been these many a long year tapping and foxing for: here, my darling, open your gob!”