Mrs. Pat was not in a mood to be trifled with, and I again think it better to omit her response to this inconvenient jesting.  What she did was to give Pilot his head, and she presently found herself as near the hounds as was necessary, galloping in a line with the huntsman straight for a three-foot wall, lightly built of round stones.  That her horse could refuse to jump it was a possibility that did not so much as enter her head; but that he did so was a fact whose stern logic could not be gainsaid.  She had too firm a seat to be discomposed by the swinging plunge with which he turned from it, but her mental balance sustained a serious shake.  That Pilot, at the head of the hunt should refuse, was a thing that struck at the root of her dearest beliefs.  She stopped him and turned him at the wall again; again he refused, and at the same instant Major Booth and the blue habit jumped it side by side.

“What did I tell you!” the former called back, with a laugh that grated on Mrs. Pat’s ear with a truly fiendish rasp; “do you want a lead?”

The incensed Mrs. Pat once more replied in forcible phraseology, as she drove her horse again at the wall.  The average Meath horse likes stones just about as much as the average Co.  Cork horse enjoys water, and the train of running men and boys were given the exquisite gratification of a contest between Pilot and his rider.

“Howld on, miss, till I knock a few shtones for ye!” volunteered one, trying to interpose between Pilot and the wall.

“Get out of the way!” was Mrs. Pat’s response to this civility, as she crammed her steed at the jump again.  The volunteer, amid roars of laughter from his friends, saved his life only by dint of undignified agility, as the big horse whirled round, rearing and plunging.

“Isn’t he the divil painted?” exclaimed another in highest admiration; “wait till I give him a couple of slaps of my bawneen, miss!” He dragged off his white flannel coat and attacked Pilot in the rear with it, while another of the party flung clods of mud vaguely into the battle, and another persistently implored the maddened Mrs. Pat to get off and let him lead the horse over “before she’d lose her life:”  a suggestion that has perhaps a more thoroughly exasperating effect than any other on occasions such as this.

By the time that Pilot had pawed down half the wall and been induced to buck over, or into, what remained of it, Mrs. Pat’s temper was irretrievably gone, and she was at the heel instead of the head of the hunt.  Thanks to this position there was bestowed on her the abhorred, but not to be declined, advantage of availing herself of the gaps made in the next couple of jumps by the other riders; but the stones they had kicked down were almost as agitating to Pilot’s ruffled nerves as those that still remained in position.  She found it the last straw that she should have to wait for the obsequious runners to tear these out of her way, while the galloping backs in front of her