ed hedge and a ditch; he got over as nice as possible, and he
gave quite a hurrah like. He says, 'There, I'm over my first
fence--that's a blessing!' Then I got him over a great many little
places, and he quite took to it and went on uncommonly well. _He was a
nice gentleman to teach--he'd just do anything you told him. That's the
way to get on!_"

In another place Dick says, "A quick and safe jumper always goes from
hind-legs to fore-legs. I never rode a steeple-chase yet but I steadied
my horse on to his hind-legs twenty yards from his fence, and I was
always over and away before the rushers. Lots of the young riders think
horses can jump anything if they can only drive them at it fast enough.
They force them too much at their fences. If you don't feel your
horse's mouth, you can tell nothing about him. You hold him, he can
make a second effort; if you drop him, he won't."

Now, Dick does not mean by this that you are to go slowly at every kind
of fence. He tells you that he "sent him with some powder at a
bullfinch;" but whatever the pace, you so hold your horse in the last
fifty yards up to the taking-off point, that instead of spreading
himself out all abroad at every stroke, he feels the bit and gets his
hind-legs well under him. If you stand to see Jim Mason or Tom Oliver in
the hunting-field going at water, even at what they call "forty miles an
hour," you will find the stride of their horses a measured beat, and
while they spur and urge them they collect them. This is the art no book
can teach; _but it can teach that it ought to be learned_. Thousands of
falls have been caused by a common and most absurd phrase, which is
constantly repeated in every description of the leaps of a great race or
run. "_He took his horse by the head and lifted him_," &c.

No man in the world ever lifted a horse over anything--it is a
mechanical impossibility--but a horseman of the first order can at a
critical moment so rouse a horse, and so accurately place his head and
hind-legs in the right position, that he can make an extraordinary
effort and achieve a miraculous leap. This in metaphorical language is
called lifting a horse, because, to a bye-stander, it looks like it. But
when a novice, or even an average horseman, attempts this sort of _tour
de force_, he only worries his horse, and, ten to one, throws him into
the fence. Those who are wise will content themselves with keeping a
horse well in hand until he is about to rise