Of course I bought her.  I could hardly do less.  I told Robert he might give her to the hounds, but he sent her over to me in a couple of months as good as new, and I won the regimental steeplechase cup with her last April.

A NINETEENTH-CENTURY MIRACLE

Captain “Pat” Naylor, of the —­th Dragoons, had the influenza.  For three days he had lain prostrate, a sodden and aching victim to the universal leveller, and an intolerable nuisance to his wife.  This last is perhaps an over-statement; Mrs. Naylor was in the habit of bearing other people’s burdens with excellent fortitude, but she felt justly annoyed that Captain Pat should knock up before they had fairly settled down in their new quarters, and while yet three of the horses were out of sorts after the crossing from England.

Pilot, however, was quite fit, a very tranquillising fact, and one that Mrs. Pat felt was due to her own good sense in summering him on her father’s broad pastures in Meath, instead of “lugging him to Aldershot with the rest of the string, as Pat wanted to do,” as she explained to Major Booth.  Major Booth shed a friendly grin upon his fallen comrade, who lay, a deplorable object, on the horrid velvet-covered sofa peculiar to indifferent lodgings, and said vaguely that one of his brutes was right anyhow, and he was going to ride him at Carnfother the next day.

“You’d better come too, Mrs. Pat,” he added; “and if you’ll drive me I’ll send my chap on with the horses.  It’s too far to ride.  It’s fourteen Irish miles off; and fourteen Irish miles is just about the longest distance I know.”

Carnfother is a village in a remote part of the Co.  Cork; it possesses a small hotel—­in Ireland no hostelry, however abject, would demean itself by accepting the title of inn—­a police barrack, a few minor public-houses, a good many dirty cottages, and an unrivalled collection of loafers.  The stretch of salmon river that gleamed away to the distant heathery hills afforded the raison d’etre of both hotel and loafers, but the fishing season had not begun, and the attention of both was therefore undividedly bestowed on Mrs. Naylor and Major Booth.  The former’s cigarette and the somewhat Paradisaic dimensions of her apron skirt would indeed at any time have rivalled in interest the landing of a 20-lb. fish, and as she strode into the hotel the bystanders’ ejaculatory piety would have done credit to a revival meeting.

“Well, well, I’ll say nothing for her but that she’s quare!” said the old landlady, hurrying in from her hens to attend to these rarer birds whom fortune had sent to her net.