Page:Darby O'Gill and the Good People by Herminie Templeton Kavanagh (1903).djvu/109

Rh others blew the bellows or piled fresh sticks on the fire; all joking, laughing, singing, or thrickin’; one couldn’t tell whether ’twas playing or workin’ they were.

Afther lighting their pipes and paying aich other an armful of complayments, the Master of Sleive-na-mon and the clargyman began a saryous discoorse about the deloights of fox-hunting, which led to the considheration of the wondherful wisdom of racing horses and the disgraceful day-ter-ray-roaration of the Skibberbeg hounds.

Father Cassidy related how whin Ned Blaze’s steeplechasin’ horse had been entered for the Connemara Cup, an’ found out at the last minute that Ned feared to lay a bet on him, the horse felt himself so stabbed to the heart with shame by his master’s disthrust that he trew his jockey, jumped the wall, an’, head in the air, galloped home.

The King then tould how at a great hunting meet, whin three magisthrates an’ two head excises officers were in the chase, that thief of the worruld, Let-Erin-Raymimber, the chief hound of the Skibberbeg pack, instead of follying the fox, led the whole hunt up over the mountain to Patrick McCaffrey’s private Rh