The novel traces the life and adventures of Black Beauty, a horse in nineteenth-Century England. It opens with Beauty's descriptions of his life as a colt (young horse) in the home of a kind master named Farmer Grey. He runs and plays in the meadow and receives lectures from his mother, Duchess, about the importance of being kind and gentle and never biting or kicking--basically the horse equivalent of an English gentlemanstar on his forehead and a single white hoof