wished to catch an express train
he could not gallop, but he could catch the train. So Moti Guj was at
the planter's door almost before Chihun noticed that he had left his
pickets. He fell into Deesa's arms, trumpeting with joy, and the man and
beast wept and slobbered over each other, and handled each other from
head to heel to see that no harm had befallen.

"Now we will get to work," said Deesa. "Lift me up, my son and my joy!"

Moti Guj swung him up, and the two went to the coffee-clearing to look
for difficult stumps.

The planter was too astonished to be very angry.

397

Among the writers of nature fiction, probably
no one deserves higher rank than Charles G. D.
Roberts (1860--), a Canadian. Mr. Roberts does
not tell of his own adventures. His stories are
truly nature fiction because the characters are
animals and the purpose is to reveal the nature
of these characters by showing how they would
act when placed in various imaginary
situations. _Kings in Exile_, from which the
following selection is taken, is a book of
splendid stories of large animals. Other
excellent books by Mr. Roberts, suitable for
the seventh and eighth grades, are _Hoof and
Claw_, _Children of the Wild_, _Secret Trails_,
and _Watchers of the Trails_, ("Last Bull" is
used by permission of the publishers, The
Macmillan Co., New York.)

LAST BULL

CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS

That was what two grim old sachems of the Dacotahs had dubbed him; and
though his official title, on the lists of the Zoological Park, was
"Kaiser," the new and more significant name had promptly supplanted it.
The Park authorities--people of imagination and of sentiment, as must
all be who would deal successfully with wild animals--had felt at once
that the name aptly embodied the tragedies and the romantic memories of
his all-but-vanished race. They had felt, too, that the two old braves
who had been brought East to adorn a city pageant, and who had stood
gazing stoically for hours at the great bull buffalo through the barrier
of the steel-wire fence, were fitted, before all others, to give him a
name. Between him and them there was surely a tragic bond, as they stood
there islanded among the swelling tides of civilization which had
already engulfed their kindreds. "Last Bull" they had called him, as he
answered their gaze