ANNIE LIVINGSTONE.
"The work of the leading equestrienne is one of the most laborious in the whole range of the circus profession. It requires physical courage of the highest order, combined with great power of endurance and a capacity for adopting oneself to a constant change of scene and surrounding. People who witness only the brilliant performances in the ring in an atmosphere laden with light and music, little dream of the wearisome toil and drudgery which precede them."
The speaker was Miss Lilly Deacon, a fair-haired English lady, with the form of a Juno, who arrived in this country from London sometime ago to fill an engagement as leading equestrienne in Forepaugh's circus. As she appeared in the parlor in an interview with a Philadelphia reporter, she might naturally have been taken for the preceptress of some fashionable English boarding-school, or the daughter of some stiff old country squire of Kent or Sussex—or anybody, in fact, rather than the daring rider whose performances have bewildered and startled the circus-going multitude of London, Paris, and Berlin. In feature and manner her appearance was that of the English gentlewoman, while her conversation throughout revealed a delicacy of thought and expression common only to the well-bred lady.
CIRCUS RIDERS.
"The training necessary to success in equestrian performances," continued Miss Deacon, "is monotonous in the extreme and in some parts very dangerous. None but those in rugged health ever withstand it, and no one without a perfect physical organization should undertake it. The ordinary exercises of the riding-school are trifles as compared with the tasks imposed in professional training. When a woman has obtained all the knowledge to be acquired in a riding-school, she has only got the rudiments of real equestrian art. She must then enter the circus ring and familiarize herself with the duties required of her there. She must be prepared to endure falls and bruises without number, together with frequent scoldings and corrections from the instructors. No woman, unless she be possessed of extraordinary natural skill, ought to appear in the ring before an audience until she has graduated from a riding-school, and then practised in the ring four or five hours every day for at least six months. Those six months will be a period of torture and weariness to her, but she must undergo them or run the risk of almost certain failure and humiliation upon her first appearance in public.
"The best equestrian instructor in Europe—in fact the only one of established reputation—is M. Salmonsky of Berlin. He is one of the grandest horsemen in the world, and in his great circus includes some of the finest stock on the continent. He saw me first in London, my native place, many years ago when I was performing with my brothers and sisters in Henley's Regent Street circus, and offered to take me with him to Berlin and complete my training. I accepted, and entered his circus at the German capital, where I received the most careful instruction he could give me.
"M. Salmonsky would send me into the ring with his most spirited horses every day and stand by to direct my exercises. Sometimes I thought I should never survive the terrible discipline, and often thought I should go back to London and content myself with being a second-rate rider, but the kindness of my good old instructor softened the innumerable bumps and bruises I received, and I at last triumphed. Emperor William and the crown prince attended the circus the night I made my debut, and complimented me formally and personally from their box.
"M. Salmonsky's course of training is very rigid, and that accounts for its thoroughness. The pupil must surrender wholly to the instructor and become very much as a ball of wax in his hands. At the outset, however, the scholar must obtain complete mastery of her horses. Fear is a quality utterly hostile to successful equestrianism, and unless the pupil can banish it at the start, she had better give up her ambition and abandon the profession. She will never succeed so long as she is afraid either of herself or her horses.
"But, as I said before, no one unacquainted with the dangerous preparatory instruction of an equestrienne has any proper estimate of the toil and weariness which her performances represent. One never knows the boundless capacity of the human frame for pains and aches until one has gone into training for circus-riding. What, with unruly horses, uncomfortable saddles, and the violent exercise involved, five or six hours of practice every day for months is certain to do one of two things—it either kills the pupil or brings her up to the perfection of physical womanhood. The hours for practice adopted by M. Salmonsky were in the forenoon—generally from eight to twelve, with, perhaps, another hour or two in the evening. To withstand this course one must dress loosely and become a devotee to plain living and the laws of hygiene. Any neglect of those principles, or any great loss of sleep usually results in broken health and professional failure.