IN COUNTY TIPPERARY 261 



snow usurping the greater part. Now we, their unem- 

 ployed elders, have had "a capital time," as English 

 winters go. Our term of discipline and denial lasted only 

 about a month and a half, after which we were free to 

 hunt every day ; and scarcely a week of our long vacation 

 but has been replete with fun and teeming with sport. 

 One of the best sporting seasons of our time, it is safe to 

 affirm. Not one week can I, at all events, recall in which 

 hounds — most packs of hounds in the Midlands — could 

 not run hard and show sport. Even yet, unless a water 

 famine is to set in, it may be open to us — some of us — 

 elsewhere to snatch a few more days' hunting, and so eke 

 out a season that would fain close before its time. 



CHAPTER XXXVIII 



IN COUNTY TIPPERARY 



I HAD hoped to have gathered crumbs of sport on various 

 tioors, eking out my season and extending my experi- 

 ences, throughout the month of April. What prospect is 

 left me by this abnormal drought and summer heat, it is 

 at the moment of writing hard to say. Suffice to say 

 that I got as far as Tipperary, and that I consider myself 

 fortunate indeed in having been assisted to prolong my 

 career at all events another Aveek. Thus it is that I am 

 still in a position to flourish my pen in your kindly faces. 

 Bear with it, and with me, while I tell briefly of Tipperary 

 as I found it in this hardened spring. 



I arrived in time to witness the Hunt Point-to- Point 

 Races at Donoughmore — a lovely arena for such a scene, 

 though on the present occasion marred in some degree 

 by the state of the ground, that narrowed the number of 

 competitors, and drove the riders as far as possible to 

 gallop wide for gaps and cattle-refts. For the spectator 

 the winning-field was an admirable standpoint whence to 

 see the races, and to look over a country which ccvteris 

 paribus (here to be translated, broad banks in place of 

 flying fences) may well be likened to that beneath the 



