“Is it blood?” chimed in an old man who was standing, slightly drunk, at Mr. Alexander’s other elbow.  “The most of them hounds is by the Kerry Rapparee, and he was the last of the old Moynalty Baygles.  Black dogs they were, with red eyes!  Every one o’ them as big as a yearling calf, and they’d hunt anything that’d roar before them!” He steadied himself on the new Master’s arm.  “I have them gethered in the ladies’ waiting-room, sir, the way ye’ll have no throuble.  ’Twould be as good for ye to lave the muzzles on them till ye’ll be through the town.”

Freddy Alexander cannot to this hour decide what was the worst incident of that homeward journey; on the whole, perhaps, the most serious was the escape of Governess, who subsequently ravaged the country for two days, and was at length captured in the act of killing Mrs. Alexander’s white Leghorn cock.  For a young gentleman whose experience of hounds consisted in having learned at Cambridge to some slight and painful extent that if he rode too near them he got sworn at, the purchaser of the Kerry Rapparee’s descendants had undertaken no mean task.

On the morning following on the first run of the Craffroe Hounds, Mrs. Alexander was sitting at her escritoire, making up her weekly accounts and entering in her poultry-book the untimely demise of the Leghorn cock.  She was a lady of secret enthusiasms which sheltered themselves behind habits of the most business-like severity.  Her books were models of order, and as she neatly inscribed the Leghorn cock’s epitaph, “Killed by hounds,” she could not repress the compensating thought that she had never seen Freddy’s dark eyes and olive complexion look so well as when he had tried on his new pink coat.

At this point she heard a step on the gravel outside; Bismarck uttered a bloodhound bay and got under the sofa.  It was a sunny morning in late October, and the French window was open; outside it, ragged as a Russian poodle and nearly as black, stood the tinker who had the day before wielded the frying-pan with such effect.

“Me lady,” began the tinker, “I ax yer ladyship’s pardon, but me little dog is dead.”

“Well?” said Mrs. Alexander, fixing a gaze of clear grey rectitude upon him.

“Me lady,” continued the tinker, reverentially but firmly, “’twas afther he was run by thim dogs yestherday, and ’twas your ladyship’s dog that finished him.  He tore the throat out of him under the bed!” He pointed an accusing forefinger at Bismarck, whose lambent eyes of terror glowed from beneath the valance of the sofa.

“Nonsense!  I saw your dog; he was twice my dog’s size,” said Bismarck’s mistress decidedly, not, however, without a remembrance of the blood on Bismarck’s nose.  She adored courage, and had always cherished a belief that Bismarck’s sharklike jaws implied the possession of latent ferocity.

“Ah, but he was very wake, ma’am, afther he bein’ hunted,” urged the tinker.  “I never slep’ a wink the whole night, but keepin’ sups o’ milk to him and all sorts.  Ah, ma’am, ye wouldn’t like to be lookin’ at him!”