If you want to be thoroughly acquainted with your horse to inspire him with that unreserved confidence which the animal is certainly capable of feeling in his master, ride him at night. An hour in the dark draws the bond of partnership tighter than a day in the sunshine. When you have made a journey or two together over bad roads, without a moon, you learn to depend upon each other thoroughly, and the animal will answer your hand and bend to your caresses with a willing promptitude he would never acquire by daylight. Tom Turnbull spends many an hour of darkness in the saddle, and except on one occasion when he took a short cut over some low fences, and tumbled neck-and-crop into an open culvert, breaking his own head and his horse’s neck, has never met with what he calls an accident.
I fancy the old-fashioned highwaymen knew more about the sagacity and powers of their horses than any more respectable sportsmen of the modern times. They rode, as their business obliged them, continually by night; and the distances they accomplished were so marvellous as to be incredible, had they not been attested by the most unimpeachable of evidence in the witness-box. Horses can see wonderfully well in the dark, and no doubt a man who was riding against time for an _alibi_, with so heavy a stake as his own life depending on his success, would be tolerably venturesome in his efforts to “get forward;” but yet, under the most favourable circumstances, it cannot but have proved haphazard work, jumping fences by moonlight; and what a good mare must poor Black Bess have been, when she started fresh on the North road for her journey to York!
In this one respect Tom Turnbull resembles Dick Turpin; the former, too, has a mare he rides long journeys by night, and for whose merits and reputation he entertains the profoundest respect. She is a lengthy, low, wiry, bay mare, with short flat legs, clean and hard as iron. She rejoices in a lean, game head, with a curl not unlike a sneer above her nostrils, and a wild eye; also, the long, fine, and rather lop ears, which belong to her high-born family. In the breeding of all stock Mr. Turnbull knows what he is about. If he wants a promising foal that shall grow into a couple of hundred pounds at five years old, he does not put an old worn-out mare, whose constitution and physical qualities are exhausted by hard work, to a fashionable stallion, and calmly expect the produce to excel the united excellencies of sire and dam in the best days of both. On the contrary, he begins, as we humbly opine, at the right end. He gets a foal or two out of the young fresh mare before she commences work, instead of after she is incapable of it. The dam’s functions are then in their highest state of vigour and redundance; nor is it possible but that this must materially enhance the value of her offspring. The infant is all the better, and the mother none the worse.