The pupil, thus adjured, made a hesitating movement, and Fanny settled
herself down into the saddle. It was the shifting of the weight that
seemed to bring home to the grey filly the true facts of the case, and
with the discovery she shot straight up into the air as if she had been
fired from a mortar. The rope whistled through Johnny Connolly's
fingers, and the point of the filly's shoulder laid him out on the
ground with the precision of a prize-fighter.

"I felt, my dear," as Fanny Fitz remarked in a letter to a friend, "as
if I were in something between an earthquake and a bad dream and a
churn. I just _clamped_ my legs round the crutches, and she whirled the
rest of me round her like the lash of a whip. In one of her flights she
nearly went in at the hall door, and I was aware of William O'Loughlin's
snow-white face somewhere behind the geraniums in the porch. I think I
was clean out of the saddle then. I remember looking up at my knees, and
my left foot was nearly on the ground. Then she gave another flourish,
and swung me up on top again. I was hanging on to the reins hard; in
fact, I think they must have pulled me back on to the saddle, as I
_know_ at one time I was sitting in a bunch on the stirrup! Then I heard
most heart-rending yells from the poor old Aunts: 'Oh, the begonias! O
Fanny, get off the grass!' and then, suddenly, the filly and I were
perfectly still, and the house and the trees were spinning round me,
black, edged with green and yellow dazzles. Then I discovered that some
one had got hold of the cavesson rope and had hauled us in, as if we
were salmon; Johnny had grabbed me by the left leg, and was trying to
drag me off the filly's back; William O'Loughlin had broken two pots of
geraniums, and was praying loudly among the fragments; and Aunt Harriet
and Aunt Rachel, who don't to this hour realise that anything unusual
had happened, were reproachfully collecting the trampled remnants of the