TIPPERARY IN SPRING 357 



the easy and the difhcult. In other words, I am not 

 frightened by them all, only by some. I no longer (as I 

 heard it put by a gallant soldier, who in reality makes 

 light of them all) die three deaths at each, viz. one on 

 jumping on to the bank, another poised (as now) among 

 the gorse or thorn upon its summit, and a third while 

 plunging into the unknown depths beyond. I shrink 

 from accepting such description quite literally as applied 

 to myself ; but I maintain that in the negotiation of many 

 woolly and ill-defined banks there is a prolonged crisis, 

 which to most Saxon minds will be found pleasurable only 

 in inverse ratio to its duration. For my part, I delight in 

 a horse that goes quick off his banks, though the slower 

 he will approach them the more confidence, and I believe 

 safety, he gives me. 



But I am neglecting the run, in which, by the way, I 

 had got so far as to allude to a "terrible fall." It merited, 

 happily, no such designation, this, I firmly believe, having 

 been invented at the moment by my fair informant, as a 

 javelin against my thin armour of courage. It had been 

 merely a case of broken stirrup-leather. To replace it 

 the fallen knight made his way at once into a farmhouse 

 adjacent, paid 5s. for another, and went on in hot pursuit 

 of hounds. At the very first fence this also, in proper 

 Irish fashion, snapped in two, and a second time our 

 luckless friend was left prone. 



" The Grove fox ! The Grove fox for a hundred I " they 

 had shouted as he broke covert, carrying his white tag 

 defiantly high. But, if he was, something prevented his 

 turning to his point ; and he ran throughout like a fox 

 who had lost his way, or rather who had failed to make 

 his line. Yet hounds could never really press him, and 

 at starting six couples of them had whisked back into 

 covert upon heel. There was some funny floundering at 

 the second or third fence — I can hardly call it a bank 

 pure and simple ; it was rather the slope of an earth- 

 work, bush-crowned, with a deep dyke beyond. To the 

 smoothest point of this we all hurried, led by one of the 

 hardest and quickest of Tipperary's sons, to find ourselves 

 checked and huddled on the very brow by our usually 



