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 things designed to produce music and other noises, the seal prefers the bagpipes. This taste either proves the seal to be a better judge of music than most human beings, or a worse one than any of the other animals, according as the gentle reader may be a native of Scotland or of somewhere in the remainder of the world. You may charm seals by the bagpipes just as a snake is charmed by pipes with no bag. It has even been suggested that all the sealing vessels leaving this country should carry bag pipes with them, and I can see no sound objection to this course—so long as they take all the bagpipes. I could also reconcile myself to a general extrusion of concertinas for this useful purpose—or for any other; not to mention barrel organs.

By-the-bye, on looking at Toby again I think we might do something better for him than give him a mere part in a pantomime; his fine moustache and his shiny hair almost point to a qualification for managership. Nothing more is wanted—except, perhaps, a fur-trimmed coat and a well-oiled hat to make a very fine manager indeed, of a certain sort.

I don't think there is a Noah's ark seal—unless the Lowther Arcade theology has been amended since I had a Noah's ark. As a matter of fact, I don't see what business a seal would have in the ark, where he would find no fish to eat, and would occupy space wanted by a more necessitous animal who couldn't swim. At any rate, there was originally no seal in my Noah's ark, which dissatisfied me, as I remember, at the time; what I wanted not being so much a Biblical illustration as a handy zoological collection. So I appointed the dove a seal, and he did very well indeed when I had pulled off his legs (a little inverted v). I argued, in the first place, that as the dove went out and found nothing to alight on, the legs were of no use to him; in the second place, that since, after all, the dove flew away and never returned, the show would be pretty well complete without him; and, thirdly, that if, on