SPECIAL FORMS OF EESTIVENESS. 315 



piece, when the stiffness of the head and neck will 

 gradually relax, and it may be put in motion again. 



Here it may be well to say what the rider should do 

 if his horse runs away with him. The general impres- 

 sion seems to be, that the safest thing is merely to 

 endeavour to keep the animal straight till it gets tired 

 of galloping, and keep one's own seat as long as pos- 

 sible ; consequently the rider plants his feet as firmly 

 as he can in the stirrups, and shoves these out tow^ards 

 the horse's shoulders in order to get fixed points from 

 which he can have a dead pull on the reins, and of 

 course his body, from the hips upwards, goes to the 

 rear, right over the horse's loins. Now, although this 

 method of proceeding suggests itself very naturally, it 

 is nevertheless all wrong, as, indeed, must be quite clear 

 to those readers who have read the preceding pages 

 with any degree of attention ; for whether the diffi- 

 culty has its seat in the horse's hind quarters, or in the 

 throat and neck, it is sure to be aggravated in this way; 

 besides that one can seldom reckon upon having room 

 enough to try this experiment without encountering 

 some obstacle, or a sharp corner, that brings horse and 

 rider down with a smash. 



Let us take the case of a horse running away in a 

 field or open space, in the first instance, as being more 

 easy to deal with. Here the principal object must be 

 to take your horse off the straight line and on to a 

 circle — at first, of course, a wide one, but by degrees 

 gradually narrowing. On a circle one has room enough 

 even for the tiring process, seeing that it never ends, 

 but the thing is to know how to get and keep the 

 horse on to it. In the first place, then, it requires 

 simply coolness and self-possession sufficient to enable 



