144 DANGER-SMELLS 



The overpowering desire for home had carried him 

 through all this misery, and he arrived at last look- 

 ing like a very old worn-out dog. 



As we higher animals are also subject to nostalgia, 

 we can sympathise 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 domestication 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 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 wiU insert the history of a horse I was inti- 

 mate with for a space of over ten years. He was an 



