198 STRAY- AW AYS 



of the details " given by Barrington of the " Match 

 of Hard Going," described in Chapter V, as the 

 method taken by a party of young foxhunters to 

 dissipate the ennui of a period of frost. Shut up in 

 the huntsman's cottage, with a hogshead of claret 

 and a dead cow; provided by the family piper with 

 " music's discourse most eloquent," seven young 

 gentlemen, of birth and breeding, spent seven days 

 and seven nights in devouring the cow, with the 

 assiduity of a pack of hyaenas, laughing hyaenas, no 

 doubt — Sir Jonah speaks affectionately of their 

 " jollity and good humour " — but hyaenas whose only 

 indisputable claim to humanity can be based on their 

 having emptied the hogshead of claret. 



The preface may, in charity, refuse acceptance of 

 these facts, yet it was the age of monstrous eating, of 

 immoderate drinking. Not in Ireland alone did gentle- 

 men, as our preface says, " drink, swagger, and behave 

 like swine," nor did the singular theory obtain only 

 in the eighteenth century, that the merits of " a good 

 fellow " were decided by his capacity to assume the 

 duties of a wine-barrel. There was a wine club among 

 the undergraduates of a fashionable college at Oxford, 

 what time the nineteenth century was young, that 

 apportioned merit to its members in accordance with 

 the number of corks of bottles of port that they could 

 produce in evidence of their achievements during a 

 sitting. And one of these members, as a grandfather, 

 and a singularly abstemious grandfather, has acknow- 

 ledged to a tally of six. Indisputably the Ireland 

 of the self-satisfied twentieth century can furnish 

 some incidents that might challenge comparison with 

 Barrington's most purple patches ; paler, perhaps, a 

 little, but nevertheless of good fast colours. A tale 

 is told, on sufficient authority, of a civic feast in an 

 Irish provincial town, of which the details might have 



