Dinny Johnny ran to the door, moved by an impulse for which I think the hot whisky and water must have been responsible.

“I’ll give you twelve pounds for the pony, ma’am!” he called out.

A quarter of an hour later, when he and the publican were tying a tow-rope round the pony’s lean neck, Mr. Denny was aware of a sinking of the heart as he surveyed his bargain.  It looked, and was, an utterly degraded little object, as it stood with its tail tucked in between its drooping hindquarters, and the rain running in brown streams down its legs.  Its lips were decorated with the absurd, the almost incredible moustache that is the consequence among Irish horses of a furze diet (I would hesitatingly direct the attention of the male youth of Britain to this singular but undoubted fact), and although the hot whisky and water had not exaggerated the excellence of its shoulder and the iron soundness of its legs, it had certainly reversed the curve of its neck and levelled the corrugations of its ribs.

“You could strike a bally match on her, this minute, if it wasn’t so wet!” thought Mr. Denny, and with the simple humour that endeared him to his friends he christened the pony “Matchbox” on the spot.

“And it’s to make a hunther of her ye’d do?” said the publican, pulling hard at the knot of the tow-rope.  “Begor’, I know that one.  If there was forty men and their wives, and they after her wid sticks, she wouldn’t lep a sod o’ turf.  Well, safe home, sir, safe home, and mind out she wouldn’t kick ye.  She’s a cross thief,” and with this valediction Dinny Johnny went on his way.

There was no disputing the fact of the pony’s crossness.

“She’s sourish-like in her timper,” Jimmy, Mr. Denny’s head man, observed to his subordinate not long after the arrival, and the subordinate, tenderly stroking a bruised knee, replied:—­

“Sour!  I niver see the like of her!  Be gannies, the divil’s always busy with her!”

On one point, however, the grey pony proved better than had been anticipated.  Without the intervention of the forty married couples she took to jumping at once.

“It comes as aisy to her as lies to a tinker,” said Jimmy to a criticising friend; “the first day ever I had her out on a string she wint up to the big bounds fence between us and Barrett’s as indipindant as if she was going to her bed; and she jumped it as flippant and as crabbed—­By dam, she’s as crabbed as a monkey!”

In those days Mr. Standish O’Grady, popularly known as “Owld Sta’,” had the hounds, and it need scarcely be said that Mr. Denny was one of his most faithful followers.  This season he had not done as well as usual.  The colt was only turning out moderately, and though the pony was undoubtedly both crabbed and flippant, she could not be expected to do much with nearly twelve stone on her back.  It happened, therefore, that Mr. Denny took his pleasure a little sadly, with his loins girded in momentary