Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
himself (for that was the only colour to his mind) and there
was a board put up on a hillock in the middle of the island
with a printed notice, saying: By the Lord Harry, Green is
the grass that grows on the ground. And, says Mr Dixon, if
ever he got scent of a cattleraider in Roscommon or the
wilds of Connemara or a husbandman in Sligo that was
sowing as much as a handful of mustard or a bag of rape-
seed out he’d run amok over half the countryside rooting
up with his horns whatever was planted and all by lord Har-
ry’s orders. There was bad blood between them at first, says
Mr Vincent, and the lord Harry called farmer Nicholas all
the old Nicks in the world and an old whoremaster that kept
seven trulls in his house and I’ll meddle in his matters, says
he. I’ll make that animal smell hell, says he, with the help of
that good pizzle my father left me. But one evening, says Mr
Dixon, when the lord Harry was cleaning his royal pelt to
go to dinner after winning a boatrace (he had spade oars for
himself but the first rule of the course was that the others
were to row with pitchforks) he discovered in himself a
wonderful likeness to a bull and on picking up a black-
thumbed chapbook that he kept in the pantry he found sure
enough that he was a lefthanded descendant of the famous
champion bull of the Romans, Bos Bovum, which is good
bog Latin for boss of the show. After that, says Mr Vincent,
the lord Harry put his head into a cow’s drinkingtrough in
the presence of all his courtiers and pulling it out again told
them all his new name. Then, with the water running off
him, he got into an old smock and skirt that had belonged
to his grandmother and bought a grammar of the bulls’ lan-