The French race is essentially a conversational and not a sporting one. It has a natural predilection for the amenities of life, and we feel how inappropriate is this present craze for rude and unsocial games. You need only watch a Frenchman on horseback, and contrast him with a British horseman to assure yourself of the fact that the point of view of each is quite different. The Anglo-Saxon rides ahead with the air of thinking only of his horse. The Frenchman trains his beast, like himself, to have an eye to the arts and graces, to curvet and prance minuettingly, to arch its neck as he himself bows, and he brings a suggestion of the salon among the shadows of the Bois de Boulogne. Should there be a mortuary chapel on their road to this sophisticated paradise, stand and note the pretty way these dashing creatures will salute death. Spaniards would do it, I admit, much more gracefully, for in the art of salutation the Spaniard comes first beyond a doubt. But you will not see anywhere in the British Isles so pleasing a spectacle. Some bend altogether over their steeds, hat curved outward on a wide sweep; others pause midway, less ostentatious and theatrical in their respect, and hold their hats in a direct line from their eyebrows, admirably suggestive of diplomatic reticence, younger and elder men all expressing every shade of effective recognition of alien grief with a subtlety, a dramatic felicity of movement and line the stiff Anglo-Saxon could never hope to achieve. Of course the supercilious Englishman would say he had no mind to play the monkey, and find a cause for just pride in the rigidity of his body, and the stoniness of his well-trained and inexpressive visage. But here I differ from him. A man loses nothing by outward grace, and there is no reason on earth why he should rejoice in the fact that he cannot bow.