XXIV 

 AMONG THE WILD PONIES OF SABLE ISLAND 



Undipped, undesecrated, her coat is like a mat ; 



One wild rough mane her crest is : no weight could keep it flat, 



Her liquid eye is friendly, and oh, I never knew, 



A mortal eye more darkly unfathomably blue. 



Yet on her peat moss litter, to luxury resigned, 

 She seems to catch the echo of every stormy wind ; 

 And sad, but uncomplaining, she seems to see the foam 

 Tossed from the angry breakers, that beat about her home. 



For ah ! she must remember that home so wild and free, 

 That barren wind-swept islet washed by the northern sea, 

 Where late she sniffed the tempests and heard the curlews call, 

 Before she knew a bridle, or moped within a stall. 



R. C. LEHMAN. 



IT is a curious sight this handful of human beings and this 

 herd of wild ponies in lonely isolation from the outside 

 world on their low, narrow, surf-fringed waste of sand, scourged 

 by unremitting gales and thundered upon incessantly by the long 

 unbroken rollers of the 'roaring forties' of the Atlantic. 



To how many poor souls of mariners this has been the last 

 strip of earth their mortal eye beheld none may ever know. 

 Long indeed is the roll of known disasters, from the loss of the 

 Admiral, of Sir Humphrey Gilbert's ill-fated expedition to New- 

 foundland in 1583, to the wreck of the big steamship Moravia, 

 bound from Boston to Antwerp, some four years ago. Yet larger 

 still is the list of the unknown. Out on the treacherous shifting 

 sand-bars, by which the island is margined for many mile, a ship 

 may be trapped and crumbled by the toppling seas, without 

 a soul being the wiser. Not without reason has Sable Island been 

 christened ' The Graveyard of the North Atlantic '. Notwithstanding 

 it may not be a charnel-house on a scale sufficient to justify such 

 a cognomen, yet many a sad story of drowned men and stranded 

 ship, of haunting spectres, of fiendish plunder of wreckers, lends 

 touch of weird and melancholy interest to its windswept desolate 

 sand-dunes. After any wild night of storm, bleached human 

 bones are sure to be disinterred from the shingle of the beach, 



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