le old horse-coping sportsman
with a red face and iron-grey whiskers, who has kept hounds all his
life; or, rather, he has always had hounds about, on much the same
conditions that other men have rats. The rats are indubitably there, and
feed themselves variously, and so do old Robert Trinder's "Rioters,"
which is their _nom de guerre_ in the County Corkerry (the few who know
anything of the map of Ireland may possibly identify the two counties
buried in this cryptogram).

I meet old Robert most years at the Dublin Horse Show, and every now and
then he has sold me a pretty good horse, so when he wrote and renewed a
standing invitation, assuring me that there was open weather, and that
he had a grand four-year-old filly to sell, I took him at his word, and
started at once. The journey lasted for twenty-eight hours, going hard
all the time, and during the last three of them there were no
foot-warmers and the cushions became like stones enveloped in mustard
plasters. Old Trinder had not sent to the station for me, and it was
pelting rain, so I had to drive seven miles in a thing that only exists
south of the Limerick Junction, and is called a "jingle". A jingle is a
square box of painted canvas with no back to it, because, as was
luminously explained to me, you must have some way to get into it, and I
had to sit sideways in it, with my portmanteau bucking like a
three-year-old on the seat opposite to me. It fell out on the road twice
going uphill. After the second fall my hair tonic slowly oozed forth
from the seams, and added a fresh ingredient to the smells of the grimy
cushions and the damp hay that furnished the machine. My hair tonic
costs eight-and-sixpence a bottle.

There is probably not in the United Kingdom a worse-planned entrance
gate than Robert Trinder's. You come at it obliquely on the side of a
crooked hill, squeeze between its low pillars with an inch to spare
each side, and immediately drop down a yet steeper hill, which lasts for
the best part of a quarter of a mile. The jingle went swooping and
jerking down into the unknown, till, through the portholes on either
side of the driver's legs, I saw Lisangle House. It had looked decidedly
better in large red letters at the top of old Robert's notepaper than it
did at the top of his lawn, being no more than a square yellow box of a
house, that had been made a fool of by being promiscuously trimmed with
battlements. Just as my jingle tilted me in backwards ag