Read "Stretton" by Henry Kingsley online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
I hope my readers will entirely dismiss from their minds the idea that Ethel was in the least degree "fast." She was only a country young lady who was a consummate horsewoman, and fond of riding long distances very fast.
About this time it "behuved," as the Scotch say, her father to fall in love with, and buy, a hunter which was not in any way up to his weight, and what was more, ride it, against the advice of his wife, son, and daughter. The horse did the best it could for him, but the illimitable grief to which the Squire and this horse came to "among them," as the stud-groom put it, was perfectly illimitable. When, however, it came to the Squire's trying the largest water-jump in the country, with the hounds running, and the horse landing on the near side, and the Squire swimming to the opposite one, he, heretofore obstinate, gave it up as a bad job, and said the horse was a worthless beast.