“There I was, with a mare I knew I could do anything with—but the owners! Mary Pat had never even seen a jumping saddle. Her father had no conception of what goes into the making of a show jumper. But there is a lot of heart in that family, apparently a hereditary condition, for Mary Pat started surprising me. She was the first student I ever had who actually did what I told her to do. Older trainers had warned me that there would be such students, but I hadn’t believed them until now. Watching Mary Pat and Peggy, alone in the California desert, I thought of the diary of one nineteenth-century traveler who had said of southern California, “The mountains cut the land off from sympathy with the East.” I sometimes felt that God was whispering things into the landscape, in the breathing of that child and that horse.”