I cannot conceive such an anomaly as a thorough Yankee _horseman_.
Given--one, or a span of trotters, to be yoked after the neatest
fashion, and to be driven gradually and scientifically up to
top-speed--the Northerner is quite at home, and can give you a wrinkle
or two worth keeping. But this habit of hauling at horses, who often go
as much on the bit as on the traces, is destructive to "hands." If the
late lamented Assheton Smith were compelled to witness the equitation
here, he would suffer almost as much as Macaulay in the purgatory which
Canon Sidney imagined for the historian. I have discussed that
Martingale-question with several good judges and breeders of American
blood-stock, but I never could get them _quite_ to agree in the
absurdity of tying down a colt's head for the rest of his natural life,
without regard to his peculiar propensities--star-gazing, boring, or
neutral. The custom, of course, never could prevail where men were in
the habit of crossing a country; but an American horse is scarcely ever
put at anything beyond the ruins of a rail fence, and there are few,
north of the Potomac, that I should like to ride at four feet of stiff
timber. It is very different in the South, where many men from infancy
pass their out-door life in the saddle: from what I have heard,
Carolina, Louisiana, and Georgia--to say nothing of the wild Texan
rangers--could show riders who, when the first strangeness had worn off,
would hold their own tolerable in England, over a fair hunting country,
in any ordinary run.
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