i 2 Among Men and Horses. 



Lord Fermoy and his son reminds me that I am a sort of a 

 ' thirty-first cousin ' of theirs ; for my great-great-grandfather, 

 George Hayes of Ballivooher, married a Miss Johanna Roche 

 of that family. Her son, James Hayes, belonged to a letter 

 of marque during the French War of his time ; was taken 

 by the enemy after a long privateering career, and kept in a 

 French prison for seven years. He and a fellow-prisoner, the 

 father of an old doctor in Bandon, were liberated through the 

 influence, at the Court of France, of his maternal cousins. 



In my early days, the Gentleman Rider was sternly re- 

 pressed by the professional, who, like the Cusacks, Carols, 

 Noble and others, regarded gratuitous chase riding as an 

 unwarrantable attempt to take the bread, or rather the whisky, 

 out of their mouths. Poor Captain Barnard Shaw, who was 

 so fond of getting a mount, that he would have gone a hun- 

 dred miles to ride even a loser, got killed by a couple of 

 jockeys, who closed in on him at a fence, and who had vowed 

 that unless he would stop riding they would ' do ' for him. 

 A stronger executive than that which ruled the Irish turf in 

 those days, has knocked that monstrous idea out of the heads 

 of the Irish pros., who have often now to resign their pride of 

 place to such amateurs as the Moores and Beasleys. At the 

 time about which I am writing, the best G. R. of the South 

 of Ireland was Mr Dick Barry of Carrigtwohill, who used to 

 ride his own horses and those of his father. He had extra- 

 ordinary bad luck at Punchestown with that fine chaser, 

 Bounceaway, who, in the run-in, after having jumped all the 

 fences and was coming in alone, put its foot in an old wheel- 

 rut in the middle of the field, fell down and lost the race. 

 The chief fault of my countrymen, I may remark, is their too 

 ready submission to the dictates of scoundrels, especially 

 those of their own kith and kin. Those of us who have 

 studied history, know that the sympathy of Irishmen for 

 criminals is a legacy handed down from the time when 

 English law meant, to them, injustice. Although it takes 

 many years to entirely efface from the minds of a people 



