This was too much for the “beast” to endure; a moving house he was beginning to regard as tolerable, but a house which stopped short and glared at him with all its windows was more than horse nature could endure, and he started for the next county to institute an inquiry as to whether such actions were to be allowed, but found himself forced to stop, and not altogether comfortable, while the master cried good-naturedly:  “Go along and take care of your car.  I’ll take care of my horse!”

“More than some other folks can do,” said the driver, with a quiet grin at the lawyer, whose angry, “Here, what are you doing!” shouted to his plunging steed, had brought all the women in the car to the front, to explain to one another that “that man was abusing his horse, poor thing.”

The car glided off, and Versatilia turned to look at it; her horse stumbled slightly, jerking her wrists sharply, and but for the cavalryman’s quick shifting of the reins to his right hand and his strong grasp of her reins with his left, she might have been in danger.

“Never look back,” lectured the master.  Esmeralda was his pupil, and he would have taken the whole centennial quadrille and all the cabinet ladies to point his moral, had he seen them making equestrian blunders.  “Where your horse has been, where, he is, is the past.  Look to the future, straight before you.”

“The cavalryman looked back just now,” Esmeralda ventured to say.

“Yes, but he turned his horse very slightly to do it, and he may do almost anything because he has a perfect seat, and is a good horseman.”

“Suppose I hear something or somebody coming up behind me?”

“If it have any intelligence, it will not hurt you.  If it have none, looking will do you no good.  Turn out to the right as far as you can and look to the front harder than ever, so as to be ready to guide your horse and to avoid any obstacles in case he should start to run.  What is the trouble with the ladies now?”

“O, dear!” cried the beauty to the society young lady, “your horse.”

“What’s the matter with him?” asked the other, still very stately and not turning.

“Oh!  The dreadful creature has caught his tail on my horse’s bit,” said the beauty.

“Then you’d better take your horse’s bit away,” retorted the other.  “My horse’s eyes are not at that end of him, and he can’t be expected to look at his tail.”

“And you may be kicked,” added the Texan.  “Check him a little; there!  We ought not to be so close together, and we ought to be moving a little, I think.  Shall we trot again?”

Everybody assented, the cavalryman and Versatilia set off, the others followed as best they might, the beauty “going to pieces” in a minute or two, according to the master, the society young lady stiffening visibly, losing the cadence of the trot very soon, but making no outcry as she was tossed about uncomfortably, and not bending her head to look at her reins, as Versatilia did.