coat. We require a "kind," pliable
cloth for our coats, to allow us absolute ease and freedom of movement,
but our skirts, even for wear in the tropics, should be of a thick,
heavy make. When I went out to India in 1885, safety skirts were
unknown, or, at least they were not constructed by Creed, of Conduit
Street, who made my habits, and who was in those days regarded as the
best habit maker in London. He told me that my thick Melton skirt would
be of no use to me in that hot country, and recommended a habit of
khaki-coloured drill, for which I paid sixteen guineas, as he would not
make any kind of riding habit for less than that sum. I soon found that
my investment was a failure, for the skirt flapped about like a sheet in
the wind, and the marks of perspiration on my coat looked most
unsightly, so I handed over my drill habit to my _ayah_, a gift which I
know she did not appreciate at anything approaching its cost. I found
myself more comfortably garbed in my Melton skirt, for heat in riding is
not felt to any appreciable extent below the waist, and I provided
myself with jackets of white drill, on which marks of perspiration are
not so unsightly as on a coloured material.

[Illustration: Fig. 53.--Off side of The Hayes' Safety Skirt.]

As safety in the saddle is the first consideration, and as no article of
riding dress has proved such a death-trap as the skirt, no lady should
ride in one of the old-fashioned, dangerous pattern. I am thankful to
say I was never dragged in any of those ancient garments, but I was
fully aware of this danger, and devised, as I explained in the first
edition of this book, a means of lessening it by buttoning "the under
and outer part" of the skirt just above the knee to the breeches, by
means of large flat cloth buttons, the same colour as the skirt, being
sewn on the breeches, and corresponding button-holes being made in the
skirt. The idea was a practical one, but I was by no means satisfied
with it, and I began to evolve a safety skirt of my own. While I was
experimenting with a pair of scissors on an old skirt in which a groom
was seated on a side-saddle, a habit maker sent me and asked me to wear
and recommend what he called a "perfectly-fitting skirt." This awful
thing had glove-like fingers, which were made to fit the upper crutch
and the leaping head! I hope no lady ever risked her neck in such a
death-trap as that. In puzzling out my safety skirt, I desired to attain
two objec