"If ever you see hounds pointing this way,
don't spare spurs to get to the cliff before them!" [Page 4.]

In Mr. Knox's Country

By

E. Œ. Somerville and Martin Ross

Authors of "Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.," "Further
Experiences of an Irish R.M.," "Some Irish Yesterdays,"
"All on the Irish Shore," "Dan Russel the Fox,"
"The Real Charlotte," etc. etc. etc.

With 8 Illustrations by E. Œ. Somerville

Longmans, Green and Co.
39 Paternoster Row, London
Fourth Avenue & 30th Street, New York
Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras
1915

All rights reserved

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

"If ever you see hounds pointing this way, don't spare spurs to get
to the cliff before them!" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frontispiece

Kitty the Shakes

"I heard scald-crow laughter behind me in the shawls"

"Lyney's a tough dog!"

"Walkin' Aisy"

James

Miss Cooney O'Rattigan

Miss Larkie McRory

IN MR. KNOX'S COUNTRY

I

THE AUSSOLAS MARTIN CAT

Flurry Knox and I had driven some fourteen miles to a tryst with one David Courtney, of Fanaghy. But, at the appointed cross-roads, David Courtney was not. It was a gleaming morning in mid-May, when everything was young and tense and thin and fit to run for its life, like a Derby horse. Above us was such of the spacious bare country as we had not already climbed, with nothing on it taller than a thorn-bush from one end of it to the other. The hill-top blazed with yellow furze, and great silver balls of cloud looked over its edge. Nearly as white were the little white-washed houses that were tucked in and out of the grey rocks on the hill-side.

"It's up there somewhere he lives," said Flurry, turning his cart across the road; "which'll you do, hold the horse or go look for him?"

I said I would go to look for him. I mounted the hill by a wandering bohireen resembling nothing so much as a series of bony elbows; a white-washed cottage presently confronted me, clinging, like a sea-anemone, to a rock. I knocked at the closed door, I tapped at a window held up by a great, speckled foreign shell, but without success. Climbing another elbow, I repeated the process at two successive houses, but without avail. All was as deserted as Pompeii, and, as at Pompeii, the live rock in the road was worn smooth by feet and scarred with wheel tracks.

An open doorway faced me; I stooped beneath its lintel and asked of seeming vacancy if there were "anyone inside." There was no reply. I advanced into a clean kitchen, with a well-swept earthen floor, and was suddenly aware of a human presence very close to me.

A youngish woman, with a heavy mop of dark hair, and brown eyes staring at the opposite wall, was sitting at the end of a settle behind