SPORTING FARMERS 



" blaygard " is just waiting you, and the covert is as 

 quiet as the churchyard there, yer 'oner,' etc. All 

 is now changed : Paddy himself is a different being in 

 every way ; the sport-loving propensity is still as 

 strongly developed in him as ever it was, but he wears 

 an unhappy, sullen expression, which says, ' I only 

 wish I could see the ould times aofain, and have all 

 the fun of them, too.' Alas I what false friends the 

 Irish agitators have been to the country, solely for 

 their own benefit. They have sadly imposed on the 

 too credulous Irishman, and robbed him of his birth- 

 right, rents, fun, and sport, the sources of riches and 

 delight to him. 



In former days the turn-out of some of the farmers 

 was a caution. * By yerr lave,' and away past your 

 horse's quarters flew Pat on a raw three-year-old, 

 which represented, barring the pig, his entire stock-in- 

 trade. These youngsters had often been backed but a 

 few days previously, and were not infrequently ridden 

 without a saddle, and the whole ' get up ' was rusticity 

 itself. One day, during a run with the Louth Hounds, 

 a man mounted on the back of a cow suddenly made 

 his appearance. He rode over a couple of fences 

 alongside of me, holding on to a straw rope twisted 

 round the animal's mouth, and the two as suddenly 

 disappeared into a yard. The man was no doubt a 

 first-class rider, and was in the habit of thus amusing 

 himself by training the cow to jump these two fences 

 on her way from one farm to the other, on the chance 

 of some day being able to show off if the hounds ran 

 through his place, and, as luck would have it, happened 

 to be out just when hounds were running hard. It 

 was no joke having such an apparition come suddenly 



