“Now walk around the school once, and go into all the corners.  Stop!  You stopped pretty well, but you leaned back too far, and you did not draw yourself up at all.  Mind, you draw ‘yourself’ up; you don’t try to pull the bit up through the corners of your horse’s mouth.  What I wanted to say was that a turn is just half a stop as far as your hands, leg and whip are concerned.  To turn to the right, use your right hand and whip, but keep your left leg and hand steady; to turn to the left, use your left leg and hand and keep your whip and whip hand steady.  When you turn to the right, lean to the right instead of backward; ‘lean,’ not twist to the right, and turn your head to the right so as to see what may be there.

“If you were on the road, and did not turn your head before going down a side street, you might knock over a bicycle rider, and thereby hurt your horse, which would be a pity,” he says, with apparent indifference as to the bicycle rider’s possible injuries.  “Now go around the school again.  Left shoulder forward!  Right shoulder back!  Sit to the right!  Lean to the left!  I told you to sit to the left, the other day?  And that is the reason that I have told you to sit to the right to-day.  You over-do it.  Miss Esmeralda, if I were talking for my own pleasure, I should say pretty things to you, but I am talking to teach you, and when I say ‘This is wrong!  This is wrong!’ and again ‘This is wrong!’ I do it for you, not for myself.  When your father and mother say ‘This is wrong; you must not do it, or you will be sorry,’ you do not look at them as if you thought them to be unreasonable—­or, I trust that you do not,” he adds, mentally.  “Heaven only knows what an American girl may do when anybody says, ‘You must not’ to her.

“Now,” he goes on aloud, “it is the same with your teacher; he says ‘You are wrong,’ lest you should be sorry by and by, and he is patient and says it many times, as your father and mother do, and he says it every time that you do anything wrong, unless you do so many wrong things at once that he cannot speak of each one.  Now you shall turn to the right, and remember that a turn is half a stop.  Go across the school and then turn to the left!  Keep a firm hold on your right rein now so as to keep your horse close to the wall.  Where, where are your toes?  It was not necessary to make you turn so as to see your right foot through your riding habit as I can now, to know that they were pointing outward.  Your right shoulder told the story by drooping forward.  M. de Bussigny lays especial stress on this point in his manual, and you will find that your whole position depends more on that seemingly unimportant right foot than on many other things, so bend your will to holding it properly, close against the saddle.  Walk on now, keeping on a straight line.  If you cannot do it in the school, you cannot on the road, and many an ugly scrape against walls, horse-cars, and other horses you will receive unless you can keep to the right and in a straight line.  Now turn to the left, and go straight across the school.  Straight!  Fix your eye on something when you start, and ride at it with as much determination as if it were a fence; now you turn to the right again and go forward.  Have you read Delsarte?”