I have thought of leaving it to our books to express and explain the part that hunting has played in Martin’s life and mine; but when I remember (to quote once again those much-quoted lines) how much of the fun that we have had in our lives has been “owed to horse and hound,” I feel an acknowledgment more direct and deliberate is due.

Almost the first thing that I can remember is the duplicity of my grandfather on my behalf in the matter of the hounds. He had been forbidden by his doctor to hunt; he had also been forbidden by the ladies of his household to permit the junior lady of that establishment, then aged five, to “go anywhere near the hounds.” None the less, by a succession of remarkable accidents, not wholly disconnected with the fact that my grandfather had had the West Carbery hounds himself at one time and knew the country as well as the foxes did, he and I rarely missed a sight of them, and, on one memorable day, we cut in at a moment that bestowed upon us the finish of the run and gained for me the brush. Absurdly bestowed, of course, but none the less glorious. The glory was dimmed a little by the fact that just after the presentation had been made my pony rolled, and a kind but tactless young man picked me up, like a puppy, and deposited me on my saddle, instead of mounting me as a gentleman should mount a lady. Nevertheless, I can confidently say that the proudest moment of my life was when I rode home with the brush.

My grandfather had hunted for a few seasons, when he was a young man, with what he, after the fashion of his day, called “the Dook of Beaufort’s” hounds. He brought over a West Carbery horse, Diamond by name, a flea-bitten grey, and he earned for his owner the honourable title of “That damned Irishman.” There is an old saying, “Nothing stops a Carbery man,” and I imagine that the title aforesaid was applied with special fervour when the hunt went into the stone-wall country and Diamond began to sing songs of Zion and enjoy himself.

Hunting in West Carbery died out when I was a child, and the hounds were in abeyance for many years. Political troubles and bad times generally had led to their temporary extinction, and such hunting as came my way was in countries far from Carbery. Of the Masters of those days not one is now left. Hard goers and good sportsmen all round, and men too, many of them, of the old-fashioned classical culture. It is told of the last of that old brigade that during his last illness, a short time before he died, he said he supposed he “would d——d soon be shooting woodcock in Mars with Johnny B.” (who was another of the same heroic mould), and if his supposition was justified, the Martian cock are likely to have had a bad time of it.

In 1891 my brother Aylmer restarted the old West Carbery foxhounds, and then indeed did that madness of the chase, of which we have treated in “Dan Russel the Fox,” descend upon us all. The first step in the affair was the raising, by means of concerts, public meetings, and mendicancy generally, a sum of money; the second was the purchase of a small pack from a private owner. These arrived with the title of “B.’s Rioters,” and it is not too much to say that we rioted with them. It was, at first, all thoroughly informal and entirely delightful; later we fell into the grip of professionals, who did things as they should be done, and inflicted decorum upon us and the Rioters. The days of “Danny-O” and “Patsey Sweeny” passed, and the thrill died out of the diaries.

No longer are such items to be found as:

“Jack, Martin, and I took hounds to walk out with Patsey. Came on a hare.” (This means that we went to look for a hare, ardently and with patience.) “Ran her for two and a half hours, all on our own miserable legs. Lost her in darkness. All pretty tired when we got back to kennels.”

Or again. “Aylmer, Martin, and I went to kennels and christened the new draft, seven and a half couple of puppies. Coupled them and tried to take them out. The instant they were coupled they went stark mad and fought, mostly in the air; it looked like a battle of German heraldic eagles.”

Other entries, which I decline to make public, relate to drags, disreputably laid, for disreputable reasons, and usually dedicated to English visitors, who did not always appreciate the attention.

My brother kept the hounds going for twelve seasons, during which we had the best of sport and learned to know the people and the country in the way that hunting alone can teach. After his long term

of office had ended, a farmer summed up for me the opinion that the country people had of him:

“He was the King of the world for them! If he rode his horses into their beds they’d ask no better!”

When he gave up in 1903, I followed him in the Mastership, which I have held, with an interval of four years, ever since. “Of all sitivations under the sun, none is more enviable or ’onerable than that of a Master of fox’ounds,” Mr. Jorrocks observes, and further states that his “’ead is nothin’ but one great bump of ‘untin’!” I do not say that things have gone as far as this with me, but I will admit that the habit of keeping hounds is a very clinging one.

Many congratulations and much encouragement were bestowed upon me when I bought the hounds and took office, but warnings were not wanting. A friend, himself a Master of Hounds, wrote to me and said that it required “the patience of Job, and the temper of a saint, and the heart of a lion, to navigate a pack of foxhounds,” and there have undoubtedly been occasions when for me the value of all these attributes was conspicuously proved by their absence at need.

If Mr. Jorrocks’s estimate of the job is to be accepted, it is, from my point of view, chiefly in the kennels that the “enviable” aspect of mastership is to be found. I have spoken of three hounds, specially beloved, but the restriction of the number is only made out of consideration for those readers whose patience could stand no more. It is customary to despise the ignorant and unlearned in hound matters, but I have too often witnessed their sufferings to do aught save pity. To be a successful kennel visitor is given to so few. I have sometimes wondered which is most to be pitied, the sanguine huntsman, drawing his hounds one by one, in the ever-renewed belief that he has found an admirer who knows how to admire, ending in bitterness and “letting them all come”; or the straining visitor, groping for the right word and praising the wrong hound. In one of Mr. Howell’s books there is a certain “Tom Corey,” who, though without a sense of humour, yet feels a joke in his heart from sheer lovableness. Even so did one of my aunts feel the hounds in her heart. Her sympathy and admiration enchanted my huntsman; he waxed more and more eloquent, and all would have been well had not “Tatters,” a broken-haired fox-terrier, come into view.

“Oh!” exclaimed my Aunt S. rapturously, “what a darling little hound! I like it the best of them all!”

The disaster of a sigh too much, or a kiss too long, was never more tragically exemplified.

Subsequently she was heard describing her visit to the kennels; amongst other details she noted with admiration that L., the huntsman, and I knew the name of each hound.

“Edith is wonderful!” she said fervently, “she knows them all! If she wants one of them she just says, ‘Here, Spot! Spot! Spot!’”

One gathered that the response to this classic hound name was instant.

Huntsmen have, in their way, almost as much to put up with as writers in the matter of cross-examination.

“And do you really know them? Each one?”

“And have they all got names?”

Then, upon explanation that there are enough names to go round, “And do you absolutely know them all?”

L., like Tom Corey, was unsustained by a sense of humour, and nothing but his lovableness enabled him to fulfil that most difficult of Christian duties, to suffer fools gladly.

“Lor, Master, what silly questions they do ask!” he has permitted himself to say sometimes, when all was over. Yet, as I have said, sympathy should also be reserved for the inquirers. Insatiable as is the average mother for admiration of her young, she is as water unto wine compared with a huntsman and his hounds. Few people have put a foot deeper into trouble than I have myself, on the occasion of a visit to a very smart pack in England. I had, I hope, come respectably through a minute inspection of the hounds, and, that crucial trial safely past, the Queen of Sheba tottered, spent, but thankful for preservation, into the saddle-room, a vast and impressive apartment, there to be shown, and to express fitting admiration for, the trophies of the chase that adorned it. All round the panelled walls were masks, beautifully mounted, grinning and snarling over their silver name-plates. And I, accustomed to the long-jawed wolves that we call foxes in West Carbery, said in all good faith,

“What a number of cubs you have killed!”

The Master said, icily, that those were foxes, and the subject dropped.

Poor L. is dead now; a keener little huntsman never blew a horn, but he never quite succeeded in hitting it off with the farmers and country people; they were incomprehensible to each other, alike in speech and in spirit. L. despised anyone who got out of bed later than 5 A.M., winter and summer alike, and would boast of having got all his work done before others were out of their beds, which was trying to people with whom early rising is not a foible. He found it impossible to divine the psychology of the lads who jovially told him that they had seen the fox and had “cruisted him well” (which meant that they had stoned him back into covert when he tried to break). It is hard to kill foxes in Carbery, and L. was much exercised about the frequent disappointments that them pore ’ounds had to endure as a result of bad earth-stopping. One wet day, on arriving at the meet, I found him in a state of high indignation. The covert we were to draw was a very uncertain find, and it transpired that L. had secretly arranged with the farmer on whose land it was, that he was to turn down a bagman in it. “He said he could get one easy, and you’d ’ardly think it, Master, but the feller tells me now it was a tame fox of ’is own he was going to turn down, and now he says to me he thinks the day is too wet to bring out such a little pet! ‘A little pet!’ ’e says!”

The human voice is incapable of an accent of more biting scorn than L. imparted to his as he spoke these words. I am unable to determine if L.’s wrath were attributable to the farmer’s heartlessness in having been willing to hunt a tame fox, or to his affectation of consideration for it, or whether it was the result of rage and disappointment on behalf of the hounds. I incline to the last theory.

I have hunted with a good many packs in Ireland of very varying degrees of grandeur, and Ireland is privileged in unconventionalism; nevertheless, it was in England, with a highly fashionable Leicestershire pack, that I was privileged to behold an incident that might have walked out of the pages of Charles Lever into the studio of Randolph Caldecott.

I had brought over a young mare to ride and sell; she and I were the guests of two of the best riders in England and the nicest people in the world (which is sufficient identification for those that know the couple in question). It was my first day with an English pack and it had been a good one. Hunting for the day was at an end, and we had turned our horses for home, when the fight flared up. High on the ridge of a hill, dark against a frosty evening sky, I can still see the combatants, with their whips in the air, laying in to each other happily and whole-heartedly for quite a minute or two, before peacemakers came rushing up, and what had been a pretty, old-fashioned quarrel was patted down into a commonplace, to be dealt with by the family solicitors.

I had had my own little fracas that day. The young mare was hot, and took me over a place which included a hedge, and a wet ditch, and an old gentleman who had waited in the ditch while his horse went on. I feared, from what I could gather as I proceeded on my way, that he was annoyed, but as I had caught sight of him just in time to tell him to lie down, I could not feel much to blame.

I had an English huntsman for two or three seasons whose keenness was equalled (rather unexpectedly) by his piety. He was an extraordinarily hard man to go (“No silly joke of a man to ride,” as I have heard it put), and his excitement when hounds began to run would release itself in benedictions.

“Gawd bless you, Governor boy! Gawd bless you, Rachel my darling! Come along, Master! Come along! He’s away, thank Gawd! He’s away!”

There was a day when hounds took us across a bad bit of bog and there checked. Harry, the whipperin, also an Englishman, and not learned in bogs, got in rather deep. His horse got away from him, and while he was floundering, waist-deep in black and very cold bog-water, he saw the hunted fox creeping into a patch of furze and rocks. He holloa’d to G., who galloped up as near as was advisable.

“Where is ’e, ’Arry?” he roared.

“Be’ind o’ them rocks ’e went. I wouldn’t ’a seen ’im only for gettin’ into this somethin’ ’ole,” replied Harry, dragging himself out of the slough. “Can’t ye catch me ’orse?”

“That’s all right, ’Arry! You wouldn’t ’a viewed ’im only for the ’ole. All things works together for good with them that loves Gawd!”

With which G. laid on his hounds, and left Harry to comfort himself with this reflection and to catch his horse when he could.

G.’s word in season reminds me of a prayer that my nephew, Paddy Coghill (whose infant devotions have already been referred to), offered on his sixth birthday, one “Patrick’s Day in the morning.”

“And oh, Lord God, make it a good day for hunting, and make me sit straight on Kelpie, and show me how to hold my reins.”

He subsequently went to the meet, himself and pony so covered with shamrock that Tim C. (the then huntsman) told him the goats would eat him. I cannot now vouch for the first clause of the petition having been granted, but the R.F.A. Riding School has guaranteed that the latter ones were fulfilled.

It is impossible for me to write a chapter about hunting without speaking of Bridget, a little grey mare who is bracketed with Candy, “Equal First.” I have been so happy as to have owned many good hunters. Lottery, by Speculation, a chestnut mare who died untimely, staked by a broken bough in a gap (and, strangely enough, her brother, “Spec,” is the only other horse who has in this country, thank heaven, had the same hard fate); Tarbrush, a black but comely lady, of whom it was said that she was “a jumper in airnest, who would face up and beyond anything she could see,” and would, if perturbed in temper, go very near to “kicking the stars out of the sky”; Little Tim, a pocket Hercules, worthy to be named with George Borrow’s tremendous “Irish cob”; and Kitty, whose flippancy is such that it has been said to have consoled the country boys for a blank day. “They were well satisfied,” said a competent judge, “Kitty filled their eye.”

But, as with Candy among dogs, so, among horses, Bridget leads, the rest nowhere. Her father was a thoroughbred horse, her mother a Bantry mountain pony. She herself was very little over 15 hands 1 inch, and she succeeded in combining the cunning and goat-like activity of the spindle side of the house with all the heroic qualities of her father’s family.

“She has a plain head,” said a rival horse-coper, who had been so unfortunate as not to have seen her before I did, “but that suits the rest of her!”

I suppose it was a plain head, but anyone who had sat behind it and seen its ears prick at sight of the coming “lep” would not think much of its plainness. I hunted her for ten seasons, and she never gave me a fall that was not strictly necessary. Since her retirement from the Hunt stables she has acted as nursery governess to a succession of rising riders, and at the age of seventeen she carried Martin for a season, and thought little, with that feather-weight, of keeping where both of them loved to be, at “the top of the Hunt.”

The West Carbery Hunt was once honoured by a visit from an American hunting woman, a lady who had been sampling various British hunts and who was a critic whose good opinion was worth having. She was an accomplished rider and a very hard goer, and her enjoyment of such sport as we were able to show her was eminently gratifying. She made, however, one comment upon the country which has not been forgotten. We had a ringing fox who rather overdid his anxiety to show the visitor a typical West Carbery line. He took us round and about a particularly typical hill more often than was requisite, and he declined to demonstrate the fact that we possessed any grass country, or any sound and civilised banks. Our visitor had the hunt, such as it was, with the best, and spoke with marked enthusiasm of the agility of our horses. Later I heard her discussing the events of the day.

“We jumped one place,” said my visitor, “and I said to myself, ‘Well, I suppose that never on God’s earth shall I see a thing like that again!’ And after that,” she went on, “we jumped it five times.”

I might prolong this chapter indefinitely with stories of hunting; of old times in Meath, with Captain “Jock” Trotter, or Mr. John Watson, when Martin and I hunted there with our cousins, Ethel and Jim Penrose; of characteristically blazing gallops with the Galway Blazers, in recent years, ably piloted by Martin’s eldest brother, Jim Martin; of many a good day at home in our own country. But an end must be made, and this chapter may fitly close with a letter of Martin’s. The hunt of which she writes did not take place with the West Carbery, but the country she describes is very similar to ours, and the incidents might as well have occurred here.

The reference to “a sound horse” may be explained by the fact that owing to her exceeding short sight we insisted on her being mounted only on old and thoroughly reliable hunters, who were able to take care of her as well as of themselves; it need hardly be added that such will not invariably pass a vet.

It was ten years from the date of her bad accident before she was able to get out hunting again; this chapter may well end with what she then wrote to Mrs. Campbell.

“I have once more pottered forth with the hounds, and have had some real leps, and tasted the wine of life again.”

* * * * *

There are some whose names will never be forgotten in Carbery who will drink no more with us what Martin Ross has called the Wine of Life. For her that cup is set aside, and with her now are three of the best of the lads whose pride and pleasure it used to be to wear the velvet cap of the hunt servant, and to turn hounds in West Carbery. Gallant soldiers, dashing riders, dear boys; they have made the supreme sacrifice for their country, and they will ride no more with us.

The hunt goes on; season follows season; the heather dies on the hills and the furze blossoms again in the spring. Other boys will come out to follow hounds, and learn those lessons that hunting best can teach, but there will never be better than those three: Ralph and Gerald Thornycroft, and Harry Becher.

“Bred to hunting they was,” said the old huntsman, who loved them, and has now, like them, crossed that last fence of all, “every one o’ them. Better gentlemen to cross a country I never see.”