begin with; that his training must begin in early boyhood, and be followed up sans intermission; that his system of horse-breaking must be the Young-Australian, which is, beyond doubt, the most trying in the world; that his skill is won by grassers innumerable; that, in short, there is no royal road to the riding of a proper outlaw—a horse that, not with any view of showing-off before girls, but with the confirmed intention of flattening out his antagonist, plays such fantastic jigs before high heaven as make the angels peep.
And yet, to be an ideal rider, man wants but little here below, nor is it at all likely he will want that little long. He wants—or rather, needs—a skull of best spring steel; a spinal column of standard Lowmoor; limbs of gutta-percha; a hide of vulcanised india-rubber; and the less brains he has, the better. Figuratively speaking, he should have no brains at all; his thinking faculties should be so placed as to be in direct touch with the only thing that concerns him, namely, the saddle. Yet his heart must not be there; he must by no means be what the schoolboys call a 'frightened beggar.'
Perfect horsemanship is usually the special accomplishment of the man who is not otherwise worth his salt, by reason of being too lazy for manual labour, and too slenderly upholstered on the mental side for anything else. Sir Francis Head, one of the five exceptions to this rule—Gordon being the second, 'Banjo' the third, 'Glenrowan' the fourth, and the demurring reader the fifth—says the greatest art in riding is knowing how to fall. And here we touch the very root of the matter. It is the moral effect of that generally-fulfilled apprehension which makes one salient difference between the cultivated, or spurious, rider, and the ignorant, or true rider. In this case, Ignorance is not only bliss, but usurps the place of Knowledge, as power.
Edward M. Curr knew as much of the Australian horse and his rider as any writer ever did; and this is what he says of the back-country natives:—
'They are taciturn, shy, ignorant, and incurious; undemonstrative, but orderly; hospitable, courageous, cool, and sensible. These men ride like centaurs,' etc., etc.
Yes, yes—but why? Looking back along that string of well-selected adjectives, does n't your own inductive faculty at once place its finger on Ignorance as the key to the enigma? Notice, too, how Curr, being a bit of a sticker himself, is thereby disqualified from knowing that the centaurs were better constructed for firing other people over their heads than for straddling their own backs.
Your true-rider must audibly and sanguineously challenge every unfamiliar scientific fact; stated in conversation, and be prepared to stake his rudimentary soul on the truth of anything read aloud from a book. He must believe, with the ecclesiastics of yesterday, that the earth is flat and square, like them, he must be a violent supporter of the geocentric theory; unlike them, his æschatological hypothesis must be that the fire we wot of is only a man's own conscience—the wish, in his case, being father to the thought. Above all, he must have no idea how fearfully and
