One of those incidents that cause a pious man to damn the whole animal
creation occurred at Janesville last week. A business man that we all
know, got up last Tuesday morning and took a walk down by Monterey, to
view the beauties of nature and get up an appetite for breakfast. He is
a man who weighs close onto 150 pounds, though he is as kitteny as
anybody when occasion calls for kittenishness.
Gazing into the crystal waters of Rock River, it occurred to him that
he would take a bath, so he disrobed himself, laid his clothes upon
the ground and plunged in. He had been sporting with the wavelets, and
waving with the sportlets for some minutes, when he heard a bellowing on
shore, and he looked up to see a cow pawing the ground and running her
horns into his clothes. You know how the smell of blood or carrion will
cause the mildest mannered cow to get on her ear and paw the ground and
bellow. Not that there was any blood or carrion there, but the cow acted
that way. She may have got the smell of a Democrat from his clothes.
Anyway she made Monterey howl, and the large man in the water dove down
for stones to throw at the cow. She had run one horn through one leg of
his pants, and the other horn through the broad part, and was engaged
in chewing his shirt, when a rock struck her on the rump and she started
off with those two garments for the blind asylum, where she evidently
belonged, shaking her head to get the pants off her horns, and chewing
the shirt as though it was a bran mash..
The pious man rushed out of the water towards the cow and said “co-boss,
co-boss,” but she took one look at his shape and turned away and didn't
co-boss very much. A war map of the thoughts of this Janesville business
man, as he saw the cow go away, would sell well, if it was illustrated
by a picture of a native Zulu picking buchu leaves. He said he was a
pious man, and had always tried to lead a different life, and do the
fair thing, but hereafter he would be blanked if he wouldn't kill every
blanked cow that he came across.
The only things the cow had left were his hat, vest and shoes and
stockings. He put them on and started after the cow. The vest was one of
these grandfather's clock vests, that stop short, never to go again, a
sort of emigrant vest, that comes high. It was not a long, lingering,
emotional vest; it was not what would be called a charitable vest,
because charity begins at home, and covers a multitude of back pay into
the treasury. He tried to remember some of the ten commandments, to
repeat, but the only one he could call to mind was “Pull down Thy Vest.”
His eyes swept the horizon to see if anybody was looking, and he could
see that the grounds about the blind asylum were alive with people
of both sexes. He thanked heaven that by the inscrutable ways of
Providence, people were made blind, but his joy at the calamity was
mingled with sorrow when he thought that the teachers at the asylum were
endowed with the most perfect eyesight.
As the cow neared the gate of the grounds he made one effort to head her
off, but she run by him, and then he attempted to take his pistol from
the hind pocket of his pants to kill himself, when he realized again
that he was indeed barefooted from his vest to his stockings, and he
sat down under a tree to die of slow starvation, but before he began to
starve he got up again and resumed an upright attitude, on account of
ants. It is a picnic for a nest of ants to partake of a human being who
has lost his or her trousers, as the case may be, and he followed the
cow, saying “co-boss” in the most pitiful accents that were ever used by
a Janesville man.
The cow looked around, and as she did so the pants caught on a sapling
and were pulled off her horns and dropped upon the ground. The pious
man looked upon this as a direct interposition of Providence, and he was
sorry he swore. He got into his trousers so quick that it made his head
swim, and just as the crowd at the asylum had come down to the gate
to see what strange looking calf was following the cow home, the man
started on a run for town, leaving the shirt with the cow.
The people at the asylum have the shirt, and it has the initials of the
man worked in the neck band, but he will never call for it. One sleeve
is chewed off, and the bosom is rent with conflicting emotions and cow's
teeth. The man sells nails and skimmers with a far off expression, and
don't want cows to run at large any more.