the wildest of the young
horses. Afterwards I wandered up among the people, and looked at the
sports. At one place a man, with his face heavily blackened, except
one cheek and eye--an extraordinary effect--was standing shots of
a wooden ball behind a board with a large hole in the middle, at
three shots a penny. When I came past half an hour afterwards he had
been hit in the mouth--by a girl some one told me--but seemed as
cheerful as ever.

On the road, some little distance away, a party of girls and young
men were dancing polkas to the music of a melodeon, in a cloud of
dust. When I had looked on for a little while I met some girls I
knew, and asked them how they were getting on.

'We're not getting on at all,' said one of them, 'for we've been at
the races for two hours, and we've found no beaux to go along with
us.'

When the horses had all run, a jennet race was held, and greatly
delighted the people, as the jennets--there were a number of them--got
scared by the cheering and ran wild in every direction. In the
end it was not easy to say which was the winner, and a dispute began
which nearly ended in blows. It was decided at last to run the race
over again the following Sunday after Mass, so everyone was
satisfied.

The day was magnificently bright, and the ten miles of Dingle Bay
were wonderfully brilliant behind the masses of people, and the
canvas booths, and the scores of upturned shafts. Towards evening I
got tired taking or refusing the porter my friends pressed on me
continually, so I wandered off from the racecourse along the path
where Diarmuid had tricked the Fenians.

Later in the evening news had been coming in of the doings in the
sandhills, after the porter had begun to take effect and the
darkness had come on.

'There was great sport after you left,' a man said to me in the
cottage this evening. 'They were all beating and cutting each other
on the shore of the sea. Four men fought together in one place till
the tide came up on them, and was like to drown them; but the priest
waded out up to his middle and drove them asunder. Another man was
left for dead on the road outside the lodges, and some gentleman
found him and had him carried into his house, and got the doctor to
put plasters on his head. Then there was a red-headed fellow had his
finger bitten through, and the postman was destroyed for ever.'

'He should be,' said the man of the house, 'for Michael Patch broke
the seat of his car