A DAY'S RIDE: A LIFE'S ROMANCE.

CHAPTER VII.

FATHER Dyke was one of those characters
which Ireland alone produces—a sporting priest.
In France, Spain, or Italy, the type is unknown.
Time was, when the abbé, elegant, witty, and
well bred, was a great element of polished life;
when his brilliant conversation and his
insidious address threw all the charm of culture
over a society which was only rescued from
coarseness by the marvellous dexterity of such
intellectual gladiators. They have passed away,
like many other things brilliant and striking:
the gilded coach, the red-heeled slipper, and the
supper of the regency; the powdered marquise,
for a smile of whose dimpled mouth the deadly
rapier has flashed in the moonlight; the
perfumed beauty, for one of whose glances a poet
would have racked his brain to render worthily
in verse; the gilded salon where, in a sort of
incense, all the homage of genius was offered up
before the altar of loveliness—gone are they all!

Au fond, the world is pretty much the same,
although we drive to a club dinner in a one
horse brougham; and if we meet the curé of
St. Roch, we find him to be rather a morose
middle aged man with a taste for truffles, and a
talent for silence. It is not as the successor of
the witty abbé, that I adduce the sporting
priest, but simply as a variety of the ecclesiastical
character which, doubtless, a very few more
years will have consigned to the realm of history.
He, too, will be a bygone!  Father Tom, as
he was popularly called, never needing any
more definite designation, was tam Marte quam
Mercurio, as much poacher as priest, and
made his sporting acquirements subservient to
the demands of an admirable table. The
thickest salmon, the curdiest trout, the fattest
partridge, and the most tender woodcock,
smoked on his board, and, rumour said, cooked
with a delicacy that more pretentious houses
could not rival. In the great world,
nothing is more common than to see some
favoured individual permitted to do things
which, by common voice, are proclaimed
impracticable or improper. With a sort of
prescriptive right to outrage the ordinances of
society, such people accept no law but their own
inclination, and seem to declare that they are
altogether exempt from the restraints that bind
other men. In a small way and an humble
sphere, Father Tom enjoyed this privilege, and
there was not in his whole county to be found
one man churlish or ungenerous enough to
dispute it; and thus was he suffered to throw his
line, snap his gun, or unleash his dog in
precincts where many with higher claims had been
refused permission.

It was not alone that he enjoyed the invigorating
pleasure of field sports in practice, but he
delighted in everything which bore any relationship
to them. There was not a column of Bell's
Life in which he had not his sympathy—the
pigeon match, the pedestrian, the Yankee trotter,
the champion for the silver sculls at Chelsea,
the dog "Billy," were all subjects of interest to
him. Never did the most inveterate blue stocking
more delight in the occasion of meeting
a great celebrity of letters, than did he when
chance threw him in the way of the jock who
rode the winner at the Oaks, or the "Game
Chicken" who punished the "Croydon Pet" in
the prize ring. But now for the letter, which
will as fully reveal the man as any mere
description. It was a narrative of races he had
attended, and rowing matches he had witnessed,
with little episodes of hawking, badger drawing,
and cock-fighting intermixed:

"I came down here—Brighton—to swim for
a wager of five-and-twenty sovereigns against a
Major Blayse, of the Third Light Dragoon
Guards; we made the match after mess at
Aldershot, when neither of us was anything to
speak of too sober; but as we were backed
strongly—he rather the favourite—there was no
way of drawing the bet. I beat him after a hard
struggle; we were two hours and forty minutes
in the water, and netted about sixty pounds
besides. We dined with the depôt in the
evening, and I won a ten-pound note on a
question of whether there ought to be saffron in the
American drink called 'greased lightning;' but
this was not the only piece of luck that attended
me, as you shall hear. As I was taking my
morning canter on the Downs, I perceived that
a stranger—a jockey-like fellow, not quite a
gentleman, but near it—seemed to keep me in
view; now riding past, now behind me, and
always bestowing his whole attention on my nag.
Of course, I showed the beast off to the best,
and handled him skilfully. I thought to myself,
he likes the pony; he'll be for making me an