The Arabian legends tell us of a magical carpet, upon which one can seat himself, and then, wishing to be in a certain place, the carpet rises into the air, and safely and swiftly carries him where he would be. When Catherine showed to me a costly seal-skin coat, her Christmas gift, I proposed to her that we should use it as a magic carpet, and flying to the home of the fur seal, should trace the coat through all the changes of its history. “Let us go at once!” cried Catherine. “If we go now,” I said, “not a seal shall we behold, for they are now far off at sea. It will be useless to make our trip before the fifteenth of May.” On the fifteenth of May, accordingly, Catherine and I spread out the seal-skin coat and began our journey. We went northwest, crossed the high Rockies, left behind us the new State of Washington, moved still west by north, and finally arrived at three small islands in Bering Sea, called the Pribylov Islands, from a Russian who discovered them in 1786. “Our fortune is good,” said I to Catherine; “this is just such weather as seals like. They delight in cool, moist, foggy days, so that the sun is obscured, and casts no shadows. This is the usual weather on the Pribylov Islands, where the sun shines clearly but few days in the year. Seals spend about eight months in the water, and four months chiefly on the land. When they land they choose a dry locality of hard sand and pebbles, shelving toward the sea, so that no water or slime shall be left on the ground, for if their fur becomes matted with mud it falls out at once.” “Here we are at St. Paul’s Island; date, May eighteenth; day, mild and hazy. We stand on a ledge of rock, and to the left of us we see five or six giant seals walking. They come up on the rocky beach and calmly take their places on large rocks and sit looking seawards; they are watching for their mates, friends, and neighbors to arrive. We need not fear to approach them; unless attacked, even the largest seal is entirely gentle. His eyesight is good, but only for moderate distances, but his sense of smell is as keen as the hearing of a manatee. If we keep on the side to which the wind is blowing, so that he cannot detect us by his sense of smell, we may approach close to him. “Look at him now. He is seven feet long, and weighs four hundred pounds. He has a small, round head, the skull bones are thin and light, and the brain fills almost the entire skull cavity, for the seal is a highly organized and very intelligent animal. The eyes are large, of a bluish hazel, and very beautiful; the nose is like that of a Newfoundland dog, but the mouth has not loose skin like the dog’s mouth, but firm, well-outlined, human-like lips.