Now if any one wants to break in a young horse well, that is the way.

My master often drove me in double harness with my mother, because she was steady, and could teach me how to go better than a strange horse. She told me that the better I behaved, the better I should be treated, and that it was wisest always to do my best and please my master. "But," said she, "there are a great many kinds of men; there are good, thoughtful men like our master, that any horse may be proud to serve; but there are bad, cruel men, who never ought to have a horse or a dog to call their own. Besides, there are a great many foolish men, vain, ignorant, and careless, who never trouble themselves to think; these spoil more horses than all, just for want of sense; they don't mean it, but they do it for all that. I hope you will fall into good hands; but a horse never knows who may buy him, or who may drive him. It is all a chance for us, but still I say, do your best wherever it is, and keep up your good name."

At this time, I used to stand in the stable, and my coat was brushed every day till it shone like a rook's wing. It was early in May, when there came a man from Squire Gordon's, who took me away to the Hall. My master said, Good-bye, Black Beauty. Be a good horse and always do your best."

I could not say "good-bye," so I put my nose into his hand. He patted me kindly, and thus I left my first home.

THE WHITE SEAL

RUDYARD KIPLING

All these things happened several years ago at a place called Novastoshnah, or North East Point, on the Island of St. Paul, away and away in the Behring Sea.

Nobody comes to Novastoshnah except on business, and the only people who have regular business there are the seals. They come in the summer months by hundreds and hundreds of thousands out of the cold gray sea; for Novastoshnah Beach has the finest accommodation for seals of any place in the world.

Sea Catch knew that, and every spring would swim from whatever place he happened to be in would swim like a torpedo boat straight for Novastoshnah and spend a month fighting with his companions for a good place on the rocks as close to the sea as possible. Sea Catch was fifteen years old, a huge gray fur-seal, with almost a mane on his shoulders, and long wicked dog-teeth. He was scarred all over with the marks of savage fights, but he was always ready for one fight more.

Yet Sea Catch never chased a beaten seal, for that was against the Rules of the Beach. He only wanted room by the sea for his nursery; but as there were forty or fifty thousand other seals hunting for the same thing each spring, the whistling, bellowing, roaring, and blowing on the beach was something frightful. You could look over three and a half miles of ground covered with fighting seals; and the surf was dotted with the heads of seals hurrying to land and begin their share of the fighting.

Sea Catch had just finished his forty-fifth fight one spring

when Matkah, his soft, sleek, gentle-eyed wife came up out of the sea, and he caught her by the scruff of the neck and dumped her down on his reservation, saying gruffly, “Late, as usual. Where have you been?"

It was not the fashion for Sea Catch to eat anything during the four months he stayed on the beaches, and so his temper was generally bad. Matkah knew better than to answer back. She looked around and cooed, "How thoughtful of you. You've taken the old place again."

"I should think I had," said Sea Catch. "Look at me!" He was scratched and bleeding in twenty places; one eye was almost blind and his sides were torn to ribbons. "I haven't been doing anything but fight since the middle of May. The beach is disgracefully crowded this season. Why can't people stay where they belong?"

Sea Catch sunk his head proudly between his fat shoulders and pretended to go to sleep for a few minutes, but all the time he was keeping a sharp lookout for a fight. Now that all the seals and their wives were on the land you could hear their clamor miles out to sea above the loudest gales. At the lowest counting there were over a million seals on the beach-old seals, mother seals, tiny babies, and holluschickie or bachelors, fighting, scuffling, bleating, crawling, and playing together.

Kotick, Matkah's baby was born in the middle of that confusion, and he was all head and shoulders, with pale watery blue eyes, as tiny seals must be; but there was something about his coat that made his mother look at him very closely.

"Sea Catch," she said at last, "our baby's going to be white!"

"Empty clam shells and dry seaweed!" snorted Sea Catch.

"There never has been such a thing in the world as a white seal."

"I can't help that," said Matkah: "there's going to be now"; and she sang the low, crooning seal song that all mother seals sing to their babies:

You mustn't swim till you're six weeks old,
Or your head will be sunk by your heels;
And summer gales and Killer Whales

Are bad for baby seals.

Are bad for baby seals, dear rat,

As bad as bad can be;
But splash and grow strong,
And you can't go wrong,

Child of the Open Sea!

Little seals can no more swim than little children, but they are unhappy till they learn. The first time that Kotick went down to the sea a wave carried him out beyond his depth, and his big head sank and his little hind flippers flew up exactly as his mother had told him in the song, and if the next wave had not thrown him back again he would have been drowned.

After that he learned to lie in a beach pool and let the wash of the waves just cover him and lift him up while he paddled, but he always kept his eyes open for big waves that might hurt. He was two weeks learning to use his flippers; and all that while he floundered in and out of the water, and coughed and grunted and crawled up the beach and took cat naps in the sand, and went back again, until at last he found that he truly belonged to the water.

Then you can imagine the times that he had with his companions, ducking under the rollers; or coming in on top of

a comber and landing with a swash and a splutter as the big wave went whirling far up the beach. Now and then he would see a thin fin, like a big shark's fin, drifting along close to shore, and he knew that was the Killer Whale, the Grampus, who eats young seals when he can get them; and Kotick would head for the beach like an arrow, and the fin would jig off slowly, as if it were looking for nothing at all.

Late in October the seals began to leave St. Paul's for the deep sea, by families and tribes, and there was no more fighting over the nurseries, and the holluschickie played anywhere they liked.

"Next year," said Matkah to Kotick, "you will be a holluschickie; but this year you must learn how to catch fish."

They set out together across the Pacific, and Matkah showed Kotick how to sleep on his back with his flippers tucked down by his side and his little nose just out of the water. No cradle is so comfortable as the long, rocking swell of the Pacific. When Kotick felt his skin tingle all over, Matkah told him he was learning the "feel of the water," and that tingly, prickly feelings meant bad weather coming, and he must swim hard and get away.

"In a little time," she said, "you'll know where to swim to, but just now we'll follow Sea Pig the Porpoise, for he is very wise."

A school of porpoises were ducking and tearing through the water, and little Kotick followed them as fast as he could. "How do you know where to go to?" he panted.

The leader of the school rolled his white eyes and ducked under. "My tail tingles, youngster," he said. "That means there's a gale behind me. Come along! The water feels bad here."