handsomely.

After a consultation with Mr. Rarey's noble patrons, it was decided that
a list should be opened at Hyde Park Corner for subscribers at L10
10_s._ each, paid in advance, the teaching to commence as soon as five
hundred subscriptions had been paid, each subscriber signing an
engagement, under a penalty of L500, not to teach or divulge Mr. Rarey's
method, and Messrs. Tattersall undertaking to hold the subscriptions in
trust until Mr. Rarey had performed his part of the agreement.[17-*] To
this fund, at the request of my friends Messrs. Tattersall, I agreed to
act as Secretary. My duties ceased when the list was filled, and the
management of the business passed from those gentlemen to Mr. Rarey's
partner, Mr. Goodenough, on the 3rd of May, 1858.

This list was opened the first day at Mr. Jos. Anderson's, after Mr.
Rarey had exhibited, not his method, but the results of his method on
the celebrated black, or rather iron-gray, horse already mentioned.

Leaving the list to fill, Mr. Rarey went to Paris, and there tamed the
vicious and probably half-mad coaching stallion, Stafford.[18-*] It is
not generally known that having omitted the precautions of gagging this
wild beast with the wooden bit, which forms one of the vignettes of this
book, he turned round suddenly, while the tamer was soothing his legs,
caught his shoulder in his mouth, and would have made an end of the
Rarey system if assistance had not been at hand in the shape of Mr.
Goodenough and a pitchfork.

Intense enthusiasm was created in Paris by the conquest of Stafford, but
250 francs was too large a sum to found a long subscription list in a
city so little given to private horsemanship, and a French experiment
did not produce much effect in England.

In fact, the English list, which started so bravely under distinguished
patronage, after touching some 250 names, languished, and in spite of
testimonials from great names, only reached 320, when Mr. Rarey, at the
pressing recommendation of his English friends, returned from Paris, and
fixed the day for commencing his lessons in the private riding-school of
the Duke of Wellington, the use of which had been in the kindest manner
offered by his Grace as a testimony of his high opinion of the value of
the new system.

The course was commenced on the 20th March, by inviting to a private
lesson a select party of noblemen and gentlemen, twenty-one in all,
including, amongst other accomplished horsemen