Throw on the saddle without a cloth, and he would "give" in the middle like a broken rail--bend till his belly almost touched the ground, and remain bent till mounted; then he'd crawl off and gradually straighten up as he became used to you.

Were you tender-hearted enough to feel compunction in sitting down hard on a six-year-old sore, or if you had an aversion to kicking the suffering brute with both heels and belting his hide with a yard or two of fencing-wire to get him to show signs of animation, you would dismount and walk--perhaps, weep.

WE always rode him right out, though.
As a two-year-old Ned was Dad's hope.

Pointing proudly to the long-legged, big-headed, ugly moke mooching by the door, smelling the dust, he would say: "Be a fine horse in another year! Little sleepy-looking yet; that's nothing!" "Stir him up a bit, till we see how he canters," he said to Joe one day.

And when Joe stirred him up--rattled a piece of rock on his jaw that nearly knocked his head off--Dad took after Joe and chased him through the potatoes, and out into the grass-paddock, and across towards Anderson's; then returned and yarded the colt, and knocked a patch of skin off him with a rail because he would n't stand in a corner till he looked at his eye.