If American children and American girls were the angels which their mothers and their lovers tell them that they are, the best possible riding master for them would be an American soldier who had learned and taught riding at West Point.  Being of the same race, pupil and teacher would have that vast fund of common memories, hopes and feelings; that common knowledge of character, of good qualities and of defects, and that ability to divine motives and to predict action which constitute perfect sympathy, and their relations to one another would be mutually agreeable and profitable.  Unfortunately, Esmeralda, you, like possibly some other American girls, are not an angel, and if you were, you could not have such a riding master, because the very few men who have the specified qualifications are too well acquainted with the characteristics of their countrywomen to instruct them in the equestrian art.  Who, then, shall be his substitute?  Clearly, either a person sufficiently patient and clever to neutralize the faults of American women, or one capable of adapting himself to them, of eluding them, and of forcing a certain quantity of knowledge upon his pupils, almost in spite of themselves.  The former is hardly to be found among natives of the United States; the latter can be found nowhere else, except, possibly, in certain English shires in which the inhabitants so closely resemble the average American that when they immigrate hither they are scarcely distinguishable from men whose ancestors came two or three centuries ago.

A foreign teacher, whether French, German, or Hungarian, always regards himself in the just and proper European manner as the superior of his pupil.  The traditions in which he has been reared, in which he has been instructed, not only in riding, but in all other matters, survive from the time when all learning was received from men whose title to respect rested not only on their wisdom but on their ecclesiastical office, and who expected and received as much deference from their pupils as from their congregations.  Undeniably, there are unruly children in European schools, but their rebelliousness is never encouraged, and their teachers are expected to quell it, not to submit to it, much less to endeavour to avoid it by giving no commands which are distasteful.  Even in the worst conducted private schools on the continent, there is always at least one master who must be obeyed, whose authority is held as beyond appeal, and in the school conducted either by the church or by civil authority, the duty of enforcing perfect discipline is regarded as quite as imperative as that of demanding well-learned lessons.