ended.

Lord Ballindine had not rested in his paternal halls the second night,
before he had commenced making arrangements for a hunt breakfast, by
way of letting all his friends know that he was again among them.
And so missives, in Guss and Sophy's handwriting, were sent round
by a bare-legged little boy, to all the Mounts, Towns, and Castles,
belonging to the Dillons, Blakes, Bourkes, and Browns of the
neighbourhood, to tell them that the dogs would draw the Kelly's Court
covers at eleven o'clock on the following Tuesday morning, and that the
preparatory breakfast would be on the table at ten. This was welcome
news to the whole neighbourhood. It was only on the Sunday evening
that the sportsmen got the intimation, and very busy most of them
were on the following Monday to see that their nags and breeches
were all right--fit to work and fit to be seen. The four Dillons, of
Ballyhaunis, gave out to their grooms a large assortment of pipe-clay
and putty-powder. Bingham Blake, of Castletown, ordered a new set of
girths to his hunting saddle; and his brother Jerry, who was in no
slight degree proud of his legs, but whose nether trappings were rather
the worse from the constant work of a heavy season, went so far as to
go forth very early on the Monday morning to excite the Ballinrobe
tailor to undertake the almost impossible task of completing him a pair
of doeskin by the Tuesday morning. The work was done, and the breeches
home at Castletown by eight--though the doeskin had to be purchased in
Tuam, and an assistant artist taken away from his mother's wake, to sit
up all night over the seams. But then the tailor owed a small trifle
of arrear of rent for his potato-garden, and his landlord was Jerry
Blake's cousin-german [34]. There's nothing carries one further than a
good connexion, thought both Jerry and the tailor when the job was
finished.

[FOOTNOTE 34: cousin-german--first cousin]

Among the other invitations sent was one to Martin Kelly,--not exactly
worded like the others, for though Lord Ballindine was perhaps more
anxious to see him than anyone else, Martin had not yet got quite so
high in the ladder of life as to be asked to breakfast at Kelly's
Court. But the fact that Frank for a moment thought of asking him
showed that he was looking upwards in the world's estimation. Frank
wrote him a note himself, saying that the hounds would throw off at
Kelly's Court, at eleven; that, if he would ride over, he w