All on the Irish Shore | Page 2

with which these abandoned their prey, whatever it was,
suggested a very intimate acquaintance with the wrath of cooks and the
perils of resistance.
Before their lawful custodians had recovered from this spectacle, a tall
lady in black was suddenly merged in the _mêlée_, alternately calling
loudly and incongruously for "Bismarck," and blowing shrill blasts on a
whistle.
"If the tinker laves a sthroke of the pan on the misthress's dog, the Lord
help him!" said Patsey, starting in pursuit of Lily, who, with tail tucked
in and a wounded hind leg buckled up, was removing herself swiftly
from the scene of action.
Mrs. Alexander shoved her way into the cabin, through a filthy group
of gabbling male and female tinkers, and found herself involved in a
wreck of branches and ragged tarpaulin that had once formed a kind of
tent, but was now strewn on the floor by the incursion and excursion of
the chase. Earthquake throes were convulsing the tarpaulin; a tinker
woman, full of zeal, dashed at it and flung it back, revealing, amongst
other _débris_, an old wooden bedstead heaped with rags. On either
side of one of its legs protruded the passion-fraught faces of the
coupled hound-puppies, who, still linked together, had passed through
the period of unavailing struggle into a state of paralysed insanity of

terror. Muffled squeals and tinny crashes told that conflict was still
raging beneath the bed; the tinker women screamed abuse and
complaint; and suddenly the dachshund's long yellow nose, streaming
with blood, worked its way out of the folds. His mistress snatched at
his collar and dragged him forth, and at his heels followed an infuriated
tom cat, which, with its tail as thick as a muff, went like a streak
through the confusion, and was lost in the dark ruin of the chimney.
Mrs. Alexander stayed for no explanations: she extricated herself from
the tinker party, and, filled with a righteous wrath, went forth to look
for her son. From a plantation three fields away came the asphyxiated
bleats of the horn and the desolate bawls of Patsey Crimmeen. Mrs.
Alexander decided that it was better for the present to leave the
personnel of the Craffroe Hunt to their own devices.
It was but three days before these occurrences that Mr. Freddy
Alexander had stood on the platform of the Craffroe Station, with a
throbbing heart, and a very dirty paper in his hand containing a list of
eighteen names, that ranged alphabetically from "Batchellor" to
"Warior." At his elbow stood a small man with a large moustache, and
the thinnest legs that were ever buttoned into gaiters, who was assuring
him that to no other man in Ireland would he have sold those hounds at
such a price; a statement that was probably unimpeachable.
"The only reason I'm parting them is I'm giving up me drag, and selling
me stock, and going into partnership with a veterinary surgeon in
Rugby. You've some of the best blood in Ireland in those hounds."
"Is it blood?" chimed in an old man who was standing, slightly drunk,
at Mr. Alexander's other elbow. "The most of them hounds is by the
Kerry Rapparee, and he was the last of the old Moynalty Baygles.
Black dogs they were, with red eyes! Every one o' them as big as a
yearling calf, and they'd hunt anything that'd roar before them!" He
steadied himself on the new Master's arm. "I have them gethered in the
ladies' waiting-room, sir, the way ye'll have no throuble. 'Twould be as
good for ye to lave the muzzles on them till ye'll be through the town."
Freddy Alexander cannot to this hour decide what was the worst

incident of that homeward journey; on the whole, perhaps, the most
serious was the escape of Governess, who subsequently ravaged the
country for two days, and was at length captured in the act of killing
Mrs. Alexander's white Leghorn cock. For a young gentleman whose
experience of hounds consisted in having learned at Cambridge to some
slight and painful extent that if he rode too near them he got sworn at,
the purchaser of the Kerry Rapparee's descendants had undertaken no
mean task.
On the morning following on the first run of the Craffroe Hounds, Mrs.
Alexander was sitting at her escritoire, making up her weekly accounts
and entering in her poultry-book the untimely demise of the Leghorn
cock. She was a lady of secret enthusiasms which sheltered themselves
behind habits of the most business-like severity. Her books were
models of order, and as she neatly inscribed the Leghorn cock's epitaph,
"Killed by hounds," she could not repress the compensating thought
that she had never seen Freddy's dark eyes and olive complexion look
so well as when he had tried on his new