no matter how attractive, on young and valuable horses. Fanny
Fitz's riding had been matured on well-seasoned screws, and she sallied
forth to the subjugation of the Connemara filly with a self-confidence
formed on experience only of the old, and the kind, and the cunning.

The filly trembled and sidled away from the garden-seat up to which
Johnny Connolly had manoeuvred her. Johnny's supreme familiarity with
young horses had brought him to the same point of recklessness that
Fanny had arrived at from the opposite extreme, but some lingering
remnant of prudence had induced him to put on the cavesson headstall,
with the long rope attached to it, over the filly's bridle. The latter
bore with surprising nerve Fanny's depositing of herself in the saddle.

"I'll keep a holt o' the rope, Miss Fanny," said Johnny, assiduously
fondling his pupil; "it might be she'd be strange in herself for the
first offer. I'll lead her on a small piece. Come on, gerr'l! Come on
now!"

The pupil, thus adjured, made a hesitating movement, and Fanny settled
herself down into the saddle. It was the shifting of the weight that
seemed to bring home to the grey filly the true facts of the case, and
with the discovery she shot straight up into the air as if she had been
fired from a mortar. The rope whistled through Johnny Connolly's
fingers, and the point of the filly's shoulder laid him out on the
ground with the precision of a prize-fighter.

"I felt, my dear," as Fanny Fitz remarked in a letter to a friend, "as
if I were in something between an earthquake and a bad dream and a
churn. I just _clamped_ my legs round the crutches, and she whirled the
rest of me round her like the lash of a whip. In one of her flights she
nearly went in at the hall door, and I was aware of William O'Loughlin's
snow-white face somewhere behind the geraniums in the porch. I think I
was clean out of the saddle then. I remember looking up at my knees, and
my left foot was nearly on the ground. Then she gave another flourish,
and swung me up on top again. I was hanging on to the reins hard; in
fact, I think they must have pulled me back on to the saddle, as I
_know_ at one time I was sitting in a bunch on the stirrup! Then I heard
most heart-rending yells from the poor old Aunts: 'Oh, the begonias! O
Fanny, get off the grass!' and then, suddenly, the filly and I were
perfectly still, and the house and the trees were spinning round me,
black, edged with green and yellow