Lady Bi^ and Bella Smith. 49 



She invests in a slang peajaeket, and hammer-headed 

 hunting ^Yhip, and a hard-looking chimney-pot. She 

 imagines that a bridle is a bridle, a saddle a saddle, and 

 a horse a horse ; that a gentleman riding well a-head of 

 of you is just the same as a well-dressed groom in 

 attendance, and that a devil-may-care fling, all on one 

 side, at a greasy-looking hole, where the odds are two 

 to one on a fall, is the same thing as the finished 

 performance of Lady Di. Lady Di is the single 

 exception, Bella Smith the hundred-headed monster who 

 startles our propriety in half-a-dozen shapes every time 

 we put on our boots and breeches. The Bella Smiths 

 have become so numerous of late that it behoves honest 

 men to tell them the truth. If they can afford a good- 

 looking hack, ard have sufficient taste to dress them- 

 selves well ; if they have brothers who can put on a bridle 

 and saddle as it ought to be, who will curb the taste for 

 colours and ribands and buckles, and who can induce 

 their sisters to sit straight upon their horses, there can be 

 no possible harm in their exhibiting themselves from 

 twelve to two p.m., between the 1st of May and the end 

 of July in Eotten Eow. They will have plenty of 

 admirers and a legitimate basis for admiration. Or, if 

 they prefer it, there can be no harm, under the same 

 irreproachable circumstances, in riding to cover every 

 day from the 1st of November to the middle of March, 

 providing only that plenty of sea-room be given to those 

 whose business it is to look after the hounds and not 

 after the womem But there is one conclusive argument 

 which should exclude the sex, as a rule, from the dangers 

 of the chase. On the score of humanity alone, we 

 deprecate any display of equestrian power beyond that 

 of the simplest kind. To see a w^oman crossing a country 

 with that resolution for which some of them are famous 

 gives me a cold shudder compared to which total 

 immersion in Wissendine is a warm bath. I know the 

 insecurity of the whole thing from beginning to end ; the 

 uncertainty of everything sublunary, excepting a woman's 

 seat, which is so dangerously secure that, in case of a fall, 

 she can scarcely get away at all. The best of horses, 

 the best of men, occasionally come to grief. Does that} 

 pretty woman bear a. charmed life only because she does 



