Page:Horsemanship for Women.djvu/75

Rh you may be almost sure you have fallen into the too common feminine practice of bearing too much of your weight on one side. An even balance in the saddle is of capital importance, and a rough-and-ready test is to observe whether the buttons of your habit are in the same plane as the horse's backbone, and your shoulders nearly equidistant from his ears—points of which you can judge as well as any one.

In the matter of the horse's gait you must be equally exacting, not resting so long as you can perceive the slightest irregularity or difference between the strides. It is desirable to cultivate such a sensitiveness to all the horse's movements as will enable you to know where his feet are at all times without looking, and the first step towards this is to learn to "sit close to the saddle." This firm and easy seat, coveted by every rider, is attained by some with much greater difficulty than by others. Many riders will bump about on their saddles for thousands of miles without being "shaken into their seat," because they neither abandon themselves to the instinct which correctly guides a child, nor, on the other hand, seek out and remove the cause, in the muscular contractions of the body and limbs.

A loose sack of grain set upright on horseback does not jump up and down, and, while it is not desirable to be quite so inert as a bag of grain, yet a lesson may be learned from it—which is, that the lower part of the person, from the hips to the knees, should be kept