COMING IN FROM PASTURE.
"Then one of the old hands tried the horse, which repeated the performance, but not so successfully, as the rider suddenly pulled the animal's head up and prevented his falling to the ground. Practised riders sometimes show their skill by putting a silver coin the size of a half-dollar between each thigh and the saddle, and retaining it there in spite of all the plunging and bucking of the animal.[11] One of the men gravely told us he had seen a man thrown twenty feet into the air by a bucking horse, and then come down astride the saddle in exactly the right position. Another said he had seen a horse swell himself suddenly, so as to burst the girths of the saddle; the saddle and the man on it then went fully ten feet into the air, and came down on the horse all right and in order. We had intended to tell them about the remarkable riding of Buffalo Bill and his cow-boys, but after these two stories we had nothing to say.
"Australian horses are credited with remarkable endurance. A ride of a hundred miles between sunrise and sundown is not a wonderful performance. There is a story of a man who rode a pony a hundred miles in a day, and then carried it a hundred yards; but it is proper to add that the pony died from his rough usage. One horse carried his rider, a Mr. Lord, two hundred and sixty-three miles in three days, and suffered no ill effects from doing so. The distances made were eighty-eight miles the first day, eighty-three the second, and ninety-two on the third. Mr. Lord weighed one hundred and ninety-nine pounds, so that the horse had no feather-weight to carry.
AN AUSTRALIAN STOCK-RIDER.
"We were called away to breakfast before the men had finished their work with the horses, as some were to be reserved for the use of the strangers. Mr. Watson had given orders that the best horses were to be turned over to us; not the best from the stockman's point of view, but those of the kindest disposition and least addicted to tricks. A horse without any bad tricks is not easy to find on an Australian station; if what we were told about their breaking is true, it is no wonder.