THE LEVEE, THE BIT AND CUEB, ETC. 191 



seqiiently at right angles to the mouthpiece. There are, 

 however, many horses, especially underbred ones, whose 

 heads will be found to project laterally, immediately 

 above the angles of the mouth, in a sudden instead of 

 the usual gradual manner ; and the width of the mouth- 

 piece is therefore insufficient to give the upper cheeks, 

 especially the rings, the requisite degree of play ; or 

 rather, the latter will most probably gall the horse's 

 cheeks more or less. There are two ways in which 

 this may be readily avoided ; first, by inclining the 

 upper cheeks somewhat outwards (fig. 15, a), or by 

 making the upper ring movable (fig. 15, b), instead of 

 its foiTuing a continuation of the upper cheek. Either 

 of these methods will be found to answer the desired 

 end, Vv'ithout interfering with the proper action of the 

 bit, and are not only unobjectionable, but should be 

 always resorted to when necessary, because nothing is 

 more common than to see unthinking riders reject a bit 

 whose mouthpiece has the proper dimensions, and adopt 

 one that is a quarter or half an inch too wide, simply 

 because they find that the upper bars do not fit the 

 outside of the horse's head ; in fact, this is what fre- 

 quently leads to a wrong selection of bits. People 

 think of the outside and visible part, and neglect alto- 

 gether the much more important interior of the mouth 

 and the mouthpiece. 



It may be useful to summarise here the whole of 

 what has been explained in detail in the preceding 

 pages. We may say, then, that the average height of 

 the bar of the horse's mouth being IJ inches, the upper 

 cheek of the bit need never be longer, except, perhaps, 

 in very rare instances of horses 18 hands high and 

 •upwards; and this gives us 3|,. inches for the lower 



