what they wanted was to get a live seal, old or young. They had tried to catch some of these common seals, but when collared by chance, they had fought so spitefully with teeth and claws that they had got off-floundering away moaning and howling, and flinging up pebbles like Parthian arrows in the faces of their

pursuers.

At last, however, a grand capture was made. Sea-side caves had been explored and netted, but in vain, Jollyman was beginning to get irritable, because, although he thoroughly enjoyed his holiday, he was also bent on capturing his live seal. The boat was being pulled up a voe, when Jollyman who was the best shot on board, exclaimed,

"There's a big beggar-I must let fly at him." Jollyman fired and shot a huge black seal with a big beard-a Phoca barbata. The Shetlanders gleefully hauled him on board, but little Jollyman felt "queer" when he heard the seal's wife wail his elegy, and saw her flounderingly scurrying back to the hollow in the voe's cliff-side, in which two of

the dead seal's children were looking out on the water with almost spooneyly "innocent" faces. Two or more Shetlanders had scaled the rocks and reached the mouth of the cave before the Jollymans, big and little, had got half-way up to it. Mamma seal was stunned by a cudgel-blow upon her head, and the two young ones, in spite of their scratching and biting, were made sure of. The three were embarked on board the Granton steamer at Lerwick, but mamma died before the passengers caught sight of the Bass Rock. The two young ones were transferred at Granton to a General Steam Navigation Company's steamer, and reached its London wharf "all alive and kicking." Thence the two Jollymans, looking as reddish-brown as kippered herrings, conveyed them by rail to the North of England town in which "Jollyman's Menagerie" was then "built up."

CHAPTER XI.

AN UNHAPPY FAMILY AND A HAPPY ONE.

OON after little Jollyman's return from the

SOON

Shetland Isles, Bob Grimstone was very insolent to his master. Jollyman threatened to dismiss him, whereupon Grimstone sneered, "If I go, the boy goes too," and became so intolerably saucy that, in spite of their liking for little Jollyman and his mother, Mr and Mrs Jollyman were compelled to get rid of Bob.

"Don't cry, my poor dear," said Mrs Jollyman to Mrs Grimstone. "That precious husband of yours will be glad enough to get rid of you when he finds he's got to keep you, an' me an' Jollyman will welcome you an' your dear boy back, soon as ever