io8 RIDING FOR LADIES. 



finger. I must candidly say that I don't believe a word of 

 their efficacy for general-purpose riding. I do not think 

 that a learner could ever be brought to understand such 

 theories from printed rules, or to profit by them if under- 

 stood. Put a girl, for instance, on a high-mettled hunter, 

 loop the reins over the fingers of her left hand only — as 

 fashionable riding-masters do in schools — give her the whip, 

 pointed upwards (another general symptom of defective 

 teaching) in her right hand, and then send her out, not 

 over the smooth grass fields and through the convenient 

 gates of beautiful Leicestershire, where, a few years ago, 

 a whole day's hunting might be had without having to jump 

 a single fence, but away over the rugged plough and trying 

 ridge-and-furrow which take the wind out of our Irish 

 hunters. The high stone walls of Galway hunting-fields 

 are excellent tests of skill ; so also are the five-barred gates 

 of Meath and Carlow, and the yawning chasms — sixteen 

 feet wide and twenty deep — at which we in this hapless 

 yet lovely old country have to steady our horses when 

 coming up, and support them when over, or else lie gasping 

 at the bottom, with broken ribs and damaged noses, and 

 dreadful saddle-pommels making havoc with our frames at 

 every struggle of our engulfed and terrified steeds. Send, 

 I say, a haute ecole rider out over Irish hunting-grounds, 

 and see what good she can accomplish with the little finger 

 of her left hand ! Such teaching is a mere tirade of orna- 

 mental nonsense, for which, I believe, no pupil would in 

 the end feel at all obliged. 



I approve of taking the reins in both hands from the very 



