A Flat Iron for a Farthing; or, Some Passages in the Life of an only Son

by Juliana Horatia Ewing

I really shrink from realizing to myself what Nurse Bundle must have suffered whilst I was learning to ride. The novel exercise, the stimulus of risk, that "put new life into me," were to her so many daily grounds for the sad probability of my death.

"Every blessed afternoon do I look to see him brought home on a shutter, with his precious neck broken, poor lamb!" she exclaimed one afternoon, overpowered by the sight of me climbing on to the pony's back, which performance I had brought her downstairs to witness, and endeavoured to render more entertaining and creditable by secretly stimulating the pony to restlessness, and then hopping after him with one foot in the stirrup, in what I fancied to be a very knowing manner.

"Why, my dear Mrs. Bundle," said my father, smiling, "you kill him at least three hundred and sixty-four times oftener in the course of the year than you need. If he does break his neck, he can only do it once, and you bewail his loss every day."

"Now, Heaven bless the young gentleman, sir, and meaning no disrespect, but don't ye go for to tempt Providence by joking about it, and him perhaps brought a hopeless corpse to the side door this very evening," said Mrs. Bundle, her red cheeks absolutely blanched by the vision she had conjured up. Why, I cannot say, but she had fully made up her mind that when I was brought home dead, as she believed that, sooner or later, I was pretty sure to be, I should be brought to the side-door. Now "the side-door," as it was called, was a little door leading into the garden, and less used, perhaps, than any other door in the house. Mrs. Bundle, I believe, had decided that in that tragedy which she was constantly rehearsing, the men who should find my body would avoid the front-door, to spare my father the sudden shock of meeting my corpse. The side-door, too, was just below the nursery windows. Mrs. Bundle herself, would, probably, be the first to hear any knocking at it, and she naturally pictured herself as taking a prominent part in the terrible scene she so often fancied. It was perhaps a good thing, on the whole, that she chose this door in preference to those in constant use, otherwise every ring or knock at the front or back door must have added greatly to her anxieties.

I fear I did not do much to relieve them. I rather aggravated them. Partly I believe in the conceit of showing off my own skill and daring, and partly by way of "hardening" Mrs. Bundle's nerves. When more knowledge, or longer custom, or stronger health or nerves, have placed us beyond certain terrors which afflict other people, we are apt to fancy that, by insisting upon their submitting to what we do not mind, our nervous friends can or ought to be forced into the unconcern which we feel ourselves; which is, perhaps, a little too like dosing the patient with what happens to agree with the doctor.

Thus I fondled my pony's head and dawdled ostentatiously at his heels when Nurse Bundle was most full of fears of his biting or kicking. But I feel sure that this, and the tricks I played to show the firmness of my "seat," only made it seem to her the more certain that, from my recklessness, I must some day be bitten, kicked, or thrown.

I had several falls, and one or two narrow escapes from more serious accidents, which, for the moment, made my father as white as Mrs. Bundle. But he was wise enough to know that the present risks I ran from fearlessness were nothing to the future risks against which complete confidence on horseback would ensure me. And so with the ordinary mishaps, and with days and hours of unspeakable and healthy happiness, I learnt to ride well and to know horses. And poor Mrs. Bundle, sitting safely at home in her rocking-chair, endured all the fears from which I was free.

"Now look, my deary," said she one day; "don't you go turning your sweet face round to look up at the nursery windows when you're a riding off. I can see your curls, bless them! and that's enough for me. Keep yourself still, love, and look where you're a going, for in all reason you've plenty to do with that. And don't you go a waving your precious hand, for it gives me such a turn to think you've let go, and have only got one hand to hold on with, and just turning the corner too, and the pony a shaking its tail, and shifting about with its back legs, till how you don't slip off on one side passes me altogether."

"Why, you don't think I hold on by my hands, do you?" I cried.

"And what should you hold on with?" said Mrs. Bundle. "Many's the light cart I've rode in, but never let go my hold, unless with one hand, to save a bag or a bandbox. And though it's jolting, I'm sure a light cart's nothing to pony-back for starts and unexpectedness."