Irish Memories

* * * * *

I have said that it was an interesting time to be alive in, this junction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That the Chief’s sympathies were, as I have already mentioned, with the men on the losing side is very well known. In one of the early letters to his wife, he speaks of having had “a very prosperous circuit,” and says his business was “pretty general, not confin’d to friends or United Irishmen, tho these latter have been no bad friends to me either.” He did not defend their methods, but he stood by his friends, and to the end of his life he stood by his opinions.

In a letter written by Mrs. Bushe to their son Charles, at Castlehaven, after the death of the Chief (that is to say, forty-three years, at least, after the Act of Union), she speaks of the chaotic state of the country, and the ruin caused by the arbitrary and ill-considered enforcement of the recent Poor Law legislation. “Useless however to complain. England has the might which supersedes the right, and we are punished now for our own folly in consenting to the Union! Just what your Father predicted—‘when Ireland gives up the rights that she has, what right has she then to complain?’—How true this little squib of the poor dear C——” (Chief). “Happy for him he did not live to see the ruin he predicted!”

The following account of a visit to Edgeworthstown forms part of a letter, written at Omagh and dated Monday, August 16th, 1810. It is from Chief Justice Bushe to his wife; the beginning portion of the letter is printed in the Appendix I. (page 332).

“I am not surpriz’d that you ask about Edgeworthstown, and I can only tell you that every thing which Smyly has often said to us in praise of it is true and unexaggerated. Society in that house is certainly on the best plan I have ever met with. Edgeworth is a very clever fellow of much talent, and tho not deeply inform’d on any subject, is highly (which is consistent with being superficially) so in all. He talks a great deal and very pleasantly and loves to exhibit and perhaps obtrude what he wou’d be so justifiably vain of (his daughter and her works) if you did not trace that pride to his predominant Egotism, and see that he admires her because she is his child, and her works because they are his Grand Children. Mrs. Edgeworth is uncommonly agreeable and has been and not long ago very pretty. She is a perfect Scholar, and at the same time a good Mother and housewife. She is an excellent painter, like yourself, and like you has been oblig’d by producing Originals to give up Copying: She is you know a 5th or 6th Wife and her last child was his 22d. Two Miss Sneyds, amiable old maids, live with him. They are sisters of one of his wives, a beautiful and celebrated Honoria Sneyd, mention’d in Miss Seward’s Monody on Major André and known by her misfortune in having been betroth’d to that poor fellow. They are Litchfield people of the old literary set of the Garricks Dr. Johnson Miss Seward &c. &c. There are many young Edgeworths male and female all of promise and talent and all living round the same table with this set among whom I have not yet mention’d Miss Edgeworth, because I consider you as already knowing her from her works. In such a Society you may suppose Conversation must be good, but I was not prepared to find it so easy. It is the only set of the kind I ever met with in which you are neither led nor driven, but actually fall, and that imperceptibly, into literary topics, and I attribute it to this that in that house literature is not a treat for Company upon Invitation days, but is actually the daily bread of the family. Miss Edgeworth is for nothing more remarkable than for the total absence of vanity. She seems to have studied her father’s foibles for two purposes, to avoid them and never to appear to see them, and what does not always happen, her want of affectation is unaffected. She is as well bred and as well dress’d and as easy and as much like other people as if she was not a celebrated author. No pretensions, not a bit of blue stocking is to be discover’d. In the Conversation she neither advances or keeps back, but mixes naturally and cheerfully in it, and tho in the number of words she says less than anyone yet the excellence of her remarks and the unpremeditated point which she gives them makes you recollect her to have talk’d more than others. I was struck by a little felicity of hers the night I was there. Shakespear was talk’d of as he always is, and I mentioned what you have lately heard me speak of as a literary discovery and curiosity, that he has borrow’d the Character of Cardinal Wolsey from Campion, the old Chronicler of Ireland. This was new to them and Edgeworth began one of his rattles—

CHAPTER III

MAINLY MARIA EDGEWORTH

Here, I think, may fitly be given some lines that the Chief wrote, when he was an old man, to accompany the gift to his wife of a white fur tippet.

Love and wit are immortal, we know, but the spirit is rare that can inspire them after nearly fifty years of married life; yet rarer, perhaps, the young heart that can persuade them still to dwell with it and to overlook the silver head.

I grieve that I have been unable to find any of Mrs. Bushe’s earlier letters. She was a brilliant creature in all ways, and had a rare and enchanting gift as an artist, which, even in those days, when young ladies of quality were immured inexorably within the padded cell of the amateur, could scarce have failed to make its mark, had she not, as the Chief, with marital complacency, observed, devoted herself to “making originals instead of copies.”

In her time there were few women who gave even a moment’s thought to the possibilities of individual life as an artist, however aware they might be—must have been—of the gifts they possessed. I daresay that my great-grandmother was well satisfied enough with what life had brought her—“honour, love, obedience, troops of friends.” In one of her letters, written when she was a very old woman, she writes gaily of the hateful limitations of old age, and says:

“When people will live beyond their time such things must be, and I have a right to be thankful that old Time has put on his Slippers, and does not ride roughshod over me.”

(Which shows, I think, that marriage had subdued the artist in her, and had, in compensation, evoked the philosopher.)

It is clear, from the last letter in the preceding chapter, that Miss Edgeworth and Mrs. Bushe had not met before 1810. How soon afterwards they met, and the friendship, that lasted for the rest of their lives, began, I cannot ascertain. In one of Miss Edgeworth’s letters (quoted in one of the many volumes that have been written about her) she says:

“Having named Mrs. Bushe, I must mention that whenever I meet her she is my delight and admiration, from her wit, humour, and variety of conversation.”

Among the contents of the letter-box that Martin gave me are several letters from Miss Edgeworth, and they testify to the fact that she lost no time in falling in love with her “very dear Mrs. Bushe.”

I recognise, gratefully, how highly I am privileged in being permitted to include in my book these letters from the brilliant pioneer of Irish novelists. To the readers and lovers of, for example, “Castle Rackrent,” they may seem a trifle disappointing in their submission to the conventions of their period, a period that decreed a mincing and fettered mode for its lady letter-writers, and rigorously exacted from its females the suitable simper.

The writing is pale, prim, and pointed, undeniably suggestive of prunes, and prisms, and papa (that inveterate papa of Maria’s); yet, in spite of the fetters of convention, the light step is felt, and although the manner may mince, it cannot conceal the humour, the spirit, and the charm of disposition.

Miss Edgeworth was born in the same year as Chief Justice Bushe, and died six years later than he, in 1849. Her friendship with Mrs. Bushe remained unbroken to the last, and their mutual admiration continued unshaken. In such of Miss Edgeworth’s letters to my great-grandmother as I have seen, she speaks but little of literary work. One of the later letters, however (dated 1827), accompanied a present of one of her books; the date would make it appear that this was one of the sequels to “Early Lessons”—(in which the unfortunate Rosamond is victimised by the dastardly fraud of the Purple Jar, and Harry gets no breakfast until he has made his bed, although the fact that his sole ablutions consist in washing his hands is in no way imputed to him as sin. But this, also, is of the period).

“Harriet did not know this little vol was published or that I intended publishing it when you spoke to her.

“I had amused myself with the assistance of a confederate sister at home in getting them printed without her knowing it for the Wise pleasure of surprising her as she had always said I could not print anything without her knowledge—These little wee wee plays were written ages ago in my age of happiness for birthday diversions and Harriet added the cross Prissy 16 years ago!”

CHAPTER IV

OLD FORGOTTEN THINGS

But few of their grandchildren, that potent and far-reaching first cousinhood of seventy, now remain. Bushes, Plunkets, Coghills, Foxes, Franks, Harrises, they were a notable company, and I imagine that in the middle and later years of the last century they made a clan of no small power and influence. “Dublin is my washpot, over Merrion Square will I cast out my shoe,” they might have said, possibly did say, in their arrogant youth, when “The Family,” good-looking, amusing, and strenuous, “took the flure” in the Dublin society of the ’fifties. From among them came no luminary in Art, specially outstanding, yet there was scarcely one of them without some touch of that spark which is lit by a coal taken from the altar, and is, for want of a better term, called originality; and although the reputations of neither Shakespeare nor Michael Angelo were threatened, they could have provided a club dedicated to “Les Quatz’ Arts” with a very useful selection of members.

(Yet the mention of Shakespeare, and the wish to be sincere, force me to recall a tale of two of these first cousins of Martin’s mother and mine, the one an artist of delightful achievement, the other, amongst her many gifts, an astronomer and writer. The latter reproached the former for her neglect of Shakespeare, and announced her intention of reading aloud to her one of his plays. The artist replied with a high and characteristic tranquillity, “Shakespeare was a coarse man, my dear, but you may read him to me if you like. I can go into a reverie.”)

It is not out of place to mention here that the first writing in which Martin and I collaborated was a solemnly preposterous work, a dictionary of the words and phrases peculiar to our family, past and present, with derivations and definitions—the definitions being our opportunity. It might possibly—in fact I think some selections would—entertain the public, but I can confidently say it will never be offered to it; Bowdler himself would quail at the difficulties it would present.

* * * * *

Martin has, in her memoir of her brother Robert, given a sketch of life at Ross as it was in the old days, in its patriarchal simplicity, its pastoral abundance, its limitless hospitality, its feudal relations with the peasants. Its simplicity was, I imagine, of a more primitive type than can be claimed for any conditions that I can personally remember in my own country. The time of which she has written was already passing when she arrived on the scene, and she had to rely mainly on the records of her elders. The general atmosphere there and in my country was much the same, but a certain degree of sophistication may have set in a little earlier here, and when I say “here,” I speak of that fair and far-away district, the Barony of West Carbery, County Cork, the ultimate corner of the ultimate speck of Europe—Ireland. You will not find West Carbery’s name in the atlas, but Cape Clear will not be denied, and there is nothing of West Carbery west of Cape Clear, unless one counts its many sons and daughters who have gone even farther west, to the Land of the Setting Sun.

The Ireland that Martin and I knew when we were children is fast leaving us; every day some landmark is wiped out; I will try, as she has done, to recapture some of the flying memories.

To begin with

Castle Townshend.

Castle Townshend is a small village in the south-west of the County of Cork, unique in many ways among Irish villages, incomparable in the beauty of its surroundings, remarkable in its high level of civilisation, and in the number of its “quality houses.” “High ginthry does be jumpin’ mad for rooms in this village,” was how the matter was defined by a skilled authority, while another, equally versed in social matters, listened coldly to commendation of a rival village, and remarked, “It’s a nice place enough, but the ginthry is very light in it. It’s very light with them there entirely.”

I hasten to add that this criticism did not refer to the morals of the gentry, merely to their scarcity—as one says “a light crop.”

Castlehaven Harbour, to whose steep shores it adheres, defiant of the law of gravity, by whose rules it should long since have slipped into the sea, has its place in history. The Spanish Armada touched en passant (touched rather hard in some places), one of Queen Elizabeth’s admirals, Admiral Leveson, touched too, fairly hard, and left cannon-ball bruises on the walls of Castlehaven Castle. The next distinguished visitors were a force of Cromwell’s troopers. Brian’s Fort, built by Brian Townshend, the son of one of Cromwell’s officers, still stands firm, and Swift’s tower, near it, is distinguished as the place where “the gloomy Dean; (of autre fois) wrote a Latin poem, called “Carberiae Rupes.” A translation of this compliment to the Rocks of Carbery was printed one hundred and seventy years ago in Smith’s “History of the Co. Cork.” It was much admired by the historian. A quotation from it may be found in “A Record of Holiday,” in one of our books, “Some Irish Yesterdays,” but candour compels me to admit that four of its lines, descriptive of the coast of Carbery—

—might be taken as equally descriptive of its readers.

The Titanic passed within a few miles of Castlehaven on her first and last voyage; I saw her racing to the West, into the glow of a fierce winter sunset. It was from Castle Townshend that the first warnings of the sharks that were waiting for the Lusitania were sent; and into Castlehaven Harbour came, by many succeeding tides, victims of that tragedy. Let it be remembered to the honour of the fishermen who harvested those sheaves of German reaping, that the money and the jewels, which most of the drowned

people had brought with them, were left with them, untouched.

It must have been eighty or ninety years ago that the first member of “The Chief’s” family reached Castlehaven. This was his second son, the Rev. Charles Bushe, who was, as Miss Edgeworth says of her stepmamma’s brother, “fatly and fitly provided for” with the living of Castlehaven. Somervilles and Townshends had been living and intermarrying in Castlehaven Parish, with none to molest their ancient solitary reign, since Brian Townshend built himself the fort from which he could look forth upon one of the loveliest harbours in Ireland, and the Reverend Thomas Somerville, the first of his family to settle in Munster, took to himself (by purchase from the representatives of the Earl of Castlehaven) the old O’Driscoll Castle, and lies buried beside it, in St. Barrahane’s churchyard, under a slab that proclaims him to have been “A Worthy Magistrate, and a Safe and Affable Companion.” The two clans enjoyed in those days, I imagine, a splendid isolation, akin to that of the Samurai in Old Japan, and the Rev. Charles Bushe, an apostle of an alien cultivation, probably realised the feelings of Will Adams when he was cast ashore at Osaka, may, indeed, have felt his position to be as precarious as that of the first missionary at the Court of the King of the Cannibal Islands.

My great-uncle Charles was for forty years the Rector of Castlehaven Parish, and the result of his ministry that most directly affects me was the marriage of my father, Colonel Thomas Henry Somerville, of Drishane, to the Rev. Charles’s niece, Adelaide Coghill. (That she was also his step-sister-in-law is a fact too bewildering to anyone save a professional genealogist for me to dwell on it here. I will merely say that my mother’s father was Admiral Sir Josiah Coghill, and her mother was Anna Maria Bushe, daughter of the Chief Justice.)[6]

There is a picture extant, the work of that artist to whom I have already referred, in which is depicted the supposed indignation of the Aboriginal Red men, i.e., my grandfather Somerville and his household, at the apostasy of my father, a Prince of the (Red) Blood Royal, in departing from the family habit of marrying a Townshend, and in allying himself with a Paleface. In that picture the Red men and women are armed with clubs, the Palefaces with croquet mallets. It was with these that they entered in and possessed the land. My grandmother (née Townshend, of Castle Townshend), a small and eminently dignified lady, one of my great-aunts, and other female relatives, are profanely represented, capering with fury, clad in brief garments of rabbit skin. The Paleface females surge in vast crinolines; the young Red man is encircled by them, as was the swineherd in Andersen’s fairy tale, by the Court ladies. My grandfather swings a tomahawk, and is faced by my uncle, Sir Joscelyn Coghill, leader of the second wave of invasion, with a photographic camera (the first ever seen in West Carbery) and a tripod.

* * * * *

I think I must diverge somewhat farther from my main thesis in order to talk a little about the Ancient Order of Hibernians (if I may borrow the appellation) who were thus dispossessed. For, as is the way all the world over, the missionaries ate up the cannibals, and the Red men have left only their names and an unworthy granddaughter to commemorate their customs.

Few South Pacific Islands are now as isolated as was, in those days,—I speak of ninety or one hundred years ago—Castle Townshend. The roads were little better than bridle-paths; they straggled and struggled, as far as was possible, along the crests of the hills, and this was as a protection to the traveller, who could less easily be ambushed and waylaid by members of the large assortment of secret societies, Whiteboys, Ribbonmen, Molly Maguires, Outlaws in variety, whose spare moments between rebellions were lightened by highway robbery. I have heard that my great-grandmother’s “coach” was the only wheeled vehicle that came into Castle Townshend. My great-grandfather used to ride to Cork, fifty-two miles, and the tradition is that he had a fabulous black mare, named Bess, who trotted the journey in three hours (which I take leave to doubt). All the heavy traffic came and went by sea. The pews of the church came from Cork by ship. They have passed now, but I can remember them, and I should have thought that their large simplicity would not have been beyond the scope of the local carpenter. There was a triple erection for the pulpit; the clerk sat in the basement, the service was read au premier, and to the top story my great-uncle Charles was wont to mount, in a black gown and “bands,” and thence deliver classic discourses, worthy, as I have heard, of the son of “silver-tongued Bushe,” but memorable to me (at the age of, say, six) for the conviction, imparted by them anew each Sunday, that they were samples of eternity, and would never end. My eldest brother, who shared the large square pew with our grandfather and me, was much sustained by a feud with a coastguard child, with whom he competed in the emulous construction of grimaces, mainly based, like the sermons, on an excessive length of tongue, but I had no such solace. Feuds are, undoubtedly, a great solace to ennui, and in the elder times of a hundred years or so ago they seem to have been the mainstay of society in West Cork. Splendid feuds, thoroughly made, solid, and without a crack into which any importunate dove could insert so much as an olive-leaf.

Ireland was, in those days, a forcing bed for individuality. Men and women, of the upper classes, were what is usually described as “a law unto themselves,” which is another way of saying that they broke those of all other authorities. That the larger landowners were, as a class, honourable, reasonably fair-minded, and generous, as is not, on the whole, disputed, is a credit to their native kindliness and good breeding. They had neither public opinion nor legal restraint to interfere with them. Each estate was a kingdom, and, in the impossibility of locomotion, each neighbouring potentate acquired a relative importance quite out of proportion to his merits, for to love your neighbour—or, at all events, to marry her—was almost inevitable when matches were a matter of mileage, and marriages might be said to have been made by the map. Enormous families were the rule in all classes, such being reputed to be the will of God, and the olive branches about the paternal table often became of so dense a growth as to exclude from it all other fruits of the earth, save, possibly, the potato.

Equally vigorous, as I have said, was the growth of character. There was room in those spacious days for expansion, and the advantage was not wasted. There was an old lady who lived in West Carbery, and died some fifty years ago, about whom legend has accumulated. She lived in a gaunt grey house, that still exists, and is as suggestive of a cave as anything as high and narrow, and implacably symmetrical, can be. Tall elms enshroud it, and rooks at evening make a black cloud about it. It has now been civilised, but I can remember the awe it inspired in me as a child. She was of distinguished and ancient family (though she was born in such remote ages that one would say there could have been scarcely more than two generations between her and Adam and Eve). She was very rich, and she was a miser of the school of comic opera, showy and dramatic. Her only son, known, not without reason, as “Johnny Wild,” is said, after many failures, to have finally extracted money from her by the ingenious expedient of inveigling her into a shed in which was a wicked bull, and basing a claim for an advance on the probability that the bull would do the same. She lost ten shillings on a rent day, and raised it among her tenants by means of a round-robin. Her costume was that of a scarecrow that has lost all self-respect, yet—a solitary extravagance—when she went in a train she travelled first-class. It is said that on a journey to Dublin she was denounced to the guard as a beggar-woman who had mistaken the carriage. It happened that the denouncer was a lady with a courtesy-title derived from a peerage of recent and dubious origin. The beggar-woman threatened to recite their respective pedigrees on the platform, and the protest was withdrawn. Naturally she fought with most of her neighbours, specially her kinsfolk, and, as a result of a specially sanguinary engagement, announced that she would never again “set foot” in the village sacred to her clan (and it may be noted that the term “to set foot” invariably implies something sacrificial, a rite, but one always more honoured in the breach than in the observance) “until the day when she went into it with four horses and her two feet foremost,” which referred to her final transit to the family burying-ground. On her death-bed, a cousin, not unnaturally anxious as to her future welfare, offered to read to her suitable portions of the Bible, but the offer was declined.

“Faith, my dear, I’ll not trouble ye. I know it all by heart; but I’m obliged to ye, and I wish I had a pound that I might give it ye, but I haven’t so much as a ha’penny.”

She shortly afterwards died, and there was found in her bedroom, in a desk, £500, and a further £20 was discovered rolled up in an old bonnet, a black straw bonnet with bright green ribbons.

CHAPTER V

EARLY WEST CARBERY

Such a fight there was between two sisters, both long since dead. They were said to have been among “The Beauties of the Court of the Regent”—delightful phrase, bringing visions of ringlets and rouge, and low necks and high play—and both were famed for their wit, their charm, and their affection for each other. Still unmarried, their mother brought them home to Castle Townshend (for reasons not unconnected with the run of the cards), not quite so young as they had been—in those days a young lady’s first youth seems to have been irrevocably lost at about three and twenty—yet none the less dangerous on that account. Most feuds originate in a difference of opinion, but this one, or so it has always been said, was due to a disastrous similarity in taste. Legends hint that a young cousin, my grandfather, then a personable youth fresh from Oxford, was the difficulty. But whatever the cause (and he married the elder sister) peace was not found in sixty years; the combatants died, and the fight outlived the fighters.

In these feebler days the mental attitude of that time is hard to realise. The stories that have come down to us only complicate the effort to reconstitute the people and the period, but they may help—some of them—to explain the French Revolution. A tale is told of one of these ex-beauties, noted, be it remembered, for her charm of manner, her culture, her sense of humour. Near the end of her long life she went to the funeral of a relative, leaning decorously upon the arm of a kinsman. At the churchyard a countryman pushed forward between her and the coffin. She thereupon disengaged her arm from that of her squire, and struck the countryman in the face. It is no less characteristic of the time that the countryman’s attitude does not come into the story, but it seems to me probable that he went home and boasted then, and for the rest of his life, that old Madam —— had “bet him a blow in the face.”

There is yet another story, written in a letter to a young cousin, by my father’s cousin, the late Mrs. Pierrepont Mundy, a very delightful letter-writer and story-teller, who has taken with her to the next world a collection of anecdotes that may possibly cause her relatives there to share the regret of her friends here that she did not leave them behind her.

“One more link in the chain of events,” she writes,

“Grandmamma’s sister-in-law married her brother, ‘Devil Dick,’ who was violent to madness. His mother alone was not afraid of him. She had a spirit of her own. On one occasion she went over a ship at Cork, intending to make purchases from contraband goods. She set aside chosen ones, but was stopped by the Excisemen. She looked at the basket full, raised her tiny foot (which you and I, dearest A., inherit) and kicked the whole collection overboard into the Sea!

“That same foot she released from her high-heeled shoe on arriving, driven from Cork in a ‘Jarvey,’ and, when the Cocher said ‘Stop Madam, you haven’t paid!’ she threw the money on the ground, and with her shoe she dealt him a smart box on the ear and said,

“‘Take that before the Grand Jury!’ (meaning she could do anything and would not get fined.)

“Une maïtresse femme!”

Thus my cousin concludes her story, not without a certain approbation of our ancestress.

Indisputably the coming of the Palefaces slackened the moral fibre of Castle Townshend; the fire has gone out of the fights and the heat out of the hatreds. I do not claim for the later generations a higher standard; peace is mainly ensued by lack of concentration; it is not so much that we forgive, as that we forget. I regret that these early histories do not present my departed relatives in a more attractive light, but personal experience has taught me how infinitely boring can be the virtues of other people’s families.

A strange product of these high explosives was my father, who, as was said of another like unto him, was “The gentlest crayture ever came into a house.” He had no brothers and but one sister, a fact that did not, I think, distress my grandparents, who were in advance of their period in considering the prevalent immense families ill-bred; and even had the matter been for them a subject of regret, they had at least one consolation—a consolation offered in a similar case to a cousin of Martin’s—“Afther all,” it was said, “if ye had a hundhred of them ye couldn’t have a greater variety.”

An only son, with a solitary sister, brought up in the days when the difference between the sexes was clearly defined by the position of the definite article, “an only son” being by no means in the same case, grammatical or otherwise, with “only a daughter,” it would not have been surprising had he developed into such a flower of culture as had blossomed in “Johnny Wild.” I expect that the rare and passionate devotion of his father to his mother taught him a lesson not generally inculcated in his time. In truth, his love and consideration for his mother and sister amounted to anachronism in those days, when chivalry was mostly relegated to the Eglinton Tournament, and unselfishness was bracketed with needlework as a graceful and exclusive attribute of the Ministering Angel.

Mrs. Pierrepont Mundy, once defined the two men of her acquaintance whom most she delighted to honour as

“Preux Chevaliers! Christian gentlemen, who feed their dogs from the dinner-table!”

I find it impossible to better this as a description of my father. I recognise the profound conventionality of saying that dogs and children adored him, yet, conventional though the statement may be, it is inflicted upon me by the facts of the case. In him children knew, intuitively, the kindred soul, dogs recognised, not by mere intuition, but by force of intellect, their slave. I can see him surreptitiously passing forbidden delicacies from his plate to the silent watchers beneath the surface, his eyes disingenuously fixed upon the window to divert my mother’s suspicions, and I can still hear his leisurely histories of two imaginary South African Lion-slayers, named, with a massive simplicity, Smith and Brown, whose achievements were for us, as children, the last possibility of romance.

Children alone could extract from him the tales of various feats of his youth, feats in which, one supposes, the wild blood that was in him found its outlet and satisfaction; of the savage bull on to whose back he had dropped from the branch of a tree, and whom he had then ridden in glory round and round the field; of the bulldog who jumped at the nose of a young half-trained Arab mare when my father was riding her, and caught it, and held on. And so did my father, while the mare flung herself into knots (and how either dog or man “held their howlt” it is hard to imagine). The bulldog was finally detached with a pitchfork by one Jerry Hegarty, who must himself have shown no mean skill and courage in adventuring into the whirl of that nightmare conflict, but my father sat it out. It was a daughter of that mare, named Lalla Rukh, a lovely grey (whom I can remember as a creature by me revered and adored, above, perhaps, any earthly thing), who was being ridden by my father through a town when they met a brass band. Lalla Rukh first attempted flight, but such was her confidence in her rider that, in the end, she let him ride her up to the big drum, and, in further token of devotion, she then, heroically, put her nose on it. One imagines that the big drummer was enough of a gentleman to refrain from his duties during those tense moments, but the rest of the band blazed on. My father was a boy of seventeen when he got his commission and was presently quartered at Birr, where he acted as Whip to the regimental pack of hounds. There is an authentic story of a hound, that my grandfather sent to Birr, by rail and coach, escaping from the barracks, and making his way back to the kennels at Drishane. Birr is in King’s County, and the journey, even across country, must be over a hundred miles. (These things being thus, it is hard to understand why any dog is ever lost.)

My father was in the Kaffir wars of 1843 and 1849, and fought right through the Crimean campaign, being one of the very few infantry officers who won all the clasps with the Crimean medal. One of his brother officers in the 68th Durham Light Infantry has told (I quote from an account published by the officer in question) “of an incident that shows the coolness and ready daring that characterised him. On the morning of the battle of Inkermann, 5th Nov., 1854, the 68th saw a body of troops moving close by. Owing to the fog it was impossible to distinguish if these were Russian or English. It was of the utmost importance, and the Colonel of the 68th exclaimed, ‘What would I give to be able to decide!’

“Without a pause Henry Somerville said, ‘I’ll soon let you know!’ And, throwing open his grey military great-coat, he showed the scarlet uniform underneath.

“In a second a storm of rifle bullets answered the momentous question, thus speedily proving that enemies, and not friends, formed the advancing troops.”

There is another story of my father’s turning back, during a retirement up hill under heavy fire, at the battle of the Alma, to save a wounded private, whom he carried on his back out of danger. But not from him did we hear of these things. One of the few soldiering stories that I can recollect hearing from him was in connection with the fighting proclivities of his servant, Con Driscoll, a son of a tenant who had followed him into the regiment. Con had been in a row of no small severity; his defence, as is not unusual, took the form of reflections upon the character of his adversary, and an exposition of his own self-restraint.

“If it wasn’t that I knew me ordhers,” he said, “and the di-shiplin’ of the Sarvice, I wouldn’t lave him till I danced on his shesht!”

CHAPTER VI

HER MOTHER