tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">"I will walk—I should really prefer it"

Flurry and I put in a blazing September day on the mountain

Braney's Lake

An intricate and variously moving tide of people

"Them hounds are in my family, seed and breed, this hundred years"

"I'll go bail 'twas him that picked me wife's fashionable cocks"

IN THE TEXT

The egregious Slipper

The victim came

"Ye have them in great form, Michael"

Pure ecstasy stretched his grin from ear to ear

"They're lovely fish altogether! they're leppin' fresh!"

The invalid removed herself

Con Brickley

"Let the divil clear me out of the sthrand!"

A witness to be proud of

His mornings were spent in proffering Irish phrases

The Sergeant's manner was distressingly apologetic

"That's a great sign of fine weather when a horse will lie     down in wather that way"

My wife came and asked me if I would take her to the workhouse

"Thim's no joke, sir, thim's Sprats!"

"He knows what's what!" said the Locum

FURTHER EXPERIENCES OF
AN IRISH R.M.

I

THE PUG-NOSED FOX

"5 Turkies and their Mother
5 Ducks and the Drake
5 Hins and the Cock
            CATHARINE O'DONOVAN, Skeagh."

A leaf from a copy-book, with these words written on it, was placed in my hand as I was in the act of dragging on a new pair of gloves in the stableyard. There was something rhythmic in the category, suggestive of burnt-offerings and incantations; some touch of pathos, pointing to tragedy; something, finally, that in the light of previous events recalled to me suddenly and unpleasantly my new-born position of Deputy M.F.H.

Not, indeed, that I was in need at that moment of circumstances to remind me of it. A new hunting-cap, pressing implacably upon my forehead, an equally new red coat, heavy as a coat of mail, a glittering horn, red hot from the makers, and so far totally unresponsive to my apoplectic wooings; these things in themselves, without the addition of a poultry bill, were sufficient to bring home to me my amazing folly in having succumbed to the wiles of Mr. Florence McCarthy Knox, and accepted the charge of his hounds, during his absence with the Irish Yeomanry at the South African war.

I had yielded in a burst of patriotic emotion to the spirit of volunteering that was in the air. It would be, Flurry had assured me, a purely nominal position.

"They'll only go out one day a week, and Jerome Hickey and Michael'll do all the work. I do secretary for myself, but that'll be no trouble to you. There's nothing at all to do but to send out the cards of the meets. It'll be a comfort to me to think you were running the show."

I suggested other names that seemed to me infinitely more comfortable, but found them blocked by intricate and insuperable objections, and when I became aware that Mr. Knox had so engineered his case as to get my wife on his side it seemed simpler to give in.

A week afterwards I saw Flurry off at the station. His last words to me were:

"Well, good-bye, Major. Be fighting my grandmother for her subscription, and whatever you do, don't give more than half-a-crown for a donkey. There's no meat on them."

Upon this touching farewell the train steamed out, and left me standing, shelterless, a reluctant and incapable Master of Hounds.

Exhaustive as Flurry's instructions had been on the subject of the cuisine and other details of kennel management, he had not even hinted at the difficulties that are usually composed by means of a fowl fund. My first experience of these had taken place but a week ago, when from the breakfast-table I had perceived a donkey and cart rambling, unattended, in the shrubberies, among the young hydrangeas and azaleas. The owner, a most respectable looking old man, explained that he had left it there because he was "dilicate" to bring it up to the house, and added that he had come for compensation for "a beautiful milking goat" that the hounds had eaten last March, "and she having two kids that died afther her."

I asked why he had not long since been to Mr. Knox about it, and was favoured with an interminable history of the claimant's ill-health during the summer, consequent on his fretting after the goat; of how he had been anointed four times, and of how the donkey was lame this long while where a branch bet her in the thigh one day she ran into the wood from the hounds. Fearing that the donkey was about to be included in the bill, I made haste to settle for the goat and her offspring, a matter of fifteen shillings.

Next day two women took up a position on the steps at