ds of the place where I bathed. I was
never in my life so terribly frightened. The nag was grazing at some
distance, not suspecting any harm. She embraced me after a most fulsome
manner. I roared as loud as I could, and the nag came galloping towards
me, whereupon she quitted her grasp, with the utmost reluctancy, and
leaped upon the opposite bank, where she stood gazing and howling all the
time I was putting on my clothes.

This was a matter of diversion to my master and his family, as well as of
mortification to myself. For now I could no longer deny that I was a
real _Yahoo_ in every limb and feature, since the females had a natural
propensity to me, as one of their own species. Neither was the hair of
this brute of a red colour (which might have been some excuse for an
appetite a little irregular), but black as a sloe, and her countenance
did not make an appearance altogether so hideous as the rest of her kind;
for I think she could not be above eleven years old.

Having lived three years in this country, the reader, I suppose, will
expect that I should, like other travellers, give him some account of the
manners and customs of its inhabitants, which it was indeed my principal
study to learn.

As these noble _Houyhnhnms_ are endowed by nature with a general
disposition to all virtues, and have no conceptions or ideas of what is
evil in a rational creature, so their grand maxim is, to cultivate
reason, and to be wholly governed by it. Neither is reason among them a
point problematical, as with us, where men can argue with plausibility on
both sides of the question, but strikes you with immediate conviction; as
it must needs do, where it is not mingled, obscured, or discoloured, by
passion and interest. I remember it was with extreme difficulty that I
could bring my master to understand the meaning of the word opinion, or
how a point could be disputable; because reason taught us to affirm or
deny only where we are certain; and beyond our knowledge we cannot do
either. So that controversies, wranglings, disputes, and positiveness,
in false or dubious propositions, are evils unknown among the
_Houyhnhnms_. In the like manner, when I used to explain to him our
several systems of natural philosophy, he would laugh, "that a creature
pretending to reason, should value itself upon the knowledge of other
people's conjectures, and in things where that knowledge, if it were
certain, could be of no use." Wherein he