210 East and West 
comfortable seat for all-day jaunts than even 
the cavalry saddle. An English saddle is 
altogether unadapted to the mountains, and 
while some of the best horsemanship is shown 
in cross-country riding on English saddles, it 
is a totally different sort of riding from the 
cowboy’s and the two can hardly be compared. 
Undoubtedly the worst trails are in Mexico, 
for there they have been made, not by pick 
and shovel, but by the unshod hoofs of burros 
and the bare and sandalled feet of peons, carry- 
ing their wares to market, or travelling over 
the mountains on pilgrimages and to village 
fiestas. In four years’ riding in that country 
I did not encounter a single instance of any- 
one repairing atrail. The ascent of the steep 
slopes of a barranca is thus often like going up 
a pair of stairs with very high and narrow 
steps. It is quite an acrobatic feat to get up 
and down these barrancas and it sometimes 
has tobe done many timesinaday. Butsuch 
trails are in reality not as dangerous as some 
in a gravel formation: neglected paths where 
the gravel has fallen down from the inside and 
dropped away from the outside until only a 
few inches of trail remains, while beneath is 
an almost perpendicular drop of five hundred 
or a thousand feet to the bottom of the cafion. 
