equestrians and equestriennes who own their own horses and ride with painstaking care to perfect themselves in the accomplishment, is growing larger every year. Class riding has become one of the most enjoyable evening recreations of New York during the winter months. Every night in the week different classes fill the big riding academies and ride to the accompaniment of music. The classes are led by professors of the school, and are put through many fancy figures, which are varied with plain riding, sometimes the gallop, sometimes the sitting trot and more frequently the rising trot. On special nights jumping and exhibition riding of the most difficult sort are given. There are galleries for spectators in all the schools, and these are usually filled by friends of those in the ring. Class riding in the Park is very popular, and during the spring and fall excursions into the country in the cool of the day, returning by moonlight, after dining at some suburban hostelry, are frequent and highly pleasurable to the participants. [Illustration: ANOTHER RIDING ACADEMY CLASS.] Central Park, on a September afternoon, when the expensive equipages of the wealth and fashion of the city are to be seen on the East Drive, presents much the appearance of Rotten Row. This similarity has been greatly enhanced by the increased number of fine riders—men and women—who fly gayly along the bridle path that skirts the favorite drive. Riding is almost universally commended by physicians, and their indorsement of its health giving qualities has certainly contributed to the firm hold it has upon a great and growing constituency. The passion for outdoor exercise that has so thoroughly taken possession of American men is shared fully by their young wives and sisters. It is doubtful if any other form of sport in the open air appeals to them with anything approaching the same force. They have not the physical strength necessary for rowing and the active games whose votaries are animated by the reckless enthusiasm exhibited, for instance, in the gentle game of football. But they can ride, and ride well, and with quite as keen enjoyment as their brothers. Another cause, perhaps, of the pastime’s rapid growth in popularity among women lies in the fact of the wonderful improvement in riding habits. The old time habit, with its tremendous skirt, was an enormity—a thing to transform a handsome woman into a being so ill proportioned and so ungainly that it is a wonder she ever had the courage to disfigure herself with such an outrageous garb. But the habit of today is a thing of beauty and a joy forever—when the right girl wears it. There is, perhaps, no costume in which a good figure appears to better advantage than in the latest style of snug fitting, short skirt habit. [Illustration: A MORNING RIDE IN THE COUNTRY.]