yellow shore and never shall another hit my fancy.

I had still my red pony, and once my father came with me riding too, and
was very exacting. He was indignant and threatening because he did not
think I rode well. "You must do everything well," he said, "that the
Pollexfens respect, though you must do other things also." He used to say
the same about my lessons, and tell me to be good at mathematics. I can
see now that he had a sense of inferiority among those energetic,
successful people. He himself, some Pollexfen told me, though he rode very
badly, would go hunting upon anything and take any ditch. His father, the
County Down Rector, though a courtly man and a scholar, had been so
dandified a horseman that I had heard of his splitting three riding
breeches before he had settled into his saddle for a day's hunting, and of
his first rector exclaiming, "I had hoped for a curate but they have sent
me a jockey."

Left to myself, I rode without ambition though getting many falls, and
more often to Rathbroughan where my great-uncle Mat lived, than to any
place else. His children and I used to sail our toy-boats in the river
before his house, arming them with toy-cannon, touch-paper at all the
touch-holes, always hoping but always in vain that they would not twist
about in the eddies but fire their cannon at one another. I must have gone
to Sligo sometimes in the Christmas holidays, for I can remember riding my
red pony to a hunt. He balked at the first jump, to my relief, and when a
crowd of boys began to beat him, I would not allow it. They all jeered at
me for being afraid. I found a gap and when I was alone in a field tried
another ditch, but the pony would not jump that either; so I tied him to a
tree and lay down among the ferns and looked up into the sky. On my way
home I met the hunt again and noticed that everybody avoided the dogs, and
because I wanted to find out why they did so I rode to where the dogs had
gathered in the middle of the lane and stood my pony amongst them, and
everybody began to shout at me.

Sometimes I would ride to Castle Dargan, where lived a brawling squireen,
married to one of my Middleton cousins, and once I went thither on a visit
with my cousin George Middleton. It was, I dare say, the last household
where I could have found the reckless Ireland of a hundred years ago in
final degradation. But I liked the place for the romance of its two ruined
castles facing one another across a litt