the Kilcronan hounds graced with their society, and when Mr.
O'Grady and his field assembled at the Curragh-coolaghy cross-roads, it
was darkly hinted that if the hounds ran over a certain farm not far
from the covert, there might be more trouble.

Dinny Johnny, occupied with pulling up Mary O'Grady's saddle girths, and
evading the snaps with which "Matchbox" acknowledged the attention,
thought little of these rumours.

"Nonsense!" he said; "whatever they do they'll let the hounds alone.
Come on, Mary, you and me'll sneak down to the north side of the wood.
He's bound to break there, and we've got to take every chance we can
get."

Curragh-coolaghy covert was a large, ill-kept plantation that straggled
over a long hillside fighting with furze-bushes and rocks for the right
of possession; a place wherein the young hounds could catch and eat
rabbits to their heart's content comfortably aware that the net of
brambles that stretched from tree to tree would effectually screen them
from punishment. From its north-east side a fairly smooth country
trended down to a river, and if the fox did not fulfil Mr. Denny's
expectations by breaking to the north, the purplish patch that showed
where, on the further side of the river, Madore Wood lay, looked a point
for which he would be likely to make. Conscious of an act which he would
have loudly condemned in any one else, Mr. Denny, followed by Mary, like
his shadow, rode quietly round the long flank of the covert to the
north-east corner. They sat in perfect stillness for a few minutes, and
then there came a rustling on the inside of the high, bracken-fringed
fence which divided them from the covert. Then a countryman's voice said
in a cautious whisper:--

"Did he put in the hounds yit?"

"He did," said another voice, "he put them in the soud-aisht side;
they'll be apt to get it soon."

"Get what?" thought Dinny Johnny, all his bristles rising in wrath as
the idea of a drag came to him.

"There! they're noising now!" said the first voice, while a whimper or
two came from far back in the wood. "Maybe there'll not be so much chat
out o' thim afther once they'll git to Madore!"

"'Twas a pity Scanlan wouldn't put the mate in here and have done with
it," said the second voice. "Owld Sta'll niver let them run a dhrag."

"Yirrah, what dhrag man! 'Twas the fox himself they had, and he cut open
to make a good thrail, and the way Scanlan laid it the devil himself
wouldn't know 'twas