LIGHT HORSE. 203 



the other way about, and is the natural, nay, the inevita- 

 ble, result of his training. This might very easily be 

 altered. A careful man might surely be trusted to ride his 

 horse a little about the roads or the camp, and then a horse 

 who declines to go alone out of the barrack-gate would be 

 a comparative rarity. At present he is not so. Then as to 

 leaping. A bar is the least useful, or rather the most 

 objectionable, thing that a young horse can be confronted 

 with. I do not mean to condemn its use for a few times 

 with a young horse ; but a very short acquaintance with 

 it is sufficient, and he should not be allowed to knock it 

 down. A troop horse is not wanted to jump ox-fences 

 or sensation water jumps, but he should be able to be 

 trusted at a flight of hurdles or a moderate timber fence 

 of any kind. Nor should he be stopped by a five-foot 

 drain or an average bank and ditch. This last is the 

 kind of fence to make horses clever. I would have 

 young remounts first led, then ridden, with a steady 

 horse to lead them over all these sort of fences, never of 

 course asking them to jump a big place or a dangerous 

 one, until it comes as natural to them to surmount any 

 moderate bar to their progress as it does to an old 

 hunter. To jump large fences without some excitement, 

 indeed, as a rule, without hounds, is to teach the art of 

 refusing ; but in cold blood a horse can almost always 

 be got over quite small places with little or no trouble, 

 and if he does the little place neatly and cheerfully in 

 cold blood, he will, when excited, think comparatively 

 little of a " rasper." Another fault in the usual training 

 of remounts is that they never gallop. In all their 

 training they never exceed the collected canter of the 

 school, and most likely have not galloped from the time 

 they join their corps until " gallop " is sounded by the 



