278 The Poets Beasts. 



and when they were too old to live they died. He only 

 knew of one kind of food, and that was grass ; and as far 

 as he could remember, never saw but one human being in 

 all his life, and if that one had not been so remarkably 

 agile in getting up a tree that happened to be near, he 

 would have tossed him on his horns sky high. 



With the animals of to-day it is vastly different.- They 

 are perpetually being fed upon new kinds of food, none of 

 which bear the slightest resemblance to grass, and instead 

 of having to go out and look for it for themselves — and 

 fight for it, probably, before they could eat it — they find 

 their meals being constantly replenished and put under 

 their very noses. The result is that the hide grows fine, 

 the bones become small, and the fattening beasts get bulkier 

 every day, and shorter-winded. A pretty figure the prize 

 beef would look trying to run up Box Hill, with a pack of 

 wolves after it ! 



Yet the comfort of such arrangements — a thickly-littered 

 stall and a pail of appetising " patent food " always at hand, 

 and nothing to worry him— would certainly suggest itself to 

 the old-world visitor. For, after all, this was the utmost 

 ambition of his own life in the Pleistocene days — plenty of 

 food, comfortable quarters, and absence of enemies. For 

 a moment, perhaps, he would regret that he had been born 

 in such early times ; but on a sudden, probably, he would 

 remember that, though the lives of these stalled cattle were 

 made very pleasant for them, they did not last long, and so 

 in the end he would come to the conclusion that liberty, 

 with length of years, was better than domestication and 

 sudden death. 



Yet a very little further on he will find some of his 

 ])OSterity that have the true old feral ring about them, and 

 all the shaggy romance of mountain and forest, as fleet and 

 fierce as any primeval beast that had to fight with lions or 

 escape from them. 



