CAPTAIN STANDISH CHOOSES A HORSE.
Having gained her point, and secured the promise of a saddle-horse, Bella wasted no time in getting herself ready to ride him. She was far too wise a little woman to exhibit herself publicly on horseback, before she had learned how to ride. She drove to Great Yafford early next morning, was measured for a habit by the best tailor in the town, and from the tailor’s went to a riding school in the suburbs, where the daughters of the plutocracy learned to sit straight in their saddles, and to take desperate leaps over a pole two feet from the tan floor.
Here Mrs. Piper arrived early enough to attire herself in a borrowed riding-habit, and to get an hour’s private lesson before the daily class began.
‘It is so very long since I’ve ridden,’ she said to the master—a being of hybrid aspect, in whom the swing and swagger of the cavalry soldier was curiously mixed with the distinctive graces of the circus rider, ‘my husband is afraid I might feel nervous on horseback.’
‘Is it very long, ma’am?’ asked the master, with a view to the selection of an animal of exceptional docility.
‘Well, yes,’ said Bella, who, in her present stage of being, had never ridden anything more dangerous than a wooden rocking-horse. ‘It is rather a long time.’
‘Tame Cat,’ roared the master to his subordinate, and in about five minutes a horse of nondescript appearance—the kind of animal which seems to be grown on purpose for riding-masters and flymen—a creature with a straight neck, splay feet, and a rat tail, but gifted with an expression of patient longsuffering which, from a moral point of view, atoned for his want of beauty.
Bella was mounted on Tame Cat, the master mounted a tall ugly chestnut with a white blaze on his face, and the two horses began to circumambulate the barn-like building at a solemn walk. Then came the exciting canter, and then the mathematical trot, which was for first too much for even Bella’s natural aptitude at doing everything she particularly wanted to do. At the end of the hour, however, there was a marked improvement, and the master complimented his new pupil.
‘You were a good deal out of practice, ma’am,’ he said, ‘but you’ll get into it again nicely in a dozen lessons.’
‘I shall come every morning for a week,’ said Bella, ‘and you must teach me as much as you can in the shortest possible time. Suppose I were to take a double lesson, two hours instead of one.’