or two narrow escapes from more serious
accidents, which, for the moment, made my father as white as Mrs.
Bundle. But he was wise enough to know that the present risks I ran
from fearlessness were nothing to the future risks against which
complete confidence on horseback would ensure me. And so with the
ordinary mishaps, and with days and hours of unspeakable and healthy
happiness, I learnt to ride well and to know horses. And poor Mrs.
Bundle, sitting safely at home in her rocking-chair, endured all the
fears from which I was free.

"Now look, my deary," said she one day; "don't you go turning your
sweet face round to look up at the nursery windows when you're a
riding off. I can see your curls, bless them! and that's enough for
me. Keep yourself still, love, and look where you're a going, for in
all reason you've plenty to do with that. And don't you go a waving
your precious hand, for it gives me such a turn to think you've let
go, and have only got one hand to hold on with, and just turning the
corner too, and the pony a shaking its tail, and shifting about with
its back legs, till how you don't slip off on one side passes me
altogether."

"Why, you don't think I hold on by my hands, do you?" I cried.

"And what should you hold on with?" said Mrs. Bundle. "Many's the
light cart I've rode in, but never let go my hold, unless with one
hand, to save a bag or a bandbox. And though it's jolting, I'm sure a
light cart's nothing to pony-back for starts and unexpectedness."

I tried in vain to make Nurse Bundle like my pony.

"I've seen plenty of ponies!" she said, severely; by which she meant
not that she had seen many, but that what she had seen of them had
been more than enough. "My brother-in-law's first cousin had one--a
little red-haired beast--as vicious as any wild cat. It won a many
races, but it was the death of him at last, according to the
expectations of everybody. He was brought home on a shutter to his
family, and the pony grazing close by in the ditch as if nothing had
happened. Many's the time I've seen him on it expecting death as
little as yourself, and he refused twenty pound for it the Tuesday
fortnight before he was killed. But I was with his wife that's now his
widow when the body was brought."

By the time that I heard this anecdote I was happily too good a rider
to be frightened by it; but I did wish that Mrs. Bundle's relative had
died any other death than that which formed so melancholy a