I met the infidel as the result of a rather unexpected series of incidents.  I don’t think I have said before that we have for some time been expecting a great event on this farm.  We have raised corn and buckwheat, we have a fertile asparagus bed and onions and pie-plant (enough to supply the entire population of this community) and I can’t tell how many other vegetables.  We have had plenty of chickens hatched out (I don’t like chickens, especially hens, especially a certain gaunt and predatory hen named [so Harriet says] Evangeline, who belongs to a neighbour of ours) and we have had two litters of pigs, but until this bright moment of expectancy we never have had a calf.

Upon the advice of Horace, which I often lean upon as upon a staff, I have been keeping my young heifer shut up in the cow-yard now for a week or two.  But yesterday, toward the middle of the afternoon, I found the fence broken down and the cow-yard empty.  From what Harriet said, the brown cow must have been gone since early morning.  I knew, of course, what that meant, and straightway I took a stout stick and set off over the hill, tracing the brown cow as far as I could by her tracks.  She had made way toward a clump of trees near Horace’s wood lot, where I confidently expected to find her.  But as fate would have it, the pasture gate, which is rarely used, stood open and the tracks led outward into an old road.  I followed rapidly, half pleased that I had not found her within the wood.  It was a promise of new adventure which I came to with downright enjoyment (confidentially—­I should have been cultivating corn!).  I peered into every thicket as I passed:  once I climbed an old fence and, standing on the top rail, intently surveyed my neighbour’s pasture.  No brown cow was to be seen.  At the crossing of the brook I shouldered my way from the road down a path among the alders, thinking the brown cow might have gone that way to obscurity.

It is curious how, in spite of domestication and training, Nature in her great moments returns to the primitive and instinctive!  My brown cow, never having had anything but the kindest treatment, is as gentle an animal as could be imagined, but she had followed the nameless, ages-old law of her breed:  she had escaped in her great moment to the most secret place she knew.  It did not matter that she would have been safer in my yard—­both she and her calf—­that she would have been surer of her food; she could only obey the old wild law.  So turkeys will hide their nests.  So the tame duck, tame for unnumbered generations, hearing from afar the shrill cry of the wild drake, will desert her quiet surroundings, spread her little-used wings and become for a time the wildest of the wild.

So we think—­you and I—­that we are civilised!  But how often, how often, have we felt that old wildness which is our common heritage, scarce shackled, clamouring in our blood!