40 HINTS ON HORSEMANSHIP. 



No chastisement should be allowed in any case. If he make 

 a start, the rider should endeavour not to make a consequent 

 one. You should not, indeed, take more notice of a shy than 

 you can possibly avoid ; and unless the horse has been pre- 

 viously brutalised, and to re-assure him, you should not even 

 caress him, lest even that should make him suspect that 

 something awful is about to happen. The common error is 

 the reverse of all this. The common error is to pull the horse's 

 head towards the object of his fear, and when he is facing it, 

 to begin with whip and spur. Expecting to be crammed 

 under the carriage-wheel, the horse probably rears, or runs 

 back into a ditch, or, at least, becomes more nervous and more 

 riotous at every carriage that he meets. Horses are instan- 

 taneously made shy by this treatment, and as instantaneously 

 cured by the converse of it. It is thus that all young or bad 

 riders make high-couraged horses shy ; but none ever remain 

 so in the hands of a good horseman ; who, in fact, in some 

 sort, prevents his horse looking at an object which he would 



