TIPPERARV 150 



murther ! " he shouted. " Why, the fox followed yon 

 double ditch !" (pointing to :i big bank without any ditch 

 at all, as we understand a ditch). And then, as hounds 

 and the line came unexpectedly together, he leaped in 

 the air with a yell that should have earned him a strait- 

 waistcoat, threw his remnant of a hat into a tree, and 

 screamed, " More power to yer honour and yer dogs ! " 

 Another, on a different tack — and prompted possibly by 

 the rumours of labour-rule already too rife in Ireland — 

 jumped on to his bank, over which our fox had just 

 scrambled, and up to which hounds were already running 

 hard, (His holding, by the way, was only an empty 

 potato ground.) " He went over Pat Flanagan's ground, 

 yer honour. I seen him ! Ah, now, yer dogs is too fast 

 altogether ! " And he gave up, as hounds and horsemen 

 went on to cross the bank and the fallow from which he 

 he would fain have fended them. 



And amid it all — amid the heading, holloaing, mis- 

 directing, and cur-loosing — the Master rode good- 

 temperedly on, let his hounds solve the question for 

 themselves, and so killed his fox. I am alluding now 

 more particularly to Wednesday, and will found my 

 brief story upon Donegal, one of the most perfect 

 gorse coverts I was ever invited to look into. Picture 

 it thus, as I have it before me after some days' interval : 

 Several acres of gorse of three or four years' growth, 

 clothing a gentle slope as with a garment of frieze ; 

 northward, below and beyond, a champaign country (the 

 best term ever devised) of greensward and clean-shaven 

 banks. (Trees form no part of the scenery of an Irish 

 hunting-country, save as an attribute of a demesne — that 

 is, if I take it rightly, a wooded park.) P3ehind, a broken 

 area, topped with spectators, accumulating rapidly as 

 crows at sunset : and in the background the blue 

 mountains of Waterford, hazy in the bright sunshine 

 that had followed on a frosty night. No condition for 

 scent, say you, and as I am bound to admit. Yet a 

 lively pack and a lively field disported themselves to a 

 circling fox. And I, as a novice, turned over a fresh 

 page of experience, as each field and each fence offered 



