ALSATIA

No doubt the fact that it was forbidden, or mainly forbidden, lent it a considerable charm. The prohibitory edict was a semi-obsolete Statute of—say—the reign of Edward VI. Authorities, when driven to their last trench, fell back on it, declaring that no respectable children were allowed in stable-yards, or ever had been. We never argued the point. At an early age we had learned the folly of hardening fluid prohibition into adamant by argument; but we did not cease from visiting the yard.

As I look back I see a procession advancing from the dimmest and most ancient places of memory, a procession as varied as that which in Maclise's picture slowly winds away from the Ark. Heading it are two figures who, in their prime, ranked equally as the over-lords of the stable-yard, Old Michael, and the copper-coloured turkey cock. When one has attained an altitude of some considerable number of inches over five feet, it is hard to estimate the terror that a robust turkey cock can inspire in a person, however charged with valiant intention, of little more than forty-eight inches over all. The copper-coloured turkey cock was subtle as he was vicious; he appreciated as well as any Boer General the moral effect of a surprise. To face him, to go forth with intent to battle, was possible, even enjoyable, but at this moment I can feel the panic, blinding and disintegrating, of being taken in the rear; I remember the sound of the striding claws on the gravel behind me, the rustle of the stiff wings; were I but four feet high, and still wore short socks, I am convinced that I would run as hard if similarly attacked.

Coincident with the time that the turkey cock held sway, one of us had somehow acquired a dog, a meek, female creature, always engaged either prospectively or retrospectively in family affairs, and loaded with a spirit broken by long beatings from the back-door. She was white, with very sore eyes and a long tail; one of her relatives professed to be a bull-terrier, a fact much dwelt on by her proprietor; but beyond the soreness of her eyes there was but little to substantiate it.

"Those village dogs had better look out," said the proprietor. "May-fly'll most likely kill them if she meets them."

She had come to us in May, and the name held for us the glamour of a hundred springs. Among the village dogs was one, contemptible beyond its fellows, known to us as Boiled Rice (a food specially abhorred by us, which her coat and complexion were supposed to resemble). Boiled Rice was generally on hand at or about the lodge gates, and one day Mayfly was formally led forth to slaughter her. Boiled Rice was a small and disgusting creature, very old, and nearly toothless, and without reputation as a fighter. None the less, when located by our scouts she did not refuse battle. On the contrary, she bustled up to May-fly, and, rising upon the shortest pair of hind legs ever put under any four-legged creature save a lizard, laid her paws upon her shoulders and yapped harshly in her face. Then, if ever, the blood of the bull terrier relation should have come into action; for some unfortunate reason that was the precise moment at which it ebbed. Our champion gave a squeak of resentful alarm, and, disengaging herself from the enemy, fled unpretentiously, unhesitatingly, without a hint of reprisal. For our parts we stoned and hunted Boiled Rice more mercilessly than ever after this overthrow. An unexpected aspect in the character of May-fly was that she, who fled from every living thing, remained unmoved by the ferocities of the copper turkey cock. At a word from us, and it was a word often spoken, she would take him by his scarlet and bulbous beard and gallop him off into remote places, from whence, long afterwards, he might be seen gloomily returning, a discredited and bedraggled despot. It was her sole achievement, and one greatly valued by us, but, unfortunately, it found no favour with the authorities, and one night she and the then puppy—she always had a puppy or so in her lair behind the potato house—were swept.
"SENDING HIS WILD VOICE ABROAD" "OLD MICHAEL"
"SENDING HIS WILD VOICE ABROAD"
"OLD MICHAEL"

Neck and neck with the copper turkey cock came Old Michael, equal in malignity, but less active. He was nominally a stable helper, and was also a self-constituted spy in the service of the government—or rather of the governess—and a more implacable tale-bearer never truckled to authorities.

"The two o' them is round back o' the cow-house, Miss. It's now this minute I seen them climbing out over the garden gate!"

Thus we, prone on the slant of the cow-house roof, under the drooping laurel branches, with our pockets crammed with green, young apples, have listened, panting, to our betrayal. Any other man on the place would have lied in our cause with chapter and verse.

There was a tradition about Old Michael that he had once been bitten by a mad dog, and had thereupon, as a recognised antidote, killed the dog and eaten its liver. There was something luridly attractive about the transaction, and we often discussed the possibility as to whether the liver had thoroughly played its part, and whether it might not be that he suffered from slight chronic hydrophobia, and that, at any moment, he might turn snarling and foaming upon us. His ordinary manner lent itself to the fancy, his rages were so explosive, his yells at the horses under his charge so ungoverned, so screeching. One of these was a white pony that might have walked straight out of a fairy tale, in which he would have been exclusively employed as palfrey to the principal Princess. He had been bought through, or from, we never quite knew which, an old farmer, one Jer Sullivan, who lived at the head of a long and lonely Atlantic cove, and was as much fisherman as farmer, and more beggar than either. His main source of income was a petition in which was feelingly narrated the manner of death that befell his only horse.

"She was clifted one night by dogs hunting her, and drowned in the tide, and I have no one now to trust to, only the Lord."

Thus sorrowed the petition, Christmas by Christmas, getting a little browner as time went by, but no less insatiable. One windy Christmas Eve Jer Sullivan and the petition had appeared as usual, together with the horde of old women who, by long-established custom, received a dole on that day.
"ANCIENT WIDOWHOOD AND SPINSTERDOM"
"ANCIENT WIDOWHOOD AND SPINSTERDOM"

In the twilight of the December morning they came by twos and threes, fluttering up the avenue, looking, with their long dark cloaks and thin red legs and feet, like the choughs that used to breed in the neighbouring cliffs. Upon the wet grass on the way round to the stable yard they squatted in a gabbling row, waiting for the coming forth of the master, and chaffing Jer Sullivan for having joined the ranks of ancient widowhood and spinsterdom, with the unquenchable spirit that lurks in the oldest and most forlorn Irish peasant woman. On this occasion, Jer, having exhausted his stock of repartee, planted himself on the hall-door steps.

"Is the granddada comin'?" he called through the window to us, assembled in the hall. His face, wrinkled and grizzly, was pressed against the glass, his filmy eye was full of unutterable things.

"I have a present for ye!" he said, as soon as we had opened the door.

To expect a begging petition, and instead of it to be threatened with a gift, is something disconcerting, but we were young, too young to know the mental and financial wear and tear involved by a present from such as Mr. Sullivan.

"What would you be sayin' to a nate little pony?" went on Jer, with a beguiling smile that was staked out by four huge yellow teeth. "Sure a friend o' mine has him below at the gate. Wait awhile now——"

He paused, with an artist's knowledge of effect, and strayed away down the avenue in the indefinite manner of beggar men.

The ceremonial of the gifts pursued its usual course. The Master moved down the row, a silence of expectation before him, a cackle of blessings behind him; as each received her dole she gathered her ragged plumage about her and flitted away, blessings still flowing from her as the steam-clouds trail out behind a train.

To us again, after breakfast, returned Jer Sullivan, and, incredible sight, he was leading a small pony. It was about thirteen hands high; in colour, dirty white, with a very wild eye, a figure like a toast rack, and a long tail.

"Sure your Honour knows the breed of him well. His dam was by the Kerry Diamond, the same as your Honour's coach-horses, the grandest horses in the globe of Ireland!"

Jer took a pull, and the Master eyed the pony in deep silence; the pony eyed us and snorted apprehensively.

"Sure the granddam of that one," resumed Jer, "was no loftier size than himself, an' she took a load out o' Banthry, an' a woman, an' three bonnives, an' two bundles o' spades, an' seven hours was all she took comin' to Tragumena Strand."

"What do you want for him?" said the Master. To say that our hearts leaped in us at this approach to business, is to put the thing very mildly. They rolled and rioted like porpoises in a summer sea, what time the Master, and Jer, and Jimmy Hosford, the coachman, who had joined the action irrepressibly, moved round and round in the slow orbits of the deal. The fiction that the pony was a present had been abandoned, the thing had narrowed to a duel between Jer Sullivan and Jimmy Hosford. The Master had made his offer—￡5, I believe—and had strolled away.

"There isn't as much condition on him as'd bait a hook," said Jimmy Hosford.

"Oh, Jimmy!" we screamed as one man, "he's a lovely——"

"Ah, God help ye!" said Jimmy Hosford, washing his hands of a bargain in which he had to suffer such collaborators.

"My darlin' childhren," said Jer in a hoarse whisper to us, "don't mind for he bein' a small bit thin an' wake in himself; it's what ails him"—the whisper deepened and thickened—"he was ridden—by nights!" he paused awfully; "wouldn't I find him in the mornings bate out an' sweatin'; an' signs on it, the world wouldn't make him cross runnin' wather!"

"Who rode him?" said we, thrilling to the implied mystery.

Jer looked right and left over his shoulders.

"Those People!" said he.

A fairy-ridden pony! It needed but that touch of romance. The pony was bought. ￡5 and a weakling heifer calf were the terms finally agreed to. The explanation offered subsequently by Old Michael that it was the Tragumena boys that took the pony by nights for blagyarding, and to ride him in the tide, was dismissed with deserved contempt; the pony was called Fairy, and a better never bolted in a snaffle, or kicked its rider over its head when invited to jump a stream.

Those who have in any measure dipped below the surface of stable yard politics, can hardly fail to have become aware, even in a minor degree, of the subtle relations existing between the house dogs and the yard cats. That an understanding, almost amounting to a treaty, obtains, there can be no reasonable doubt. That the dogs are ashamed of it is certain; that the cats are not, is a fact bound up in the character of cats, who are never ashamed of anything. But yesterday, unsuspected and unseen, I viewed a typical instance of the strange and chilly truce that holds in the ashpit when the house dogs, the yard cats, the turkey cock, and, most implacably hated of all by all, the pensionnaire hound mother and her brood, feasted horribly and illicitly among cinders and refuse. The house dogs, furtively and hurriedly, with ears laid back, and guilty pauses in mid-bone; the hound mother grossly and jealously, something disposed to truculence; the turkey cock contemptibly, with sunken tail, and wattles of faded pink, prepared to skip four times his own length if the hound mother so much as looked at him.

Of the whole party the hound puppies and the cats alone showed to any advantage. The puppies, jovially unaware of the momentousness of each instant, sprawled and croaked over the woolly shin bone of a lamb; the cats were unalterably dignified, nibbling with deliberate daintiness the remains of a long-interred cod-fish. A millennial peace rested upon the scene.

It was possibly half an hour later, when those ineffable snobs, the house dogs, basking in the smiles of the aristocracy, had their attention drawn to the creeping grey form of the yard Tom, making fowling observations in the shrubbery. Like twin bolts from a thunder-cloud they sped on the chase; two highly connected white fox-terrier ladies, shrieking shrill threats at the intruding vermin. No wonder the yard Tom galloped. Yet the close observer could not but notice that as soon as the distance from the quarry had been reduced to some three or four feet, it remained fixed at that. In that nicely maintained interval was embodied one of the most immutable clauses of the treaty.

The treaty, however, and all connected with it, were of the most artificial and trifling to that child of nature, the hound mother. She, like her many predecessors, pretended to no higher sphere of operations than the stable yard.

"The care of my children and the surveillance of the ashpit," she seemed to say, "are all I demand."

But, like her predecessors, a more accomplished and wide ranging thief never jumped on to a kitchen table, or smirked hypocritically outside a hall door on the chance of making a dash upon the dining-room. It is not long since that history, for the twentieth time, repeated itself.

"The ham! the ham!" wailed from the dining-room the voice of the mistress. "Niobe has stolen the ham!"

The sequel was given by the laundry-woman, herself long versed in the ways of the stable yard, and of hound mothers.

"I was west in the field spreading the clothes, when I seen herself sthretched above on the hayrick. Divil blow the stir that was out of her! I knew by her she was at something! An' afther that I dunno why she wouldn't bursht with all the wather she dhrank! She has the divil's own inside!"