Upon that he drew rein, saying we should wait till she drew near. After a while, as Noll did crop the grass at his feet, Master Royston asked me if I could sit astride. "It is no shame," he said, "thou art so small a maid." And when I was so set, grasping a double handful of the pony's mane, he said: "When she is close I shall run to the house. Hold thou fast, little love, for Betty must run as never before if she would catch us." And as I would have pleaded she drew near, all spent and blowing, and I felt his knee move, and little Noll did also feel it, and was gone. Oh, that I had a pen to tell of that ride! This time I was not afraid. This time there was no starting aside, no uneasy casting of my poor small person from side to side in grievous oscillation. And, oh! I say again, for the pen of some poet (yet I cannot tell whose to wish) in order to describe this my first taste of the joy there is in a horse when he is between us and turf good and plenty! Many a mile and many a beast have I ridden since that summer afternoon, and I hope so to ride, by the goodness of God, many a year hence; and yet that long, clean, resilient flight through an air that seemed of liquid green, flecked with the gold of the sun dropping here and there through the elms; the soft, fresh thud of hoof meeting turf but to part anew with the impact--that meeting with the soil that gave so lively assurance that Mother Earth was yet kindly and strong beneath; the strong rushing of the wind cooling my face and lifting the tangled curls back over the close cap; the new-born trust, moreover, in the arm that held me--all these things are with me now, distilled into one golden drop of life's very elixir, being, indeed, one of those gems of memory whereof the sweetness can as little be set fast by words as the stamp of them can be erased from the mind so sweetly and strangely impressed. So much for my memory rather of a frame of being than of an ordered consecution of events. The curtain of childish oblivion here descends, as it is wont to fall, swift and dark, on these pregnant spoils of recollection. I think my dear and honored father's arms were those that lifted me from the saddle. I have since heard that Betty was saved by my new friend from the rating Sir Michael had ready for her, receiving privily from that youthful master of craft a mint-new crown in earnest of future subsidies, did she prove thenceforth tender to the little maid. And, indeed, I think she did deserve whatever wage of kindness the future may have brought her. For I have of her no further memory of harsh entreatment.