THE BARB AND THE BKJDLE. 47 



CHAPTEE, YII. 



The Trotting Lesson. 



This, once thoroughly mastered, gives the pupil confidence and 

 security on her horse, and is the great inductive step by which she 

 learns the value of balance. Some years ago it was considered that 

 if a lady could sit her horse gracefully at a walk, and securely at a 

 canter, she had accomplished all that was correct or necessary in 

 female equitation. Trotting was altogether ignored, for the simple 

 reason that ladies found "it extremely difficult to do, and impossible 

 to find anybody who could help them out of their difficulty by 

 teaching them the right way. In those days most of the riding 

 masters were men who had been instructors in the cavalry. In that 

 arm of the service, trotting according to regulation is quite a dif- 

 ferent thing to the easy rise and fall seat practised by civihans- 

 on horseback. It is a necessity in cavalry, in order to preserve the 

 dressing in line, that a man should sit down in his saddle at a trot, 

 and allow the horse to shake him fair up and down in it. If the 

 rising seat were allowed, it would be impossible to preserve anything 

 like dressing. This shake-up, or "bumping" seat, however, as men 

 out of the army call it, is by no means so distressing as some people 

 imagine, unless the horse is unusually rough in his action. 



The reason is that the military trot is taught upon the principle of 

 balance. The man sits fair down on his ^eat, and, keeping his knee 

 forward and his heel well down, does not cling to the horse by 

 muscular grasp ; consequently the bumping, so terrific to the eye of 

 the civilian, is scarcely felt by the soldier, and in continental armies, 

 where rough trotting horses are exceptional, the motion or jolt is 

 scarcely perceptible. There are a great many popular fallacies about 

 military riding — as, for instance, that a dragoon rides with a very 



