Sporting Tales Author:Mrs. Edward Kennard General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1893 Original Publisher: F.V. White Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can sele... more »ct from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: A DAY WITH THE DEVON AND SOMEESET STAGHOUNDS. An Irish landlord and his daughter, with nothing, or next to nothing, to live upon. I hope your sympathies are enlisted. If they are not, they ought to be; for we are reduced from comfort to discomfort, from a good social position to obscurity, and from comparative affluence to a state bordering on downright pauperism. I am twenty-one years of age, and I pity myself intensely; but I pity my father still more. I have all my life before me. Something may turn up ; something may happen. Who knows ? And even at the worst, youth is always hopeful and sanguine. But papa, at sixty-three, suddenly finds himself turned out of his house by a pack of idle, dishonest, good-for-nothing tenants, who have deprived him of his fortune, and for the last five years have rendered his life a burden. And all this came of the Land League. Until that iniquitous society spread and took root in the country, and was virtually encouraged by Mr. Gladstone's Government, we rubbed along fairly well. Papa was then Mr. O'Brian, of O'Brian Castle, and master of the Ballynakillem hounds. He had kept them for twenty years, and no keener sportsman or truer fox-hunter ever threw his leg across the pigskin. I look back with regret to those happy days. It seems to me that whatever kind fate may hold in store for me, nothing can ever equal the time when I was mistress of the big, rambling old castle, with its wild wilderness of a garden, and could ride any horse I pleased in the stables. Oh! the fun of forcing those half-broken three and four year olds to ho...« less