wicked intention.  Arrived within speaking distance, she stood for a little while confronting the fraudful figure, then put out her nose toward it, as if to be caressed, trying to create the impression that fondling and dalliance were more to her than wealth, power and the plaudits of the populace—­that she had been accustomed to them all her sweet young life and could not get on without them.  Then she approached a little nearer, as if to shake hands, all the while maintaining the most amiable expression of countenance and executing all manner of seductive nods and winks and smiles.  Suddenly she wheeled about and with the rapidity of lightning dealt out a terrible kick—­a kick of inconceivable force and fury, comparable to nothing in nature but a stroke of paralysis out of a clear sky!

The effect was magical!  Cows kick, not backward but sidewise.  The impact which was intended to project the counterfeit theologian into the middle of the succeeding conference week reacted upon the animal herself, and it and the pain together set her spinning like a top.  Such was the velocity of her revolution that she looked like a dim, circular cow, surrounded by a continuous ring like that of the planet Saturn—­the white tuft at the extremity of her sweeping tail!  Presently, as the sustaining centrifugal force lessened and failed, she began to sway and wabble from side to side, and finally, toppling over on her side, rolled convulsively on her back and lay motionless with all her feet in the air, honestly believing that the world had somehow got atop of her and she was supporting it at a great sacrifice of personal comfort.  Then she fainted.

How long she lay unconscious she knew not, but at last she unclosed her eyes, and catching sight of the open door of her stall, “more sweet than all the landscape smiling near,” she struggled up, stood wavering upon three legs, rubbed her eyes, and was visibly bewildered as to the points of the compass.  Observing the iron clergyman standing fast by its faith, she threw it a look of grieved reproach and hobbled heart-broken into her humble habitation, a subjugated cow.

For several weeks Phoebe’s right hind leg was swollen to a monstrous growth, but by a season of judicious nursing she was “brought round all right,” as her sympathetic and puzzled mistress phrased it, or “made whole,” as the reticent man of God preferred to say.  She was now as tractable and inoffensive “in her daily walk and conversation” (Huggins) as a little child.  Her new master used to take her ailing leg trustfully into his lap, and for that matter, might have taken it into his mouth if he had so desired.  Her entire character appeared to be radically changed—­so altered that one day my Aunt Patience, who, fondly as she loved her, had never before so much as ventured to touch the hem of her garment, as it were, went confidently up to her to soothe her with a pan of turnips.  Gad! how thinly she spread out that good old lady upon the face of an adjacent stone wall!  You could not have done it so evenly with a trowel.