Then there are what may be called the "let _me_ come" women--those who have to gallop at their fences because they dare not go at them slower, and if anybody happens to be before them think it necessary to shout. I know, of course, that opinions differ as to riding fast or slow at a fence, though personally I hold to the latter, and cannot help thinking that people who always ride at them fast are afraid to do so any slower. Certain it is that a horse will jump a place more surely and more cleverly if you give him time to see what he is going at, and most of them can jump very much bigger places even standing than people generally give them credit for. If you take a pull to steady your horse when you are a little distance from your fence, you will probably arrive at the other side far more collectedly, and be striding away again over the next field, before others who allow their horses to gallop on right up to the fence are near you. They are going too fast to notice the grip before they arrive at it, and consequently their horse takes off from the wrong leg and lands like a star-fish in the next field, then stumbles, pecks, and recovers again before he is once more set in motion. All this takes time and tires the horse, moreover should the luckless animal thus ridden fail to recover from the stumble and peck, he will give his rider a far worse fall than if he had gone at it slower. "Hands" of course have everything to do with the niceties of riding, and "hands" cannot be taught. But, after all, _thinking_ has a great deal to do with good riding, and if people would but remember that horses are not machines, that they _do_ feel and their poor mouths _are_ sensitive, it would go far towards improving their horsemanship and hands. I am sure that half the falls we get are due to our own faulty riding, though we all know how we say if our horse falls with us he is a stupid brute for doing it, yet if the same mishap should occur while a groom is on his back, it is then _he_ who gets that title for letting him down. We read sometimes about people "lifting" their horses, but I do not know what that means. One must _trust_ them to a great extent, and any interference at the critical moment is most likely to land them head over heels. I remember hearing a well-known coper say to a friend of mine who could ride a runaway horse without being even pulled, "Ah, but then you've got the fingers." I once tried to explain to my sister that she must "carry her own hands," and she laughed at me for telling her to try and make them be like souflés. "Anything will pull if you pull at it," I have often been told, but it is _not_ easy to be like a souflé when you are going forty thousand miles a minute, skew-ways on at a double wire fence with a river in between.