GUY FAWKES' DAY 21 



covert. Of the field assembled at Kellistown Gorse, a 

 field that is as remarkable for its unanimity and close 

 fellowship as it is for devotion to its chief, there were, 

 among others, Miss Watson, Mr., Mrs., and Miss Stewart- 

 Duckett, Mr. and Mrs. Pike, Mr. and Mrs. Roche, Miss 

 Bolton, Dr. and Mrs. Kidd, Major Alexander, Messrs. 

 Bagenal, Beresford, Dawson, Eustace (3), Forbes, Grogan, 

 Hall-Dare, Hore, M'Clintock. 



I can quite conceive that Carlow is, even to the 

 skilled Irish practitioner, anything but an easy country 

 in which to live with hounds when they are running 

 hard. To begin with, the hounds are a very fast pack, 

 chiefly of Fitzwilliam and Brocklesby blood — Milton 

 Remus and Brocklesby Weathergage, for instance, ac- 

 counting for nearly half the present pack ; then there 

 is nothing to stop or, rather, to string them out, for they 

 can carry a head twenty couple wide on to the banks and 

 through their unkempt hedge-growth, while these lofty 

 fences cloud the view, and, moreover, are by no means 

 to be jumped invariably as they come. Many of them 

 are not to be jumped at all. 



A text-book example of the conservative good-fellow- 

 ship of the hunt I happened to see next day at Chancellor's 

 in Dublin, in the shape of a portrait album of the Carlow 

 and Island Hunt members, compiled for presentation to 

 Mr. Robt. Watson. 



CHAPTER IV 



GUY FAWKES' DAY 



As a barque that has been tossed upon distant waters 

 (there are always terrors in the unknown), I return to the 

 plain-sailing Midlands of England, to find them fully a 

 fortnight backward as compared to Ireland. Hounds 

 have been somewhat busy for the past week or so, the 

 ground excellent, scent of course good, with the glass up 

 in the heavens, and the leaf coming down as rapidly as the 

 wire. We can never ride here with our eyes shut, what- 

 ever folk may say at a distance. But we fight very shy 



