THE POET OF INSTRUMENTS 179 



But to my own old maid. Lovely woman, she once 

 wrote some charming verses to an entrancing little Danish 

 air I had exhumed from the relics of a deceased musical 

 antiquary I am talking of thirty-odd years ago, and she 

 was fifteen years my senior then. Well, one day she said, 

 at a concert to which I had taken her at St. James's. Hall, 

 where we had listened to Joachim's wondrous playing, 

 " If the organ is the king of instruments, surely the violin 

 is the poet." Now, the high-school rider is much like the 

 violin mind you, I have not used the word " fiddle," which 

 is quite another instrument, of the banjo order. There is 

 no more delicate thing in the world than a horse's mouth, 

 and the high-school rider works on its delicacy, while all 

 other riders seek to harden it to their own less sensitive 

 hands. The fact is undeniable ; the hands of the high- 

 school rider are not to be equalled. He must have good 

 hands ; he can accomplish no result without them. Nor 

 is it the light hand and loose rein of the cowboy or 

 Arab, for he feels his horse's mouth at every instant; he 

 talks to him through the bit as no one else ever can. 

 The jockey stimulates his horse by the bit, sometimes in 

 a marvellous way ; the cross-country rider does the like, 

 and rouses his every power at a difficult obstacle. But 

 the high-school rider talks a language to his steed which 

 is, indeed, Greek to those who have not studied it, which 

 is Homeric in its graceful touch and powerful effect. 



Associated with this fact is the question whether such 

 a delicate mouth is what one wants. "Well to be quite 

 honest, no ; not as a rule. A man who is travelling needs 

 a Baedecker rather than a Shakespeare ; we admire, if you 

 like, the man who reads Browning before breakfast instead 

 of his newspaper ; but 



Alas, my steed has positively got hold of the bit again, 

 and I fear he will gallop into yonder chestnut grove. But 



