entaur. Yet he is
quite helpless the first time he gets astride one of the small eastern
saddles. One summer, while purchasing cattle in Iowa, one of my ranch
foremen had to get on an ordinary saddle to ride out of town and see
a bunch of steers. He is perhaps the best rider on the ranch, and will
without hesitation mount and master beasts that I doubt if the boldest
rider in one of our eastern hunts would care to tackle; yet his
uneasiness on the new saddle was fairly comical. At first he did not
dare to trot and the least plunge of the horse bid fair to unseat him,
nor did he begin to get accustomed to the situation until the very end
of the journey. In fact, the two kinds of riding are so very different
that a man only accustomed to one, feels almost as ill at ease when he
first tries the other as if he had never sat on a horse's back before.
It is rather funny to see a man who only knows one kind, and is
conceited enough to think that that is really the only kind worth
knowing, when first he is brought into contact with the other. Two or
three times I have known men try to follow hounds on stock-saddles,
which are about as ill-suited for the purpose as they well can be; while
it is even more laughable to see some young fellow from the East or from
England who thinks he knows entirely too much about horses to be taught
by barbarians, attempt in his turn to do cow-work with his ordinary
riding or hunting rig. It must be said, however, that in all probability
cowboys would learn to ride well across country much sooner than the
average cross-country rider would master the dashing and peculiar style
of horsemanship shown by those whose life business is to guard the
wandering herds of the great western plains.

Of course, riding to hounds, like all sports in long settled, thickly
peopled countries, fails to develop in its followers some of the hardy
qualities necessarily incident to the wilder pursuits of the mountain
and the forest. While I was on the frontier I was struck by the fact
that of the men from the eastern States or from England who had shown
themselves at home to be good riders to hounds or had made their records
as college athletes, a larger proportion failed in the life of the
wilderness than was the case among those who had gained their experience
in such rough pastimes as mountaineering in the high Alps, winter
caribou-hunting in Canada, or deer-stalking--not deer-driving--in
Scotland.

Nevertheless, of