How women should ride

IT has not been the intention of the author of this little volume to present the reader with elaborate chapters of technical essays. Entire libraries have been written on the care and management of the horse from the date of its foaling ; book upon book has been compiled on the best and proper method of acquiring some degree of skill in the saddle. The author has scarcely hoped, therefore, to exhaust in 248 pages a subject which, after having been handled on the presses of nearly every publisher in this country and England, yet contains unsettled points for the discussion of argumentative horsemen and horse-women.But it happens with riding as, indeed, it does with almost every other subject that we ignore the simpler side for the more intricate. We delve into a masterpiece, suitable for a professional, on the training of a horse, when the chances are we do not know how to saddle him.We stumble through heavy articles on biting, the technical terms of which we do not understand, when if our own horse picked up a stone we probably would be utterly at a loss what to do.We, both men and women, are too much inclined to gallop over the fundamental lessons, which should be conned over again and again until thoroughly mastered. We are restive in our novitiate period, impatient to pose as past-masters in an art before we have acquired its first principles.