When you have once chosen your pilot, obey him. If at a gate or in a crowd, or for any other reason, even if you do not understand it, he should want you to go first, _Go!_ Nip through quickly and quietly, and don't keep others waiting whatever you do. Take your turn whenever it comes, and take every chance that offers without hanging back, which hinders other people, and without hustling, which annoys them. In fact, if after you have achieved being _quiet_ out hunting you succeed in being quick, you will have begun to grasp the situation. It is as well for your own comfort and that of other people to ride sane horses as far as in you lies. I once had a ride on an insane one, and it was far from satisfactory. It was perfectly immaterial to that horse whether he arrived at his fence with his head or his tail foremost. Now it is not a pleasant sensation to waltz round and round, or to find yourself bounding backward towards an impenetrable black bullfinch and at the last moment to whip round and swish through or over as chance befalls. It was rather like having a hunt on a wild cat, for I never knew where or how he intended either to take off or land, but he would not fall, though the bridle _behind his ears_ was a mass of mud and grass, after one double distilled peck into a boggy field. Of course a woman has not half the strength on a phlegmatic horse that a man has to "gar them gang," as we say in the North. A man can squeeze a half-hearted one over a fence, where a woman would be simply powerless to do anything, and I think the worst sort of a horse a woman can ride is a refuser. It is bad for her in every way, for body, temper, and nerve. One can forgive a horse everything if he will but try, but a sulky or funking brute, who grows more and more slack as he nears each fence until he collapses at the brink, is too high a trial, especially when the fight which must come generally ends in rearing, which is of all things most dangerous for a woman. I once had a racehorse given me, which had been spoiled in training, with the temper simply of a fiend. In racing, he never would try, but always shut up just when he ought to have won with ease, for to give the devil his due--and he _was_ one--he could gallop. That horse out hunting was simply purgatory; he could jump like a stag, which was the most irritating part of the whole thing, and sometimes he would gallop and jump with the best for a few fields, then all of a sudden collapse, stop, dig in his toes, and that was the end of my hunt, for no power on earth after that would induce him to go _forwards_. Backwards he would go all round the field, with intervals of rearing. I saw him fall backwards twice in one day, when one of the whippers-in was riding him, because he refused to go through an open gate.