In which the narrator endeavours to explain the strange customs and knavery of mankind to his Houyhnhnm master, who listens with a mixture of astonishment and moral indignation, particularly at the practices of deceit and the harsh treatment of horses in the narrator’s homeland. The discourse turns to the narrator’s own origin and the misfortunes of his companions, whose desperate circumstances render them castaways from European society, a concept so foreign that it requires patient circumspection to convey.