re sturdy plants grow. And when autumn
comes the young steeds go off alone to the mountain heights to survey
the country around and call wildly for mates, whom, when found, they
will keep close to them through all the next year, even though they
mingle with thousands of others.

Till about ten years ago the _Equus hemionus_ was the only truly wild
horse known, but in the winter of 1879-80 the Russian traveller
Przevalsky brought back from Central Asia a much more horse-like
animal, called by the Tartars "Kertag" and by the Mongols "Statur." It
is a clumsy, thick-set, whitish-gray creature with strong legs and a
large, heavy, reddish-colored head; its legs have a red tint down to
the knees, beyond which they are blackish down to the hoofs. But the
ears are small, and it has the broad hoofs of the true horse, and
warts on his hind legs, which no animal of the ass tribe has. This
horse, like the Kiang, travels in small troops of from five to
fifteen, led through the wildest parts of the Dsungarian desert,
between the Altai and Tianschan Mountains, by an old stallion. They
are extremely shy, and see, hear, and smell very quickly, so that they
are off like lightning whenever anything approaches them.

So having travelled over America, Europe, and Asia, was my quest
ended? No; for from the dreary Asiatic deserts my thoughts wandered to
a far warmer and more fertile land, where between the Blue Nile and
the Red Sea rise the lofty highlands of Abyssinia, among which the
African wild ass (_Asinus taeniopus_), the probable ancestor of our
donkeys, feeds in troops on the rich grasses of the slopes, and then
onwards to the bank of a river in Central Africa where on the edge of
a forest, with rich pastures beyond, elephants and rhinoceroses,
antelopes and buffaloes, lions and hyaenas, creep down in the cool of
the evening to slake their thirst in the flowing stream. There I saw
the herds of Zebras in all their striped beauty coming down from the
mountain regions to the north, and mingling with the darker-colored
but graceful quaggas from the southern plains, and I half-grieved at
the thought how these untamed and free rovers are being slowly but
surely surrounded by man closing in upon them on every side.

I might now have travelled still farther in search of the Onager, or
wild ass of the Asiatic and Indian deserts, but at this point a more
interesting and far wider question presented itself, as I flung myself
down on the moor t