Now lest, after a perusal of this letter, any one should think ill of its writer, I take leave to announce at once that Kate Mellon was a virtuous woman; pure in heart, though any thing but simple; without fear, but not without as much reproach as could possibly be heaped upon her by all of her own sex who envied her good looks, her high spirits, and her success. There are, I take it, plenty of novels in which one can read the doings, either openly described or broadly hinted at, of the daughters of Shame under many a pretty alias; and it is because one of these aliases describes the calling of which Kate Mellon was the most successful follower, that I am so desirous of clearing her good name, and immediately vindicating her position with my readers. Kate Mellon was a horsebreaker, a _bonâ-fide_ horsebreaker; one who curbed colts, and "took it out of" kickers and rearers, and taught wild Irish horses and four-year-olds fresh from Yorkshire spinneys to curvet and caper prettily in the Park. She taught riding, too; and half the Amazons in the Row owed their tightness of seat and lightness of hand to her judicious training. She hunted occasionally with the Queen's hounds and with the Pytchley, and no one rode straighter or with more _nonchalance_ than she. Give her a lead, that was all she wanted; and when she got it, as she invariably did from the boldest horseman in the field, she would settle herself in her saddle, left hand well down, right hand jauntily on her hip, and fly over timber, water, no matter what, like a bird. In social life her great pride was that there "was no nonsense" about her; she was not more civil to the great ladies who sent their horses to her establishment to be broke, and who would occasionally come up and inspect the process, than she was to the stable-helpers' wives and children, who all worshipped her for her openhanded generosity. Tommy Orme who was popularly supposed to be a hundred and fifty years old, but who lived with the youth of the Household Brigade and the Foreign Office and the _coryphées_, and who knew every body remarkable in any one way, never was tired of telling how Kate, teaching the Dowager Lady Wylminster to drive a pair of spirited dun ponies, had, in the grand lady's idea, intrenched upon her prerogative, and was told that she was a presuming person, and desired to remember her place. "Person, indeed!" said Kate; "person yourself, ma'am! My place isn't by you after that, and now get the duns home the best way you can;" with which she sprang from the low phaeton, struck off across the fields, and left the wretched representative of aristocracy "with a couple of plunging brutes that soon spilt the old woman into the hedge, broke the trap all to pieces, and rushed away home with the splinter-bar at their heels--give you my word!" as Tommy used to narrate it.