In Mr. Knox's CountrySomerville, E. Oe. (Edith Oenone)
General
In Mr. Knox's Country
Somerville, E. Oe. (Edith Oenone)
British -- Ireland -- Fiction; Ireland -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Judges -- Fiction
She straightened her hat with a gasp, as a couple of weighty female
primitives went through us and passed on. (In all circumstances and
fashions, my wife wears a large hat, and thereby adds enormously to the
difficulties of life.) Among the stalls of apples and biscuits, and
adjacent to the drink tent, a roulette table occurred, at which the
public were invited to stake on various items of the arms of the United
Kingdom. The public had accepted the invitation in considerable
numbers, and I did not fail to point out to Philippa the sophisticated
ease with which Acis flung his penny upon "Harp," while Galatea,
planking twopence upon the Prince of Wales' plumes, declared that the
last races she was at she got the price of her ticket on "Feather."
We passed on, awaking elusive hopes in the bosoms of two neglected
bookmakers, who had at intervals bellowed listlessly to the elements,
and now eagerly offered me Rambling Katty at two to one.
"Boys, hurry! There's a man dead, north!" shrieked a boy, leaping from
the top of a bank. "Come north till we see him!"
A rush of boys went over us; the roulette table was deserted in a
flash, and its proprietor and the bookmakers exchanged glances
expressive of the despicable frivolity of the rustics of Poundlick.
"We ought to try to find Dr. Fraser," said Philippa, hurrying in the
wake of the stampede.
"I did not know that the Chicken Farmers were to be among the
attractions," I said to Andrew, realising, not for the first time, that
I am but an infant crying in the night where matters of the higher
diplomacy are toward.
Andrew made no reply, as is the simple method of some men when they do
not propose to give themselves away, and we proceeded in the direction
of the catastrophe.
The dead man was even less dead than I had expected. He was leaning
against a fence, explaining to Dr. Catherine Fraser that he felt all
the noise of all the wars of all the worlds within in his head.
Dr. Fraser, who was holding his wrist, while her friend, Miss Longmuir,
kept the small boys at bay, replied that she would like a more precise
description. The sufferer, whose colour was returning, varied the
metaphor, and said that the sound was for all the world like the
quacking of ducks.
"You'd better go home and keep quiet," said Dr. Fraser, accepting the
symptom with professional gravity.
I asked my next door neighbour how the accident had occurred.
"Danny Lyons here was practising this young mare of Herlihy's for Lyney
Garrett, that's to ride her in the first race," said my neighbour, a
serious man with bushy black whiskers, like an old-fashioned French
waiter, "and sure she's as loose as a hare, and when she saw the flag
before her on the fence, she went into the sky, and Danny dhruv in the
spur to keep the balance, and with that then the sterrup broke."
"It's little blagyarding she'd have if it was Lyney was riding her!"
said some one else.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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