41 6 THE BEST OF THE FUN 



CHAPTER LXVI 



AN IRISH FAIR 



If I was silent for a week, it was through no lack of courtesy 

 or deficiency of duty towards my readers, nor yet of the 

 wherewithal to be garrulous, had I been so minded. How 

 could one trip it to Ireland and back ; partake of such 

 hospitality as scarce any other country can mete, mingle 

 in such joviality as certainly only Irishmen could evolve, 

 and come back without memory merry as daylight, or (to 

 use a more appropriate metaphor) lit up as a frosty sky ? 

 The context is but a frame. The picture is set, not be- 

 tween gilding, but between twenty-four hours' rattling from 

 Northamptonshire to county Tipperary, and the return 

 purgatory, which latter is best expressed by — please let 

 me have it — -a visit of four hours to the region of lost souls, 

 utter imbecility for a subsequent thirty-six. 



The humblest of us are loth to proclaim a failure ; to 

 acknowledge a sell. I should have interested nobody by 

 giving out that I had broken the record by being in the 

 Green Island for close upon two weeks, posing as a horse- 

 man, yet never crossing a horse. Tciiipora niutautitr nos d 

 mntainur in illis. So said our old copy-books ; but I never 

 thought to reproduce the maxim in application to a country 

 where the rule has ever been, to miss one day this week, 

 to hunt two extra the next. 



Beleaguered thus by frost and snow, my two chief ex- 

 periences in Tipperary were not of hunting, though to some 

 extent akin. The Hunt Ball, not a subject with which it 

 behoves me at any length to deal, was a model of bright- 

 ness and completeness. The flower of Tipperary were there, 

 fresh, brilliant, and captivating, in spite of chilly winter and 

 a spell of cold unexampled in the memory of the oldest 

 native. Of no greenhouse growth, you may be assured, are 

 the bright eyes and warm complexions of the Sister Isle, the 

 product rather of outdoor life and a merry temperament. 



Things are not done by halves in county Tipperary : 

 and so, by dint of extra dances, extra liberality on the part 



