s. The young man on the pony turned a questioning eye towards
his mother, but her sole response was a drag at the pony's head to set
it going; swinging her cloak about her, she paddled through the slush
towards the gate, supremely disregarding the fact that a gander, having
nerved himself and his harem to the charge, had caught the ragged skirt
of her dress in his beak, and being too angry to let go, was being
whirled out of the yard in her train.

Dinny Johnny ran to the door, moved by an impulse for which I think the
hot whisky and water must have been responsible.

"I'll give you twelve pounds for the pony, ma'am!" he called out.

A quarter of an hour later, when he and the publican were tying a
tow-rope round the pony's lean neck, Mr. Denny was aware of a sinking of
the heart as he surveyed his bargain. It looked, and was, an utterly
degraded little object, as it stood with its tail tucked in between its
drooping hindquarters, and the rain running in brown streams down its
legs. Its lips were decorated with the absurd, the almost incredible
moustache that is the consequence among Irish horses of a furze diet (I
would hesitatingly direct the attention of the male youth of Britain to
this singular but undoubted fact), and although the hot whisky and
water had not exaggerated the excellence of its shoulder and the iron
soundness of its legs, it had certainly reversed the curve of its neck
and levelled the corrugations of its ribs.

"You could strike a bally match on her, this minute, if it wasn't so
wet!" thought Mr. Denny, and with the simple humour that endeared him to
his friends he christened the pony "Matchbox" on the spot.

"And it's to make a hunther of her ye'd do?" said the publican, pulling
hard at the knot of the tow-rope. "Begor', I know that one. If there was
forty men and their wives, and they after her wid sticks, she wouldn't
lep a sod o' turf. Well, safe home, sir, safe home, and mind out she
wouldn't kick ye. She's a cross thief," and with this valediction Dinny
Johnny went on his way.

There was no disputing the fact of the pony's crossness.

"She's sourish-like in her timper," Jimmy, Mr. Denny's head man,
observed to his subordinate not long after the arrival, and the
subordinate, tenderly stroking a bruised knee, replied:--

"Sour! I niver see the like of her! Be gannies, the divil's always busy
with her!"

On one point, however, the grey pony proved better than had been
anticipated. With