COUNTY TIPPEKARY 293 



anything yet as good as this that I am about, however 

 inadequately, to describe — the sport of Friday last with the 

 Tipperary ? Old England is three weeks behind time. 

 Did not the Tipperary open their season on October 15th, 

 while the Quorn are not to get into their new clothes till 

 November 6th ? You may not have had rain enough. 

 Here the ground is in condition absolutely perfect, the 

 grass rich and the soil moist, with warm and recent rain. 

 And, as the ploughed land is limited to an occasional 

 potato patch, which you need seldom enter, it matters 

 nothing if that be soft and deep. The fences, of course, 

 are blind. They invariably are, the winter through, it 

 seems to me, in Tipperary. And the Tipperary horse, 

 having during his three-year-old schooling fathomed one 

 or two bramble-veiled dykes, is not easily entrapped after- 

 wards. Warm as the inner room of a Turkish bath has 

 the atmosphere been on several days of late. But each 

 day have horses grown fitter ; each day have our own 

 lungs worked more freely ; each day has our whole 

 muscular system developed and hardened. I'faith, sirs, 

 we have had a merry time, stealing a march upon you. 

 Allow me to put it thus, and allow me at the same time to 

 register my gratitude to the kind friends by whose assist- 

 ance I have thus been enabled to score. 



Tipperary is a book that I have, in recent months, been 

 privileged to study page by page, and very pleasant reading, 

 believe me, have I found it. Friday's page happened to be 

 not altogether a new one. I had turned it before. But 

 the leaf was not dimmed, nor were the illustrations less 

 brilliant than on last perusal. To reduce my meaning to 

 plain fact, we had two gallops from two of the same 

 coverts, and I verily believe, with the same two foxes as 

 nearly a year ago ! It will hardly happen again, for the 

 head of that big Ballylennan fox has gone to ornament a 

 certain Saxon smoking-room in the Grass Countries. 



I have before described Ballylennan's swampy gorse — 

 a low-lying covert in the flat valley of a tributary of the 

 river Anner, and situated in a district that I have learned 

 to love well, associating it, as I do, with wild sport, 

 consistent scent, and a country that, if rough, is very 



