192 Among Men and Horses. 



ignore. My experience is that the worse men ride, the more 

 do they affect slippery saddles. Australian horsemen will un- 

 derstand me when I say that the large majority of saddles 

 used in England are unfit to ride in on account of being too 

 wide in the ' twist ' or ' waist/ a fault which prevents the 

 rider from sitting close to the horse. This clumsy pattern 

 has been handed down from the days when men rode cart 

 horses, whose broad backs required the bars of a saddle-tree 

 to be wide apart. As Australasian horses are more or less 

 well bred, and as many of them are difficult to ride, only 

 saddles narrow in the ' twist ' or ' grip ' are used in those 

 Colonies. I may mention that the trees of all these saddles 

 come from Walsall ; for no saddle-trees are made in Australia, 

 although many get 'covered' there. 



I was on the best of terms with all the Australian and 

 New Zealand horse shippers, from whom I received the 

 greatest civility and kindness. They were always delighted 

 to ' pull out,' and let me try any of their horses ; for they 

 knew that I would never think of troubling them, and of 

 losing my own time unless I meant to buy. What these men 

 and all other dealers rightly detest, is a ' messer,' namely, a 

 person who cannot make up his mind, or who, with the idea 

 of giving himself importance, pretends to want to purchase a 

 horse, but who has not the remotest intention of doing so. 

 When I had a good order on hand, I dealt liberally with 

 them ; and as they knew that I did not want to keep all the 

 profit myself, they were ready to ' meet me/ if they could 

 possibly do so, when there was not much to be made at the 

 price. They are good judges of horses, and have to work 

 very hard, with a continually sinking rupee to make a liveli- 

 hood. Mr John Stevens, who was a horse importer and a 

 captain in the New Zealand Cavalry, was a great friend of 

 ours. He had been a Government interpreter among the 

 Maoris, and had many stories to tell about those people. On 

 one occasion, a native chief, who was under cross-examina- 

 tion in court, on being asked why he had not brought a 



