this narrow trench and a low, rotten fence, and the fool behaved as though she wanted to jump it all.  I hope no one will ever erect an equestrian statue in my honour; now that I have experienced the sensation of ramping over nothing, I find I dislike it.  I believe I might have been there now, but just then a couple of hounds came up, and before I knew what she was at, the filly had jumped down after them into the trench as if she had been doing it all her life.  I was not long about picking the others up; the filly could gallop anyhow, and we thundered on over ground where, had I been on foot, I should have liked a guide and an alpenstock.  At intervals we jumped things made of sharp stones, and slates, and mud; I don’t know whether they were banks or walls.  Sometimes the horses changed feet on them, sometimes they flew the whole affair, according to their individual judgment.  Sometimes we were splashing over sedgy patches that looked and felt like buttered toast, sometimes floundering through stuff resembling an ill-made chocolate souffle, whether intended for a ploughed field or a partially drained bog-hole I could not determine, and all was fenced as carefully as cricket-pitches.  Presently the hounds took a swing to the left and over the edge of the hill again, and our leader Jerry turned sharp off after them, down a track that seemed to have been dug out of the face of the hill.  I should have liked to get off and lead, but they did not give me time, and we suddenly found ourselves joined to Robert Trinder and his company of infantry, all going hard for the oak wood that I mentioned before.

It was pretty to see the yellow horse jump.  Nothing came amiss to him, and he didn’t seem able to make a mistake.  There was a stone stile out of a bohireen that stopped every one, and he changed feet on the flag on top and went down by the steps on the other side.  No one need believe this unless they like, but I saw him do it.  The country boys were most exhilarating.  How they got there I don’t know, but they seemed to spring up before us wherever we went.  They cheered every jump, they pulled away the astounding obstacles that served as gates (such as the end of an iron bedstead, a broken harrow, or a couple of cartwheels), and their power of seeing the fox through a stone wall or a hill could only be equalled by the Roentgen rays.  We fought our way through the oak wood, and out over a boggy bounds ditch into open country at last.  The Rioters had come out of the wood on a screaming scent, and big and little were running together in a compact body, followed, like the tail of a kite, by a string of yapping country curs.  The country was all grass, enchantingly green and springy; the jumps were big, yet not too big, and there were no two alike; the filly pulled hard, but not too hard, and she was jumping like a deer; I felt that all I had heard of Irish hunting had not been overstated.

We had been running for half an hour when we checked at a farmhouse; the yellow horse had been leading the hunt all the time, making a noise like a steam-engine, but perfectly undefeated, and our numbers were reduced to five.  An old woman and a girl rushed out of the yard to meet us, screaming like sea-gulls.