As long as I kept her in the stall, or confined to the inclosure, this strange eclipse of her sight was of little consequence.  But when spring came, and it was time for her to go forth and seek her livelihood in the city’s waste places, I was embarrassed.  Into what remote corners or into what terra incognita might she not wander!  There was little doubt but that she would drift around home in the course of the summer, or perhaps as often as every week or two; but could she be trusted to find her way back every night?  Perhaps she could be taught.  Perhaps her other senses were acute enough to compensate in a measure for her defective vision.  So I gave her lessons in the topography of the country.  I led her forth to graze for a few hours each day and led her home again.  Then I left her to come home alone, which feat she accomplished very encouragingly.  She came feeling her way along, stepping very high, but apparently a most diligent and interested sight-seer.  But she was not sure of the right house when she got to it, though she stared at it very hard.

Again I turned her forth, and again she came back, her telescopic eyes apparently of some service to her.  On the third day, there was a fierce thunder-storm late in the afternoon, and old buffalo did not come home.  It had evidently scattered and bewildered what little wits she had.  Being barely able to navigate those streets on a calm day, what could she be expected to do in a tempest?

After the storm had passed, and near sundown, I set out in quest of her, but could get no clew.  I heard that two cows had been struck by lightning about a mile out on the commons.  My conscience instantly told me that one of them was mine.  It would be a fit closing of the third act of this pastoral drama.  Thitherward I bent my steps, and there upon the smooth plain I beheld the scorched and swollen forms of two cows slain by thunderbolts, but neither of them had ever been mine.

The next day I continued the search, and the next, and the next.  Finally I hoisted an umbrella over my head, for the weather had become hot, and set out deliberately and systematically to explore every foot of open common on Capitol Hill.  I tramped many miles, and found every man’s cow but my own,—­some twelve or fifteen hundred, I should think.  I saw many vagrant boys and Irish and colored women, nearly all of whom had seen a buffalo cow that very day that answered exactly to my description, but in such diverse and widely separate places that I knew it was no cow of mine.  And it was astonishing how many times I was myself deceived; how many rumps or heads, or line backs or white flanks, I saw peeping over knolls, or from behind fences or other objects, that could belong to no cow but mine!