dropped in conversation with her, and had got up and walked away without a word or look, ruling my existence out, she could not have done it better. She walked straight away to some other place in the park where she wished to be. To that spot she would go in a bee-line, not thinking about the right direction or, indeed, about anything, but with mind agreeably occupied with the sights and sounds and scents that came to her.

Then came my turn to go, as it was now late in the day, and after some moment's hesitation as to which gate would suit me best for an exit on that afternoon, Richmond, Kingston, or Sheen, I, too, got up and walked off, occupied with my own thoughts and also, like the hind, amusing myself with the sights and sounds and scents, leaving the whole business of getting to my destination to my legs and the compass in my brain.

Here, too, as in the sense of equilibrium, she had an immense advantage over me, incalculably great if night and thick darkness had surprised us still together at that spot. Not in Richmond Park only, but on Exmoor, or in any vast deer-forest in the North, she would go by night or day unhesitatingly in a direct line to her destination. But no sooner am I in a place I don't know and lose sight of the sun, or have been making many turns in a wood, than I lose the sense of direction. Thus, if I go to Piccadilly Circus by tube and, leaving my train, wander about in the galleries in search of the right station for some other part of London, I cease to know the points of the compass. But for the lettering on the walls and the arrow-heads and pointing fingers, I am as effectually lost as if I had fallen into

a very deep hole and had, at the end of it, crawled out at the antipodes.

Judging from myself (a very bad case, I dare say), the sense of direction is a dwindling one in our civilized state and in many of us appears to be wholly gone. Yet to man living in a state of nature it is of vital importance, as it is to all animals endowed with locomotive organs-wings, fins, legs, and, in the ophidians, ribs and scales. The snake does not move, as the ancients thought, by means of its fiery spirit. And we know that snakes, with virtually no horizon at all and so shortsighted that they can have no landmarks, do yet possess the sense of direction in a remarkable degree. Thus there are authentic cases on record of tame snakes traveling long distances back to the home from which they had been removed, incidents similar to those we are accustomed to hear every day with regard to our domestic animals and pets. Apart from such cases we see from observation of their habits that the snake could not do very well without such a sense. Take the snakes that inhabit great grass countries like the prairies, or, better still, the absolutely flat pampas, where, moving on their bellies, they are down in the grass and seldom have their heads above it. In that temperate climate they do not estivate, but spend the eight or nine warm months distributed over the land. The snake may go a long distance in search of the female. Going to her, he has the wind and the message it conveys to him for guide; but there is no extraneous force, no "nimble emanations" to lead him back to his accustomed haunts, the home where he passes his long summers and his whole life. At the ap

proach of winter, in May, he returns to his hibernaculum, which he shares with many others of his kind, coming in from all directions and various distances. The wintering site is as a rule in a mound on the plain formed by rodents, armadillos, and other excavating mammals, and in one of the old cavities they mass themselves together to drowse away the two or three cold months. It is plain that without a sense of direction the serpent could not find his way back to the same spot each year.

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As to insects, a little observation of wasps, bees, ants, and others, both social and solitary, that cannot carry on the business of life without constantly returning to one point, is enough to show that they could not exist without such a sense. It is perhaps most easily seen in the ants. Take your seat on the turf on a chalk down and look at the ground and you will see a minute black ant hurrying about on his business. You don't know how long he has been abroad, but the chances are you will get tired of watching him before he returns to his home. For a home he has a minute hole somewhere under the grass leading into his subterranean galleries, where he spends part of his time; and as his sense-organs are specialized in two directions, he will then move about as freely in the dark and know just what to do and how to do it, as when out in the brilliant sunlight. Night and day and aboveground and underground are all one to him. If, when watching him, you try the experiment of putting a finger close to him, he is overwhelmed with astonishment; at first struck motion

less and then, recovering his faculties, he rushes wildly away. The near approach of your finger to him was like a tremendous tornado charged with every violent animal smell in the world bursting suddenly upon a horse, let us say. But soon he recovers from his panic and goes on with his everlasting quest, and you are obliged to go after him on your hands and knees to keep him in sight. He is probably now leagues away from his home, still hurriedly pushing his way through the endless forest. For to him the grasses are like trees and their stems like trunks, and they stand up and lean and lie about in all positions. He goes round this one, crawls under the next, and climbs over a third, and cannot see a distance of half an inch before him. Tired of watching him, you get up and go away, and he goes on and on, and will continue to go on until he finds what he is looking for, and then will set out on his return, working his way through that interminable forest, that boundless contiguity of shading grasses, straight to his home.

And as with serpents and insects and fishes and batrachians, so it is with birds and mammals, all of which when out and away from home on their various quests are, as the poet has said of the migrating bird,

"Lone wandering, but not lost." There is no hamlet in the kingdom, or, I imagine, anywhere in the world, where you will not be told strange, yet familiar, stories of a domestic or pet animal returning from long distances to its old home over ground unknown to it, where it could never have memorized the landmarks. Such instances are so common that any one who thought it worth his while could collect a volume full of them in a few

weeks. Even here, in this house in Penzance, where I am writing these papers, two such cases have been related to me of cats; one that was sent away to a distant village in a closed basket and promptly returned to its home here; the other of a cat received here from St. Just, seven miles away over a rough moor, which disappeared on the evening of its arrival and reappeared the very next day at St. Just. Also I have just received from a correspondent in America an extraordinary case of a dog sent by rail and water across the country to a Southern State, which soon vanished from his new home, to reappear several months later at his old home, eight hundred miles distant. This is an authentic case, and the astonishing thing is that in that immense journey the desire for home, the nostalgia, the impelling force, was not overcome by the difficulties; by hunger and fatigue and the hostility and persecutions met with from man and dogs encountered on the way. The overpowering desire for home had carried him through all this misery, and he arrived at last, looking like a very old worn-out dog.

As we higher animals are also subject to nostalgia, we can sympathize with the cat and dog in their sufferings in a strange place, the sense of disharmony. Especially so if we consider that smell, which is nothing to us, is to them more than sight, more even than vision and hearing together. They live in smells. In the familiar smells of their home, their surroundings, in and out of doors, they are in their element, at peace. Instinctively the animal regards every strange smell with suspicion: it is a warning of danger, perhaps, and for all his do

mestication and tameness he cannot be free of this inheritance. We can imagine, then, what it must be to remove an animal of this kind, a cat, let us say, from his familiar home into a world of unknown smells!

In my early home on the Argentine pampas we thought less about cats and dogs in this connection than of horses; for it was in a region where, as the Gauchos say, the horse is the legs that carry you. It was a common thing to hear a Gaucho say when his horses, or some of them, had been stolen, that he counted on the recovery of such a one, seeing that however far they took him from his home and district, however long they kept him hobbled or collared to another horse, he would, on the first opportunity that offered, make his escape and find his way back.

Here I will insert the history of a horse I was intimate with for a space of over ten years. He was an iron gray, the color called moro by the natives, and as he was the only one of that color in our troop, we named him Moro. He came to us from some Gaucho friends who lived at their estancia about forty miles south of our home; and as we were warned that Moro was a home-loving horse, it was necessary to keep him collared to one of the horses of the establishment for a month before letting him go free. I retain a very vivid recollection of this animal, so that he stands out from the hundreds of horses I have ridden among the half a dozen or so that have most impressed me with their personality. He had a spirit and dash above all the horses I have known and ridden: to be touched with whip or spur would drive him wild. One had to keep a tight rein on him, as with a man on his back his one desire was to

let himself go at his topmost speed. But he had a silken mouth and the most perfect control over his motions. He was the only horse I ever possessed that when at full speed could be brought to a sudden stand, and then, with a touch on his neck, be made to spin round as on a pivot. His instant response when you set him to do these things seemed to show that he loved doing them. His chief fault was that he was intolerant of strangers, and if carelessly approached by one he did not know, he would lash out with his heels; so that our visitors always had to be warned not to go near the dangerous animal.

One day on coming home on Moro I rode into the patio, or yard, and, leaving him standing there, went into the house. Just then a child of some people on a visit to us, a little boy of seven from town and perfectly ignorant of country things, ran out, and seeing Moro standing there with his long tail almost touching the ground, went to it and, twisting his little hands into the hair, began swinging himself to and fro. The moment I caught sight of him I thought it was all over with the child, for Moro was in a passion, tossing his head and stamping on the ground; in another moment the child's brains would be dashed out! I yelled at him, and loosing his hold, he came to me unhurt. Every one said it was a miracle; it was Providence that saved the child's life. It was, I think, the animal's intelligence, his knowledge that it was an innocent child and not a grown-up that was taking this liberty with him which restrained his impulse to strike.

The one thing about Moro which comes properly into the subject I am writing about was his home instinct.

Although he became reconciled to his new surroundings and attached to the horses he lived and grazed with, whenever we had a long spell of cold, windy, and rainy weather in winter, always a time of intense discomfort to horses living on the flat, open, unsheltered plain, where not a tree was growing, Moro would disappear. Then, as a rule, after a week or two there would be a message from our distant Gaucho friends to inform us that Moro had turned up at their place and that he would be sent as soon as any one of the estancia had occasion to travel On his return it was not

our way. necessary to collar him to another horse. He was always pleased to be back with his familiar friends and companions, and would settle down and live quite contentedly until, when another bad spell in the weather occurred, he would disappear again.

The explanation of Moro's action is, I fancy, simple enough. He was reconciled to his second home and attached to the animals he consorted with and had no desire to return to his former home in ordinary circumstances, but in the intense discomfort induced by a seemingly endless spell of bad weather, when he was being lashed with cold rain perpetually day and night, he was reminded of his home. He had an image of the wide green plains bathed in everlasting genial sunshine; the image, the vision, produced the illusion that even thus would he see it again if he returned to it, and in the end he fled back a distance of forty miles to escape from his misery.

We know that animals are capable of visualizing past scenes in this way.