Sporting Reminiscences by the Same Author
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746 Webster FamHy Library of Vetennary Med»c»ne Cummmgs School o^ Vetennary Medicine at Tufts University 200 Westboro Road North Grafton, MA 01536 SPORTING REMINISCENCES BY THE SAME AUTHOR THE STRAYINGS OF SANDY THRKK GIRI.S AND A HERMIT ' TWO IMPOSTORS AND TINKER THE CONVERSION OF CONGRECAN AUNT JANK AND INCLE JAMES LADY ELVERTON'S EMERALDS SOME HAPPENINGS OF GLENDALVNE THE BOY, SOME HORSES, AND A GIIJL SALLY SANDY MARRIED OLD ANDY A MIXED PACK THE BLIGHTING OF BARTKAM B. E. N. TIRANOGliE SPORTING REMINISCENCES BY DOROTHEA CONYERS SECOND ElimoV METHUEN & CO. LTD. 36 ESSEX STREET W.G. LONDON iO First Published . January 22nd ig20 Second Edition . ig20 CONTENTS PAGE I. Very Early Hunting Days I II. Some Packs I have Hunted with and their Masters 22 III. Autobiographical Odds and Ends 50 IV. The Best Run I have Ever Had 63 V. Stray Memories of the Country People 71 VI. Cases and Races .... 105 VII. Hotels and Otherwise 119 VIII. Irish Servants .... 131 IX. Some Good Horses and Some Frauds . 152 X. How Some People Buy their Horses and How Some are Sold .... 171 XI. Some Hunting Stories . 195 XII. Some Irish Customs 217 XIII. Kerry, Connemara, and Clare . 228 XIV. Superstitions and Strange Hauntings . 251 XV. Ireland Still Unchanged at the Last . 281 J. SPORTING REMINISCENCES CHAPTER I VERY EARLY HUNTING DAYS THINK I should like this book to consist of about a dozen words and then a toast. I Chapter I—Fox hunting with all the honours. Chapter the last, a toast—Fox hunting ; but perhaps my funds for fox hunting next year might be curtailed if I simply sent that to my kindly publishers. I cannot remember how old I was—probably about three, if one can recall oneself at that age, when I was first lifted on a horse in one of the stables at home—but I remember it quite well. My joy in the life I felt under me, my mischievous little heels drumming at a big sleek side ; my fury because they would not let me ride out of the box. My mother, a very fine rider herself, taught me to ride (sideways) without a saddle. We were allowed a girth to hold on to and very long hair, because my stud consisted of an ass called Donna Inez, and a milk pony ; but my mother believed in balance. I could gallop and trot, and in the end even jump 2 SPORTING REMINISCENCES something small before she gave me a saddle. She could ride anything herself and spent her days on wild two and three year olds which tied themselves into knots as they bucked in the early mornings. In her hunting days, before she married, there were only two ladies riding across country, the County Limerick Hounds, Lady Humble and herself. Later Miss Massey made a third. I am afraid I was born to love horses too well. How much my patient ass endured I never like to think of. With Peter, a youth who followed me at a gasping trot, I was always off somewhere. Without Peter I was also off, but not so decor- ously. I can recall the day now, I was seven then, when I saw one of the jennets tied up in the yard, and immediately took it away. It was a very spirited and willing jennet, but its efforts to jump the boggy garden trench, a small ditch with crumbling peaty edges, were not crowned with success. When my father came out after the men's dinner hour, the jennet did not, and it was hay-making time. Where was it ? Had Miss Dora seen it ? Miss Dora in a very small voice thought that she had . quite lately . where ? "At the bottom of the boggy garden trench, Papa. It is " lying in the cool there "What a very peculiar place for a jennet to Stray tg," VERY EARLY HUNTING DAYS 3 No one betrayed the fact that Miss Dora had spent twenty minutes schooHng it there as she had seen the grooms school the youngsters, before she succeeded in knocking it into the deep trench. My walk in the procession to rescue the jennet was tempered with remorse, and later I confessed my sins. I can see now a kindly but peppery father looking for his lost jennet, and a small child listening to the men as they discussed its dis- appearance. "She has the reins broke, Johnny Kennedy. She has not, Jim Mack. Let ye have sinse. Is there a trace of a broken rein on the post she was tied to ? Thin someone loosed her. She is that crabbed some maybe she loosed herself." My father told me with decision that I was not to grow up into a jockey and nothing else, but we were soon picking the spotted white moss apples together to throw to the labourers, and before tea-time I was hammering old Grampus the bay farm horse backwards and forwards from tram cock to wynds. Why does hay never smell now as it did then, and why is everything done by machinery, too quickly and easily ? No one ever knows the joy of a ride on the top of a moving mass of hay, and the surreptitious delight of working forward until it overbalances and one goes buried in sweet hot grass out under the big horse's heels, **I toult ye that tram was too high entirely, 4 SPORTING REMINISCENCES God save us an' the Colonel with his eye on us. Miss Dora will be thrampled below. Lift the hay an' don't be talkin', ye bosthoon," would go the chorus. I wonder if they knew that I used to get over on purpose. There was one old man, Johnny Kennedy, who always built his haycocks crooked, and I re- member how all the others used to laugh at him. I suppose I learnt something in those days, but I can only remember being always out in the garden or on the farm, and generally alone. I believed in the Fairies firmly. My old nurse taught us to. I used to creep out to the Forths and watch there to see Uttle men ride out on white horses, and to hear the fairy cobbler tap tap at his shoes, and then go racing home wild with terror if a blackbird flew out of the thick thorn trees. There was a black dark walk too where Fear lived, which I could never pass through except at a run, and even up to the time we left the farm, a big girl would take to her heels and scurry through the gloom from the new garden door. As to my efforts to kill myself, fortunately nothing alarmed my mother. I used to run round the high garden walls, to swing from end to end of a wood without touching ground, and jump from the highest section of a half-full haybarn to the lowest, and drop from the bathroom window. VERY EARLY HUNTING DAYS 5 My father drew pictures for us, and mine, I remember, always had to be on some animal. To tease me he generally depicted me side-saddle upon a pig, my small form comically attired in top hat and tight habit. No perfectly cut garment from Scott will ever give me the keen joy of my first cut down habit, an old one of my mother's. A light blue thing, with black braid on it and little coat tails. This lapped across me somehow, and the tail twisted round my small legs, became mine when I was eight, together with a saddle resembling the Beast in Revelation — a thing of many horns. It materiaUsed out of the gloom of a chill November morning, put into my room when I was asleep, and I think I turned every buckle, and knew every line, and its smell of dressed leather was as in- cense. Children did not get everything they wanted in those days, and I had dreamt of a saddle as a far-off possibility. Poor Topsy, she must have regretted its arrival. My father and mother both hunted, though she never had a trained hunter. I have always seen her on raw three year olds, and even her iron nerves gave way. Curiously, just before she died, her mind affected by a stroke, her one idea was to ride again and she was always begging, childishly, to be taken out for a hunt. My father was fond of it too in a milder way. 6 SPORTING REMINISCENCES He had a very fine thoroughbred called Sarsefield, which was given to him and which caused, when I was aged seven, a real scare about a horse- demented little girl. Sarsefield was bred, so far as I can remember, by Colonel Jesse Lloyd of Ballyleck, and ran in the Derby, but, upset by the crossing, only finished fifth. He was supposed to have had a good chance. He then turned savage and ate a man or two, one certainly, and was given to my father to see what he could do with him. He was put out on grass on the lawn. All the men doubtless warned but the small child for- gotten. I saw a horse loose. How I made over- tures I don't know. My favourite playground was the plantation bordering the lawn. There was a hollow in a tree there which I was sure held a fairy, and I used to build little houses there and dwell alone. I was years younger than the others, who were mysterious big people to me.