Two years passed uneventfully, the Seal was an adult now nearly six feet long, victorious in the September fights, and master of many lady-loves. The Herring-gull was gathered to his forefathers, and it was from a younger generation that news came to the seal family of certain changes fraught with grave danger to one and all. The land lying round the little bay they knew and loved so well had passed from the hands that held it for so long and was let to a sportsman. Sport! the word had a strange and terrifying sound in the Seal’s ear, he remembered what his old friend had told him.
He was guardian of a group of seals now, the last to take his place on rock or shore, the first to rise out of the water and look for danger. His playing time was over, and responsibility had come with power.
Shots had been heard on several occasions; some young seals that had ventured on to the sand at full tide, and had forgotten about the ebb, had never returned.
The Old Seal summoned a family council, and explained matters.
“Farther to the north,” he said, “there are some islands that the Herring-gull knew. There the guns are never heard. Shall we leave our home?”
The answer to this question is plain to all visitors to the coast to-day. Sea-birds scream and play and flutter their wings over the rocks, the summer waters are bright and clear and tempting to the swimmer, but the seals have gone for good and aye.
THE GIRAFFE
Picture to yourself a wide expanse of open land covered with flowers and grasses that spring two or three feet high in the track of the rains.
To the far west stretches a high mountain range, whose topmost peaks are ever clad in snow; to the east a river bed filled with a raging torrent at one season, and dry at another; to the south an acacia wood; to the north the open land, trackless and desert as the sea.
In this land, from which the sun never takes its departure for more than a few days at a time, Maami the giraffe was born, a quaint and curious little creature, whose proportions even in those early days were almost grotesque. In the secluded spot that was his earliest home the growth was thick and luxuriant and, while one who surveyed it with a field-glass from a distant hill might have thought the grasses were comparatively short, the big antelopes that raced along from time to time showed no more than the tops of their horns, the lion who pursued them was unseen. So, too, was the leopard, as he stole along in the direction of the foot hills of the mountain, hoping to surprise some of the noisy baboons that lived and clustered there.