ring the week I was out.

The river has been very high recently, and I have had on two
or three occasions to swim my horse across it; a new
experience to me. Otherwise I have done little that is
exciting in the way of horsemanship; as you know I am no
horseman, and I cannot ride an unbroken horse with any
comfort. The other day I lunched with the Marquis de Mores,
a French cavalry officer; he has hunted all through France,
but he told me he never saw in Europe such stiff jumping as
we have on the Meadowbrook hunt.

Whether he was or was not a horseman is a question on which there is
authority which clashes with Roosevelt's. A year's experience with
broncos had taught him much, and though Sylvane remained indisputably
the crack rider of the Maltese Cross outfit, Roosevelt more than held
his own. "He was not a purty rider," as one of his cowpunching friends
expressed it, "but a hell of a good rider."

Roosevelt was a firm believer in "gentling" rather than "breaking"
horses. He had no sentimental illusions concerning the character of
the animals with which he was dealing, but he never ceased his efforts
to make a friend instead of a suspicious servant of a horse. Most of
Roosevelt's horses became reasonably domesticated, but there was one
that resisted all Roosevelt's friendly advances. He was generally
regarded as a fiend incarnate. "The Devil" was his name.

"The trouble with training the Devil," said Packard, who was present
at the Maltese Cross one day when Roosevelt was undertaking to ride
him, "was that he was a wild four-year-old when first ridden and this
first contest was a victory for the horse. If the rider had won, Devil
might have become a good saddle horse. But when the horse wins the
first contest, one can look for a fight every time he is saddled. The
chances favor his becoming a spoiled horse. I happened to arrive at
the Chimney Butte Ranch one day just as the horse-herd was being
driven into the corral. Devil knew he was due for a riding-lesson. It
was positively uncanny to see him dodge the rope. On several occasions
he stopped dead in his tracks and threw his head down between his
front legs; the loop sliding harmlessly off his front quarters, where
not even an ear projected. But Devil couldn't watch two ropes at once,
and Roosevelt 'snared' him from the corral fence while Merrifield was
whirling his rope for the throw. Instantly Devil stopped and meekly