In about another week they expected to arrive at Garrandilla, when the curtain would rise on the first act of the drama of Colonial Experience, with Mr. E. Neuchamp in the _rôle_ of first gentleman. Two or three days only had passed when Jack Windsor announced to Mr. Neuchamp that the colt was quite quiet enough to back, and that he would perform the ceremony that very morning, as soon as the sheep were steadied to their first feed. ‘Back him, now!’ exclaimed Ernest in tones of horror, ‘why, he cannot be nearly mouthed.’ ‘Oh yes, he is,’ assented Mr. Windsor, playfully pressing against the bit and causing Osmund to retrograde; ‘he’s got mouth enough for anything, and between leading and hobbling he’s steady enough to make a wheeler in a coach. When I have finished you won’t find fault with him for not being steady, I’ll be bound. Just you stand close to his shoulder, and hold him while I get up.’ Ernest, though much mistrusting the preliminary instruction of a week’s leading, and the simple addition of a bridle and saddle as being sufficient to take the place of all the two months’ lunging, belting, cavessoning, driving, dressing, which had been the invariable curriculum of the colts at Neuchampstead, deferred to his follower’s opinion. ‘I don’t think he’s got any bucking in him,’ he said; ‘he carries his head too high for that, and his mouth’s that tight, I could pull him on to his tail if he tried any tricks. He’s a bit frightened, and when he’s got over that he’ll go like an old horse.’ ‘I should say that buckjumping was produced in this country by bad breaking,’ said Mr. Neuchamp oracularly. ‘It all depends upon how a horse is treated.’ ‘Don’t you believe it, sir. Bucking is like other vices. Runs in the blood. I’ve seen horses that had twice and three times the time taken over ’em that this colt has, and by good grooms too, in good stables, and they’d buck, and buck too till they’d half kill themselves, or you. And as for a stranger, they’d eat him.’ ‘And how do you account for that?’ asked Mr. Neuchamp. ‘Why should one horse be free from that particular vice, and another with the same amount, or even more handling, be unmanageable from it?’ ‘Why do boys at the same school turn out different? It depends upon the families they come off. So it is with the horses. One strain will be reg’lar cannibals, no matter how steady you are with ’em; the others you can catch and ride away, and they’ll be as quiet as lambs, and yet game all the time, as I believe this one of ours is.’