Ike’s fortune was not a large one. It consisted of two hundred pounds, and this he spent in about fourteen months, during which period he constantly treated some of the worst characters in the parish, and lived almost entirely in the open air, undergoing great hardship, both of work and weather, in the pursuit of that sport which to him was certainly synonymous with pleasure. Just as he arrived at the last five-pound note of his two hundred, an Irish gentleman who was staying at Castle-Cropper, and delighted the whole neighbourhood with the breadth of his brogue, the daring of his horsemanship, and the vivacity of his manners, took a great fancy to Ike, from the masterly way in which he saw the latter fishing a pool below the Mill, and easily persuaded him to accompany him back to Ireland, as a sort of humble sporting companion. There being no profit and nothing definite to do, the situation was exactly suited to our friend; and as he could neither read nor write, it is needless to state that his patron called him his private secretary forthwith. Most men have some period in their lives—not always the happiest while it was actually present—on which they are continually looking back, and to which they lose no opportunity of reverting, as a sort of Utopian existence, rendering everything else tame and desolate by comparison. Such, it would appear, was Ike’s residence in the county Galway. Whenever the old man’s heart was warmed and his nose reddened by his usual potation, “a little gin-and-cloves,” he would enlarge upon his favourite theme. He was never tired of detailing the glories of Bally-Blazer, the improvidence of the housekeeping, the liberality and general recklessness of “The Master.” The latter, by Ike’s account (although the narrator, it must be admitted, varied a little in his statistics), seems to have kept more young horses and old servants, drank more claret, and betted more freely on the Curragh, than any other gentleman in the West of Ireland. Here Ike acquired his principal knowledge of hunting, and a taste, which rapidly grew into a passion, for that amusement. Mounted by The Master upon what he was pleased to call “the pick of the stable,” Ike, by his own account, distinguished himself for his daring feats of horsemanship as well as by his scientific knowledge of the chase.