In our talk I told him of long rambles on the Mendips, along the valley of the Somerset Axe, where I had lately been, and where of all places, in this island, the cow should be most esteemed and loved by man.  Yet even there, where, standing on some elevation, cows beyond one’s power to number could be seen scattered far and wide in the green vales beneath, it had saddened me to find them so silent.  It is not natural for them to be dumb; they have great emotions and mighty voices —­the cattle on a thousand hills.  Their morning and evening lowing is more to me than any other natural sound—­the melody of birds, the springs and dying gales of the pines, the wash of waves on the long shingled beach.  The hills and valleys of that pastoral country flowing with milk and honey should be vocal with it, echoing and re-echoing the long call made musical by distance.  The cattle are comparatively silent in that beautiful district, and indeed everywhere in England, because men have made them so.  They have, when deprived of their calves, no motive for the exercise of their voices.  For two or three days after their new-born calves have been taken from them they call loudly and incessantly, day and night, like Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted; grief and anxiety inspires that cry—­they grow hoarse with crying; it is a powerful, harsh, discordant sound, unlike the long musical call of the cow that has a calf, and remembering it, and leaving the pasture, goes lowing to give it suck.

I also told him of the cows of a distant country where I had lived, that had the maternal instinct so strong that they refused to yield their milk when deprived of their young.  They “held it back,” as the saying is, and were in a sullen rage, and in a few days their fountains dried up, and there was no more milk until calving-time came round once more.

He replied that cows of that temper were not unknown in South Devon.  Very proudly he pointed to one of the small herd that followed us as an example.  In most cases, he said, the calf was left from two or three days to a week, or longer, with the mother to get strong, and then taken away.  This plan could not be always followed; some cows were so greatly distressed at losing the young they had once suckled that precautions had to be taken and the calf smuggled away as quietly as possible when dropped—­if possible before the mother had seen it.  Then there were the extreme cases in which the cow refused to be cheated.  She knew that a calf had been born; she had felt it within her, and had suffered pangs in bringing it forth; if it appeared not on the grass or straw at her side then it must have been snatched away by the human creatures that hovered about her, like crows and ravens round a ewe in travail on some lonely mountain side.

That was the character of the cow he had pointed out; even when she had not seen the calf of which she had been deprived she made so great an outcry and was thrown into such a rage and fever, refusing to be milked that, finally, to save her, it was thought necessary to give her back the calf.  Now, he concluded, it was not attempted to take it away:  twice a day she was allowed to have it with her and suckle it, and she was a very happy animal.