194 STRAY -AW AYS 



look at him, five or six thousand more people, but 

 that is nothing to him; he has been looked at hard 

 from the hour of his birth, and his virtues have been 

 proelaimed before his shy face; he has evoked simile 

 and epigram even while yet he hid behind his mother. 

 He has also heard his detractors ; they may even 

 have accused him very loudly of " having no more 

 bone than a dog," or of a habit of " boxing himself," 

 or of having " a fashion of twining the leg," even of 

 " going light on the former leg " (which, it may be 

 explained, means being slightly lame in a fore), a 

 matter at once met by the extenuating circumstance 

 that he was " growing a splinter." Intense and 

 untiring observation has been accorded to him 

 throughout his life, therefore he moves in stately 

 docility in the big rings, where the people lean thick 

 to follow his movements, and the dealer beckons him 

 to the rails, and the heated tide of encomium is met 

 by the glacier stream of detraction, and out of these 

 is brought forth, like a chaud-froid, the Bargain. He 

 is passed on, probably, almost certainly, to England 

 and to Germany, but that early life of his, among a 

 clever people wiio expected him to be as clever and 

 intuitive as they, has made him what he is, as surely 

 as Gal way limestone or Munster pastures have entered 

 into his bones. Has not an English cavalry sergeant- 

 major told the present writer, while looking on at 

 " stables " at Aldershot, that the Irish horses who 

 passed into the regiment learned their work in a 

 noticeably shorter time than any other ? So it should 

 be with those of their upbringing. 



It is, of course, in that unique jumping enclosure of 

 Ball's Bridge, when he springs to his work, ignoring, 

 in spite of his sensitive soul, the slope of faces in the 

 enormous stand, the solid ring of them framing the 

 long oval of grass, that he displays his greatest 



