several times, that a number
of the cowboys have by practice become proficient in riding
to hounds, and in steeple-chasing.

It would be interesting to compare the performances of the Australian
stock-riders with those of our own cowpunchers, both in cow-work and in
riding. The Australians have an entirely different kind of saddle, and
the use of the rope is unknown among them. A couple of years ago the
famous western rifle-shot, Carver, took some cowboys out to Australia,
and I am informed that many of the Australians began themselves
to practise with the rope after seeing the way it was used by the
Americans. An Australian gentleman, Mr. A. J. Sage, of Melbourne, to
whom I had written asking how the saddles and styles of riding compared,
answered me as follows:

"With regard to saddles, here it is a moot question which is the better,
yours or ours, for buck-jumpers. Carver's boys rode in their own saddles
against our Victorians in theirs, all on Australian buckers, and honors
seemed easy. Each was good in his own style, but the horses were not
what I should call really good buckers, such as you might get on a back
station, and so there was nothing in the show that could unseat the
cowboys. It is only back in the bush that you can get a really good
bucker. I have often seen one of them put both man and saddle off."

This last is a feat I have myself seen performed in the West. I suppose
the amount of it is that both the American and the Australian rough
riders are, for their own work, just as good as men possibly can be.

One spring I had to leave the East in the midst of the hunting season,
to join a roundup in the cattle country of western Dakota, and it was
curious to compare the totally different styles of riding of the cowboys
and the cross-country men. A stock-saddle weighs thirty or forty pounds
instead of ten or fifteen and needs an utterly different seat from that
adopted in the East. A cowboy rides with very long stirrups, sitting
forked well down between his high pommel and cantle, and depends upon
balance as well as on the grip of his thighs. In cutting out a steer
from a herd, in breaking a vicious wild horse, in sitting a bucking
bronco, in stopping a night stampede of many hundred maddened animals,
or in the performance of a hundred other feats of reckless and daring
horsemanship, the cowboy is absolutely unequalled; and when he has his
own horse gear he sits his animal with the ease of a c