Edith Oenone Somerville - In the Vine Country

IN THE VINE COUNTRY

BY
E.. SOMERVILLE AND MARTIN ROSS
AUTHORS OF
THROUGH CONNEMARA IN A GOVERNESS CART, ETC.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY F. H. TOWNSEND
FROM SKETCHES BY E.. SOMERVILLE
LONDON
W. H. ALLEN & CO. LIMITED
13 Waterloo Place S.W.
1893

IN THE VINE COUNTRY

I T was our first days cub-hunting, and things had been going against us from the outset.

To begin with, we had started rather late,it is noticeable that the minutes between five and six A.M. are fewer and closer together than they are at any other period of the day,and, when half way to the meet we found that Betty had given way to her sporting proclivities, and had surreptitiously followed us. When it is explained that Betty is a St. Bernard puppy of cart-horse dimensions, whose expression of smiling imbecility only cloaks a will of iron, it will be understood that there was trouble before us. The trouble began at once. Directly she saw she was discovered she ran away, and the next time we saw her she was three fields ahead of us, lumbering cheerfully into covert at the heels of the hounds, pursued by several cows and the curses of the master.

BETTY.

By the time that she had been caught and immured in the bedroom of the nearest cottage, we were covered with confusion and blazing with heat, and while we were precariously scrambling on to our horses backs by the help of the pigstye door, we were told by an excited old man that the hounds had found, and were firing away like the divil out of the far side of the wood. This happened to be one of those statements that are founded not so much on fact as on a desire to keep things stirring and pleasant, but none the less did it send us at inconvenient speed to the other side of the covert, there to find that the hounds had never left it, and were hunting slowly back towards the side from which we had just come.

Not long after this my second cousin lost her temper, and said she hated cubbing, and wished she was back in Connemara, or anywhere out of the county Cork. This expression of opinion occurred when she was picking herself up out of a potato furrow, into which she and her horse had ingloriously rolled, and it was a good deal embittered by the fact that she had hurt her knee, torn her habit, and broken her hunting crop.

The day ended with this incident, so far, at least, as we were concerned. Betty was released from the captivity that she had not ceased to bewail in quivering, infantine shrieks, and we turned our faces toward home. There is something very humbling in coming in at ten oclock to a late edition of the family breakfast, with nothing to justify the routing up of the household at five A.M. except a torn habit and a bruised knee; and we said to each other, as we went unostentatiously up the back stairs, that cubbing was not worth the candle by which one had to get up to be in time for it.

We did not know that a few days afterwards we should be hanging out of the window of the train as, at a painfully early hour, it passed a covert in the vicinity, straining jaundiced eyes of jealousy at the distant specks that represented the field and the houndsspecks who were to remain in the county Cork and go out cubbing, instead of faring forth, as we were doing, to take our pleasure in foreign lands.

The letter that we found on the dining-room table, when we came down-stairs on that day that had

MY SECOND COUSIN LOST HER TEMPER.

been sacrificed to Betty, was responsible for this unexpected change of circumstances. It said majestically, You are to go to the vineyards of the Mdoc, and must start at once in order to be in time for the vintage; and in spite of a grand and complete ignorance of Mdoc, its vintages, and wines in general, we accepted the position with calm, even with satisfaction.

The gibes of our friends were many and untiring, and were the harder to bear that we felt a secret scepticism as to our fitness for this large and yet delicate mission,what did we know of Chteau Lafite or Mouton Rothschild, except that a glass and a half of the former had once compelled my second cousin to untimely slumber at dessert?and when on a foggy morning we drove away from home, the dank air was heavy with the prognostications that we should return as bottle-nosed dipsomaniacs, and the last thing that caught our eye as we turned the final corner of the avenue was the flutter of a piece of blue ribbon.

We had a singularly detestable journey to London, or perhaps it was that a summer spent in country remoteness made the train and its loathsome sister, the steamboat, more intolerable than usual. As far as Dublin we were comparatively confident, though the trees at the station were rustling a little in the wind, and the window-frames shook ominously in dismal accompaniment to the lamentations of the emigrants who crowded the platforms, waiting for the down train to Cork. There are happily few things in the world that are as bad as they are expected to be, but a bad crossing is worse than the combined efforts of imagination and remembrance can make it. This, at least, is the opinion of my second cousin, who ought by this time to have some knowledge of a subject to which, according to her own reckoning of the time occupied in each crossing, she has given some fifty of the best years of her life. The trees and the window-frames had not overstated the case, and we had the gloomy satisfaction of hearing the stewardess remark, as we neared Holyhead, that it had been a rough passage. We could have told her so ourselves, but still it was gratifying to have the thing placed on an official basis.

In the pale morning, as we endured that last long hour before Euston is reached, we read in headachy snatches a pamphlet that we had been lent about the wines of the Mdoc, and our souls sank at the prospect of expounding the laws of fermentation to readers who would be as oppressively bored by it as we ourselves. But our first day in London routed this hobgoblin: we were to enjoy ourselves; we were to taste claret if we wished, or talk bad French to the makers of it if it amused us; but to improve other peoples minds by figures and able disquisitions on viticulture and the treatment of the phylloxera was not, we heard with thanksgiving, to be our mission.

The three days before our start were spent in the manner customary in such cases; that is to say, we moved incessantly and at an ever-quickening pace between the Strand, the Army and Navy Stores, and High Street, Kensington, laden with small parcels,

WE WERE LENT A KODAK.

footsore from the unaccustomed flagstones, and care-worn from the effort to utilise the Underground return tickets that an ideally perfect programme had induced us to take in the morning. In addition to these usual cares, another more poignant anxiety fell to our lot. We were lent a Kodak,for the benefit of the unlearned it may be mentioned that the Kodak is a photographic camera of the kind that is to the ordinary species as a compressed meat lozenge to a round of beef,and as neither of us knew anything about it, it became necessary to learn its mechanism in a fevered ten minutes, or to leave it behind. Ambition fired us to the attempt, and having adjourned with the Kodak and an instructor to the severely simple scenery of the gardens on the Thames Embankment, we received there our first and only lesson. What its results were will never be known to the public; a group of intoxicated ghosts lolling on a bench in the depths of a spotted fog can be of little interest to any one except the artists, and even to their indulgent eyes its charm is of a somewhat morbid character.