the body, not trying to control the head, and persist until you can thoroughly relax the muscles of the neck, a work which you need not expect to accomplish until after you have made many efforts.  Now execute all your movements for strengthening the muscles, very slowly and lightly, using as little force as possible.  After you can do this fairly well, begin by executing them quickly and forcibly, then gradually retard them, and make them more gently, until you glide at last into perfect repose.  This will take time, but the good results will appear not only in your riding, but also in your walking and in your dancing.  You and Nell might practise these Delsarte exercises together, for no especial dress is needed for them, and companionship will remove the danger of the dulness which, it must be admitted, sometimes besets the amateur, unsustained by the artist’s patient energy.  Before you take another class lesson, you may have an exercise ride, in which to practise what you have learned.  “Tried to learn!” do you say?  Well, really, Esmeralda, one begins to have hopes of you!

X.

—­Ye couldn’t have made him a rider,
And then ye know, boys will be boys, and hosses,
—­well, hosses is hosses!
Harte.

When you and Nell go to take your exercise ride, Esmeralda, you must assume the air of having ridden before you were able to walk, and of being so replete with equestrian knowledge that the “acquisition of another detail would cause immediate dissolution,” as the Normal college girl said when asked if she knew how to teach.  You must insist on having a certain horse, no matter ho much inconvenience it may create, and, if possible, you should order him twenty-four hours in advance, stipulating that nobody shall mount him in the interval, and, while waiting for him to be brought from the stable, you should proclaim that he is a wonderfully spirited, not to say vicious, creature, but that you are not in the smallest degree afraid of him.  You should pick up your reins with easy grace, and having twisted them into a hopeless snarl, should explain to any spectator who may presume to smile that one “very soon forgets the little things, you know, but they will come back in a little while.”

Having started, you must choose between steadily trotting or rapidly cantering, absolutely regardless of the rights or wishes of any one else, or else you must hold your horse to a spiritless crawl, carefully keeping him in such a position as to prevent anybody else from outspeeding you.  If you were a man, you would feel it incumbent on you to entreat your master to permit you to change horses with him, and would give him certain valuable information, derived from quarters vaguely specified as “a person who knows,” or “a man who rides a great deal.” meaning somebody who is in the saddle twenty times a year, and duly pays his livery stable bill for the privilege,