12 RIDING FOR LADIES. 



of families who actually put their infant children into 

 panniers, because they "look pretty" in them, and send 

 them out on ponies for an hour's jolting, with their poor 

 little heads bobbing pitifully about, and brain and spine 

 alike suffering from the so-called exercise. There are 

 fathers, too, who think that their boys ought to ride before 

 they are well capable of walking, and who in consequence 

 of this belief clap them on to wide-backed, rough-actioned 

 animals, regardless of the dangers to which, by so doing, they 

 are exposing the feeble frames of their hapless offspring. To 

 aid such persons by offering any sort of instruction as a help 

 to their objectionable practices would be like assisting at a 

 murder, or showing a torturer how to get on with his work. 

 I was choosing some articles at the establishment of a 

 fashionable saddler a short time ago, when the proprietor 

 stepped forward and requested me to look at an instru- 

 ment (I can call it by no other name) which he had just 

 completed to order. It was a child's saddle, with a con- 

 trivance not unlike a brazier, arising from the centre of it, 

 well furnished with padding and straps. This unique 

 appliance was, it appeared, the invention of the father of 

 the unfortunate infant for whose benefit it had been manu- 

 factured, and his pride in its appearance, and in his own 

 cleverness, was quite unbounded. Determined that his 

 son, aged three, should begin his lessons in horsemanship 

 at that early period of life, and resolved to secure him from 

 tumbling off (the only thing in the shape of danger to 

 which he gave a moment's thought), he conceived the 

 idea of buckling the infant into the " brazier," which was 



