This Lumiere piece from 1896 is just a series of gags as a man tries to mount a horse and keeps failing -- not high enough, leaping over the horse and so forth. It's a fairly standard bit of clowning and I'm sure it still goes on at rodeos and dude ranches. Even given the short length of Lumiere pieces, it seems to go on a bit long.As with all the Lumiere shorts, the composition is impeccable -- although given that you've got a horse there that you wish to fit into the frame, that's not much of a challenge. The horse stands still for all these hi-jinks -- my guess is that it was a circus horse and trained to put up with this sort of nonsense.