o head Old Grey off! Of course he did. But the dear old
horse didn't want to give up, and I didn't mean that he should; so he
shied, and, of course, having nothing to hold him in by but the tuft of
hair and the stick, he left father behind, and, I do believe, kicked up
a trifle, just to show his independence.

That was my first lesson on horseback. On the second, my father insisted
on haltering the creature, which gave me a pull at his head, and mane,
too, which rather interfered with the use of my crooked stick, and
bunched me up, till father called out to me to sit up straight--which I
did, at last, going it with both hands on the halter, and the hair
blowing about my face like a veil. That morning Old Grey and I jumped a
brook a full yard wide, and cleared both banks beautifully.

After that I did a great deal of bareback riding, along the road and in
the pasture lots, and could sit and ride like a trooper before I ever
got into a side-saddle or knew what a curb-bit was.

Sisters, that is the way to learn things--begin at the beginning, and
get a firm, steady seat before you attempt to cut a dash. The lady that
can't sit her horse handsomely without regard to bit or stirrup, needn't
set herself up as much of a rider--at any rate, in our part of the
country.

So much for one kind of racing. Now for the water-course.

We used to send little boats, dug out with a jack-knife, under paper
sails, down that brook by the school-house, and see them swamped among
the cowslips or capsized in the eddies, when we were in the A B C class.
Some of us went far enough to sail down the mill stream in a canoe dug
out of the trunk of some big tree. In fact, I have a remembrance of
crossing a large river in a scow pushed forward with awful long poles.
But beyond these rudimental experiences, ship-rowing is not indigenous
to the Green Mountains, as a general thing, and I do not see how it can
ever become a Vermont institution, yet awhile. Therefore I say,
horse-racing you can understand, but ship-racing is really a novelty in
the Mountains.

Now, a yacht, sisters, is nothing more or less than a baby schooner,
which has two masts, or a sloop, that has one, built up slender and
graceful, with a cock-pit, which is in the stern, and a cooking-room,
which is in the bow, and all the other fixings which make it as much
like a ship as a first-rate baby-house is like an old homestead.

Dempster has been to Washington, and got some contracts