Black Beauty

By: Anna Sewell

Narrated by: Linda Barrans

Sometimes he came round and patted me, saying in his quiet, pleasant way, "This horse has got a good master, and he deserves it."

It was a very rare thing for any one to notice the horse that had been working for him. I have known ladies to do it now and then, and this gentleman, and one or two others have given me a pat and a kind word; but 99 persons out of 100 would as soon think of patting the steam engine that drew the train.

This is the heart-warming story of Black Beauty, his masters, and his friends.

Written in 1877 by Quaker Anna Sewell, partly to educate, partly as a plea that we should treat horses not as machines, but as creatures of flesh and blood and feeling.

As she says: We have no right to distress any of God's creatures without a very good reason.

Thanks go to the Mutasa brothers, Chenjerai and Mambakwedza, artists at The Harvest Centre at Hout Bay near Cape Town, for permission to use pictures of their wonderful horse sculpture made from pieces of broken machinery.

Thanks, too, to Andy Forward of Horse Presence for permission to use their horse sounds, and to Richardemoore at FreeSound for the use of CW_Battle_Nearby, recorded at a Civil War re-enactment.

Public Domain (P)2019 Voices of Today