I cherish the memory of this cow, however, as the most affectionate brute I ever knew.  Being deprived of her calf, she transferred her affections to her master, and would fain have made a calf of him, lowing in the most piteous and inconsolable manner when he was out of her sight, hardly forgetting her grief long enough to eat her meal, and entirely neglecting her beloved husks.  Often in the middle of the night she would set up that sonorous lamentation, and continue it till sleep was chased from every eye in the household.  This generally had the effect of bringing the object of her affection before her, but in a mood anything but filial or comforting.  Still, at such times a kick seemed a comfort to her, and she would gladly have kissed the rod that was the instrument of my midnight wrath.

But her tender star was destined soon to a fatal eclipse.  Being tied with too long a rope on one occasion during my temporary absence, she got her head into the meal-barrel, and stopped not till she had devoured nearly half a bushel of dry meal.  The singularly placid and benevolent look that beamed from the meal-besmeared face when I discovered her was something to be remembered.  For the first time, also, her spinal column came near assuming a horizontal line.  But the grist proved too much for her frail mill, and her demise took place on the third day, not of course without some attempt to relieve her on my part.  I gave her, as is usual in such emergencies, everything I “could think of,” and everything my neighbors could think of, besides some fearful prescriptions which I obtained from a German veterinary surgeon, but to no purpose.  I imagined her poor maw distended and inflamed with the baking sodden mass which no physic could penetrate or enliven.

Thus ended my second venture in live-stock.  My third, which followed sharp upon the heels of this disaster, was scarcely more of a success.  This time I led to the altar a buffalo cow, as they call the “muley” down South,—­a large, spotted, creamy-skinned cow, with a fine udder, that I persuaded a Jew drover to part with for ninety dollars.  “Pag like a dish rack (rag),” said he, pointing to her udder after she had been milked.  “You vill come pack and gif me the udder ten tollar” (for he had demanded an even hundred), he continued, “after you have had her a gouple of days.”  True, I felt like returning to him after a “gouple of days,” but not to pay the other ten dollars.  The cow proved to be as blind as a bat, though capable of counterfeiting the act of seeing to perfection.  For did she not lift up her head and follow with her eyes a dog that scaled the fence and ran through the other end of the lot, and the next moment dash my hopes thus raised by trying to walk over a locust-tree thirty feet high?  And when I set the bucket before her containing her first mess of meal, she missed it by several inches, and her nose brought up against the ground.  Was it a kind of far-sightedness and near blindness?  That was it, I think; she had genius, but not talent; she could see the man in the moon, but was quite oblivious to the man immediately in her front.  Her eyes were telescopic and required a long range.