



Produced by Al Haines










[Frontispiece: OLD FLYNN, MOVING ALONG THE VERGE, BECAME IDYLLIC]





Further Experiences of an

Irish R.M.



By

E. [OE]. Somerville and Martin Ross


Authors of "Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.,"
  "Some Irish Yesterdays," "All on the Irish Shore,"
  "The Real Charlotte," etc. etc. etc.




With 35 Illustrations by E. [OE]. Somerville




Longmans, Green, and Co.

39 Paternoster Row, London

New York, Bombay, and Calcutta

1908

All rights reserved




_BY THE SAME AUTHORS_


SOME EXPERIENCES OF AN IRISH R.M.

With 31 Illustrations by E. [OE]. SOMERVILLE.  Crown 8vo, 6s.


SOME IRISH YESTERDAYS

With 51 Illustrations by E. [OE]. SOMERVILLE.  Crown 8vo, 6s.


AN IRISH COUSIN

Crown 8vo, 6s.


THE REAL CHARLOTTE

Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d.


THE SILVER FOX

Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d.


ALL ON THE IRISH SHORE

With 10 Illustrations by E. [OE]. SOMERVILLE.  Crown 8vo, 6s.



LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

LONDON, NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA




CONTENTS


     I.  THE PUG-NOSED FOX
    II.  A ROYAL COMMAND
   III.  POISSON D'AVRIL
    IV.  "THE MAN THAT CAME TO BUY APPLES"
     V.  A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE
    VI.  THE BOAT'S SHARE
   VII.  THE LAST DAY OF SHRAFT
  VIII.  "A HORSE!  A HORSE!" (Part I.)
    IX.  "AHORSE!  A HORSE!" (Part II.)
     X.  SHARPER THAN A FERRET'S TOOTH
    XI.  OWENEEN THE SPRAT
   XII.  THE WHITEBOYS




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


HALF-TONE


Old Flynn, moving along the verge, became idyllic.... Frontispiece

Suspicious of an ill-timed pleasantry

"Take me out of this"

Whizzed like a driven grouse past the combatants

The guard put his hand over his mouth

"And not a brown farthing more would he give"

"I'm dashed if she hasn't got Sullivan's pony"

He crowned the arrangement with the bottle of potheen

A trayful of burning sods of turf

He did not deny himself a most dissolute wink

Maria's performance was faultless

The Modulator opened with a long-drawn and nasal cadenza

"Did ye see the police!"

"Is that my darlin' Major Yeates?" shouted the cook

"I will walk--I should really prefer it"

Flurry and I put in a blazing September day on the mountain

Braney's Lake

An intricate and variously moving tide of people

"Them hounds are in my family, seed and breed, this hundred years"

"I'll go bail 'twas him that picked me wife's fashionable cocks"


IN THE TEXT


The egregious Slipper

The victim came

"Ye have them in great form, Michael"

Pure ecstasy stretched his grin from ear to ear

"They're lovely fish altogether! they're leppin' fresh!"

The invalid removed herself

Con Brickley

"Let the divil clear me out of the sthrand!"

A witness to be proud of

His mornings were spent in proffering Irish phrases

The Sergeant's manner was distressingly apologetic

"That's a great sign of fine weather when a horse will lie
    down in wather that way"

My wife came and asked me if I would take her to the workhouse

"Thim's no joke, sir, thim's Sprats!"

"He knows what's what!" said the Locum




FURTHER EXPERIENCES OF
  AN IRISH R.M.




I

THE PUG-NOSED FOX

  "5 Turkies and their Mother
  5 Ducks and the Drake
  5 Hins and the Cock
        CATHARINE O'DONOVAN, Skeagh."


A leaf from a copy-book, with these words written on it, was placed in
my hand as I was in the act of dragging on a new pair of gloves in the
stableyard.  There was something rhythmic in the category, suggestive
of burnt-offerings and incantations; some touch of pathos, pointing to
tragedy; something, finally, that in the light of previous events
recalled to me suddenly and unpleasantly my new-born position of Deputy
M.F.H.

Not, indeed, that I was in need at that moment of circumstances to
remind me of it.  A new hunting-cap, pressing implacably upon my
forehead, an equally new red coat, heavy as a coat of mail, a
glittering horn, red hot from the makers, and so far totally
unresponsive to my apoplectic wooings; these things in themselves,
without the addition of a poultry bill, were sufficient to bring home
to me my amazing folly in having succumbed to the wiles of Mr. Florence
McCarthy Knox, and accepted the charge of his hounds, during his
absence with the Irish Yeomanry at the South African war.

I had yielded in a burst of patriotic emotion to the spirit of
volunteering that was in the air.  It would be, Flurry had assured me,
a purely nominal position.

"They'll only go out one day a week, and Jerome Hickey and Michael'll
do all the work.  I do secretary for myself, but that'll be no trouble
to you.  There's nothing at all to do but to send out the cards of the
meets.  It'll be a comfort to me to think you were running the show."

I suggested other names that seemed to me infinitely more comfortable,
but found them blocked by intricate and insuperable objections, and
when I became aware that Mr. Knox had so engineered his case as to get
my wife on his side it seemed simpler to give in.

A week afterwards I saw Flurry off at the station.  His last words to
me were:

"Well, good-bye, Major.  Be fighting my grandmother for her
subscription, and whatever you do, don't give more than half-a-crown
for a donkey.  There's no meat on them."

Upon this touching farewell the train steamed out, and left me
standing, shelterless, a reluctant and incapable Master of Hounds.

Exhaustive as Flurry's instructions had been on the subject of the
cuisine and other details of kennel management, he had not even hinted
at the difficulties that are usually composed by means of a fowl fund.
My first experience of these had taken place but a week ago, when from
the breakfast-table I had perceived a donkey and cart rambling,
unattended, in the shrubberies, among the young hydrangeas and azaleas.
The owner, a most respectable looking old man, explained that he had
left it there because he was "dilicate" to bring it up to the house,
and added that he had come for compensation for "a beautiful milking
goat" that the hounds had eaten last March, "and she having two kids
that died afther her."

I asked why he had not long since been to Mr. Knox about it, and was
favoured with an interminable history of the claimant's ill-health
during the summer, consequent on his fretting after the goat; of how he
had been anointed four times, and of how the donkey was lame this long
while where a branch bet her in the thigh one day she ran into the wood
from the hounds.  Fearing that the donkey was about to be included in
the bill, I made haste to settle for the goat and her offspring, a
matter of fifteen shillings.

Next day two women took up a position on the steps at luncheon time, a
course which experience has taught me indicates affairs too exalted and
too personal to be transmitted _via_ the kitchen.  They were, according
to their own showing, ruined proprietors of poultry yards, in proof of
which they pointed to a row of decapitated hens, laid forth on the
grass like the bag at a fashionable shoot.  I was irritably aware of
their triumph in the trophy.

"Sure he didn't make off with anny of them only three, but he snapped
the heads off all that was in it, and faith, if Masther Flurry was at
home, he'd give us the blood of his arm before he'd see our little hins
desthroyed on us this way."

I gave them thirty-two and sixpence as an alternative compensation,
not, I admit, without an uneasy sense of something unusual in Peter
Cadogan's expression, as he assiduously raked the gravel hard by.

It was Michael Leary, Flurry's Michael, who placed the matter of a fowl
fund upon a basis.  Catharine O'Donovan and her list of casualties had
been dismissed at a cost of ten shillings, a price so inadequate, and
so cheerfully accepted, as to confirm my dawning suspicions.

"Is it what would they get from Mr. Flurry?" replied Michael when I put
the matter to him; "it isn't ten shillings, no, nor thirty-two
shillings that they'd get from him, but a pelt of a curse after their
heels!  Why wouldn't they keep their hens inside in the house with
themselves at night, the same as annyone that'd have sense, and not to
leave them out enticing the fox this way."

Michael was in a bad temper, and so, for the matter of that, was I,
quite irrespective of dealings in poultry.  Our red coats, our horses,
and the presence of the hounds, did not betoken the chase, they merely
indicated that the Hunt was about to be photographed.  The local
photographer, backed by Mrs. Sinclair Yeates, had extorted from me the
privilege of "a sitting," a figurative expression, involving a ride of
five miles to a covert, selected by my wife as being typical of the
country, accompanied by the fourteen and a-half couple of half-bred
harriers who figured in Hound Lists as "Mr. Knox's Fox-hounds."

It was a blazing day in late August, following on forty-eight hours of
blanketing sea-fog; a day for flannels and a languid game of croquet.
Lady Jane, the grey mare lent to me by Flurry, had been demoralised by
her summer at grass, and was in that peculiarly loathsome frame of mind
that is a blend of laziness and bumptiousness.  If I left her to her
own devices she drowsed, stumbling, through the dust; if I corrected
her, she pranced and pulled, and kicked up behind like a donkey.  My
huntsman, Doctor Jerome Hickey, who was to have been in the forefront
of the photograph, was twenty miles off in an open boat, on his way to
an island at the far end of his dispensary district, with fifteen cases
of measles ahead of him.  I envied him; measles or no, he had on a
turned down collar.  As a result of his absence I rode in solitary
dignity at the head of the pack, or, to speak more correctly, I
preceded Michael by some thirty yards of unoccupied road, while the
pack, callous to flogging, and disdainful of my cajoleries, clave to
the heels of Michael's horse.

In this order, we arrived at the tryst, a heathery hill side, flanked
by a dense and rambling wood.  A sea-gull scream from the hill-side
announced the presence of my wife, and summoned me to join her and the
photographer at the spot where they were encamped.  I put the mare at a
suitable place in the wall by the roadside.  She refused it, which was
no more than I had expected.  I sampled my new spurs on her fat sides,
with the result that she charged the wall, slantways, at the exact spot
where Philippa had placed her bicycle against it, missed the bicycle by
a hair's-breadth, landed in the field with a thump, on all four feet,
and ended with two most distressing bucks.  It was a consolation to me,
when I came in touch again with the saddle, to find that one of the new
spurs had ploughed a long furrow in her shoulder.

The photographer was a young man from Belfast, a new comer to the
neighbourhood; Philippa is also a photographer, a fact that did not
tend as much as might have been expected to the harmony of the occasion.

"Mrs. Yeates has selected this hillock," said Mr. McOstrich, in tones
of acrid resignation, indicating as he spoke a sugar-loaf shaped knoll,
thickly matted with furze and heather.  "She considers the background
characteristic.  My own suggestion would have been the grass-field
yonder."

It is an ancient contention of my wife that I, in common with all other
men, in any dispute between a female relative and a tradesman, side
with the tradesman, partly from fear, partly from masculine
clannishness, and most of all from a desire to stand well with the
tradesman.  Nothing but the remembrance of this preposterous reproach
kept me from accepting Mr. McOstrich's point of view, and, while I
hesitated, Michael was already taking up his position on the hillock,
perhaps in obedience to some signal from Philippa, perhaps because he
had realised the excellent concealment afforded by the deep heather to
his horse's fetlocks, whose outline was of a somewhat gouty type.  It
was part of Flurry Knox's demoniac gift for horseflesh that he should
be able to buy screws and make them serve his exacting purposes.
Michael's horse, Moses, had, at a distance, the appearance of standing
upon four champagne bottles, but he none the less did the work of two
sound horses and did it well.

I goaded Lady Jane through the furze, and established myself beside
Michael on the sugarloaf, the hounds disposed themselves in an interval
of bracken below, and Mr. McOstrich directed his camera upon us from an
opposite <DW72>.

"Show your teeth, please," said Mr. McOstrich to Michael.  Michael,
already simmering with indignation at the senseless frivolity of the
proceedings, glowered at his knuckles, evidently suspicious of an
ill-timed pleasantry.

[Illustration: SUSPICIOUS OF AN ILL-TIMED PLEASANTRY]

"Do you hear, Whip?" repeated Mr. McOstrich, raising his bleak northern
voice, "show your teeth, please!"

"He only wants to focus us," said I, foreseeing trouble, and hurriedly
displaying my own new front row in a galvanic smile.

Michael murmured to Moses' withers something that sounded like a
promise to hocus Mr. McOstrich when occasion should serve, and I
reflected on the hardship of having to feel apologetic towards both
Michael and the photographer.

Only those who have participated in "Hunt Groups" can realise the
combined tediousness and tension of the moments that followed.  To keep
thirty hounds headed for the camera, to ensure that your horse has not
closed its eyes and hung its head in a doze of boredom, to preserve for
yourself that alert and workmanlike aspect that becomes a sportsman,
and then, when these things have been achieved and maintained for what
feels like a month, to see the tripod move in spider strides to a fresh
position and know that all has to be begun over again.  After several
of these tentative selections of a site, the moment came when Mr.
McOstrich swung his black velvet pall in the air and buried his head
under its portentous folds.  The hounds, though uneasy, had hitherto
been comparatively calm, but at this manifestation their nerve broke,
and they unanimously charged the glaring monster in the black hood with
loud and hysterical cries.

Had not Michael perceived their intention while there was time awful
things might have happened.  As it was, the leaders were flogged off
with ignominy, and the ruffled artist returned from the rock to which
he had fled.  Michael and I arranged ourselves afresh upon the hillock;
I squared my shoulders, and felt my wonted photographic expression of
hang-dog desperation settle down upon me.

"The dogs are not in the picture, Whip!" said Mr. McOstrich in the
chill tone of outraged dignity.

I perceived that the hounds, much demoralised, had melted away from the
<DW72> in front of us, and were huddling in a wisp in the intervening
hollow.  Blandishments were of no avail; they wagged and beamed
apologetically, but remained in the hollow.  Michael, in whose
sensitive bosom the term "Whip" evidently rankled, became scarlet in
the face and avalanched from the hill top upon his flock with a fury
that was instantly recognised by them.  They broke in panic, and the
astute and elderly Venus, followed by two of the young entry, bolted
for the road.  They were there met by Mr. McOstrich's carman, who most
creditably headed the puppies with yells and his driving-whip, but was
out-played by Venus, who, dodging like a football professional, doubled
under the car horse, and fled irrevocably.  Philippa, who had been
flitting from rock to rock with her kodak, and unnerving me with
injunctions as to the angle of my cap, here entered the lists with a
packet of sandwiches, with which, in spite of the mustard, she restored
a certain confidence to the agitated pack, a proceeding observed from
afar with trembling indignation by Minx, her fox-terrier.  By reckless
expenditure of sandwich the hounds