distant rumbling of wheels growing more and more distinct, I took leave of my temporary hostesses with many thanks (they were poor New England workwomen, by whom no other species of acknowledgment would have been received), and was presently fast asleep in the corner of the carriage, and awoke only long after to feel rested and refreshed, and well able to endure the fatigue of the rest of the journey. In spite of this fortunate result, I do not now, after a lapse of forty years, think the experiment one that would have answered with many young women's constitutions, though there is no sort of doubt that the nervous energy generated by any pleasurable emotion is in itself a great preservative from unfavorable influences. My riding-master was the best and most popular teacher in London--Captain Fozzard--or, as he was irreverently called among his young Amazons, "Old Fozzard." When my mother took me to the riding school, he recalled, with many compliments, her own proficiency as an equestrian, and said he would do his best to make me as fine a horsewoman as she had been. He certainly did his best to improve a very good seat, and a heavy, defective hand with which nature had endowed me; the latter, however, was incorrigible, and so, though I was always a fearless horsewoman, and very steady in my saddle, I never possessed the finer and more exquisite part of the accomplishment of riding, which consists in the delicate and skillful management of a horse's mouth. Fozzard's method was so good that all the best lady riders in London were his pupils, and one could tell one of them at a glance, by the perfect squareness of the shoulders to the horse's head, which was one invariable result of his teaching. His training was eminently calculated to produce that result, and to make us all but immovable in our saddles. Without stirrup, without holding the reins, with our arms behind us, and as often as not sitting left-sided on the saddle, to go through violent plunging, rearing, and kicking lessons, and taking our horses over the bar, was a considerable test of a firm seat, and in all these special feats I became a proficient.