ound skin on her as would bait
a rat-trap"--I here quote Mr. Trinder--and she had fever in all her
feet.

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 bystand