GOOD HORSES AND FRAUDS 153 



improved the yellow pony's wind but not his 

 courage. Anything he could not climb over he 

 dived into, to be pulled to his legs by an undaunted 

 girl in a bundled-up habit, and urged on ... as 

 far as he would go. . . . It was never far, and big 

 fences he simply ate grass off, so I ran no particular 

 danger on him. 



My first real hunter was a blue roan called 

 Dandy, perhaps one of the best and most evil- 

 tempered beasts in Ireland. 



He was a great raking three-cornered horse with 

 a narrow chest, baker-kneed, and with wide ragged 

 hips and he reared and fell back for his own amuse- 

 ment. He had to be ridden in a rearing bit to the 

 meets, with his evil eye set sullenly as he recognised 

 defeat, but once hounds went away he took his 

 own time and was fast as a race-horse. I was a 

 passenger. He was really no horse for a seven- 

 teen-year-old girl, and when he had crashed back 

 with me three times my nerve went. 



I sold him to Mr. Donovan of Cork and he 

 changed hands four times, eventually for four 

 hundred ; he must have been almost in the book 

 and was up to fourteen stone. 



With my capital I bought a brown mare on the 

 common side, a lady with curbs, sold to me as 

 quite quiet, but as it turned out a well-known 

 runaway. The first day she saw hounds it was 

 with Thady Cooney's deer dogs. She bolted, 

 narrowly escaped crashing into a high brick wall 



