The meet was fixed for nine o’clock at the cross-roads, by the village of Castle Knock; and at eight you might have seen Bob Mahony, the sweep, clattering down the main street of Castle Knock in his donkey-cart, his face washed and shining, so that you would never have known he was a sweep, only for the traces of soot round the back of his ears and the nape of his neck that the towel had failed to reach. He always turned out for a meet of the hounds. His donkey was a tiny mouse-coloured beast, the quickest and the wickedest donkey in the county. “Game as a tarrier,” to use Bob’s expression, “and not to hold or bind when she hears the hounds giving lip.” He drew up at the sign-post that is set at the cross-roads, and he had scarcely got down to put the nose-bag on the donkey, to keep her “aisy,” when over the fields, from the direction of Tullagh, taking the low stone walls in his strides, came Billy the Buck. A meet of the hounds without Billy the Buck would have been a function robbed of most of its picturesqueness and colour. He was a dark gipsy-looking personage, in an old red waistcoat with tarnished brass buttons; he lived in hayricks and such places, caught rats, sold rabbit skins, trapped moles, did a bit of petty thieving when times were bad, and a bit of poaching whenever he could get the chance. He followed the hounds on foot, and was always in at the death, for he could run like a hare and jump like a horse. He was “near seven fut”—that is to say, he measured six feet six, and, to use the local expression, he was as “thin as a barber’s pole.” “The top of the marnin’ to you!” cried Billy, vaulting over the low stone wall separating the road from the fields. “Oh, it’s yourself, is it?” said the sweep. “And what’s the news?” “There’s an ould grey dog-fox in Rafferty’s Clump,” cried Billy. “He’s the wan that took earth at Kilgobbin last year, whin Mr Moriarty broke his back over the sunk fence beyant Highberries Barn; I knowed him by the ring on his tail and the thrap mark on his lift shoulder, where the hair’s grown a different colour. ‘Good-marnin,’ says I, whin I see him ten minits ago. ‘It’s you that’ll be sweepin’ the country-side with your brush before you’re an hour older, or me names not Billy the Buck,’ I says. And with that he livels it at me like a gun, and into the bushes he pops, with his eye over his shoulder at me. Who’s this comin’ on the big brown horse?” “One of the quality from the Big House,” replied the sweep, as Mr Fanshawe, in spotless pink and mounted on a superb hunter, turned the corner of the road from Glen Druid. After Mr Fanshawe, and some way behind, came the governess-cart driven by Patsy.