For the enlightenment of city milkmen who never saw a
cow, it may be well to state that this more or less useful
animal does not resemble a pump in the slightest particular.
A cow has four feet, but the subsequent one on the right
side is her main reliance. With this foot she can strike a
blow that no man or woman born can elude. It resembles a
load of drunken chain-shot, and searches every cubic yard
of atmosphere in a two-acre lot for a victim before it stops.
She is also provided with a caudal appendage that ends in
a patent fly-brush. This she uses to wrap around the neck
of the milkmaid to prevent her getting away before she has
a chance to kick her health corset off and upset the milk.
A cow will eat anything she can steal, from an ear of corn
to a hickory shirt. She will leave a square meal especially
ordered for her, and gotten up by an imported chef, to fill
her measly hide full of straw from a boarding-house bedtick,
if she can only steal it. She will work at a crack in a
neighbor's barn for six mortal hours, and wear her tongue
as thin as a political platform to get an old corn-cob, when
she knows she can have a bushel of corn, all shelled, by
going home for it. She is a born thief, a natural marauder.
Any cow that has been given opportunities for gleaning
knowledge can open a gate that fastens with a combination
lock, get into a garden, do fifty dollars' worth of damage
and be six blocks away before the infuriated owner can ram
a charge of slugs into a muzzle-loading gun.
The man who has not lived in a small town, where one-half
the inhabitants keep cows and expect them to forage their
living off the other half, will never fully realize what he
has missed unless he starts a daily paper or falls down
stairs with the cook stove. When Mrs. B. and I first went
into partnership we decided to raise our own garden truck.
It is the usual mistake of youngsters. During the long
winter evenings they sit by the fire and plan their garden. A
640-acre farm, covered a foot deep with patent fertilizers,
mortgages and other modern improvements, would not
produce the amount of stuff two moonstruck young amateur
gardeners confidently expect to yank from a patch of dirt
but little bigger than a postage stamp. Thirty dollars for
tools and seeds, ninety-seven dollars' worth of labor, and
four times that amount of worry and vexation of spirit,
results in some forty dollars' worth of "garden sass," which
is promptly referred to the interior department of the
neighbors' cows.
I soon learned that an ordinary gate catch was no bar to
the educated cattle in my neighborhood, so I added a bolt.
That puzzled them for a night or two, but they soon learned
the combination and filled themselves so full of cabbage
that cost me two dollars a head to raise, that they couldn't
get out by way of the gate, and I had to knock down a
panel of fence to get rid of them. That evening I brought
home a double-barreled shot gun, a log-chain and a
padlock that would have baffled a cracksman. I chained up
the gate, gave the key to Mrs. B. to lose, loaded the gun
halfway to the muzzle with tenpenny nails and resolved to
hold the fort by main strength. It was a bright moonlight
night, and I sat up with a corncob pipe and a robust
determination to have fresh beef for breakfast if that
padlock failed to do its duty.
About 9 o'clock an old brindle cow came browsing up to the
front gate. She took a long survey of the house to see if
we had all gone to bed. Having satisfied herself on that
point, she inserted her horns between the bars of the
front gate and gave it a gentle shake. She looked at
the house again to see if the noise had aroused us.
Finding all quiet, she went to work on the bolt, first with her
horns and then with her tongue. In ten minutes she had it
drawn, and started to come in. She was evidently
surprised to find herself still on the outside. Two or three of
her companions came up and they held a consultation.
Old Brindle worked at the chain awhile, but it was no use.
They were puzzled. They took a long look at the gate,
shook it viciously with their horns, then turned impatiently
away, like a man who has run four blocks to a bank, only to
find "closed" staring him in the face. Several more cows
came up, and when they were shown the new jewelry they
acted hurt and proceeded to hold an indignation meeting
and pass a vote of censure, after which one old she-pirate
broke a horn trying to lift the gate off its hinges. After this
mishap they acted so discouraged that I concluded they
had given it up; but they hadn't. Old Brindle returned to the
attack. She spent half an hour "monkeying" with the gate,
and then stopped short and began to study. She had more
gall than a ward heeler, more tenacity than an office-
seeker, more brains than a boodle alderman. In just ten
minutes by the town clock she had the problem solved.
With her horn she lifted the chain over the top of the gate-
post and walked in, as proud as a boy with a sore toe. I
felt like a homicide as I raised the double-barreled gun and
pulled both triggers. I felt worse after I had crawled out of
the cistern, where the perfidious gun had kicked me, and
learned that I had missed the whole drove and sent a hatful
of slugs and nails into a neighbor's china closet. I broke
the gun over Old Brindle's vertebrae and followed up the
attack with the garden-fork. After I had chased the entire
drove back and forth over the garden a dozen times, and
seen what was left of my summer's work inextricably
mixed with the sub-soil, fallen over the wheelbarrow and
ruined a $14 pair of trousers, a constable came and
arrested me for discharging firearms inside the corporate
limits. A young theological gosling, who has since died of
excessive goodness, preferred a charge of cruelty to
animals against me, and my neighbor sued for the price of
his china and got judgment. Old Brindle died and the court
decided that it was my duty to buy her. I found her meat
too tough for eating and her hide too full of garden-fork
holes to be available for sole-leather.
If the retail butchers are to be believed, the cow is a calf
until there is no more room on her horn for rings. She
seldom lives to be too old to be carved up with a buzz-saw
and a cold-chisel and sold as veal.
After she has passed her time of usefulness in the dairy;
when she has forgotten how to give four quarts of milk per
diem and then kick it over the dewy-lipped maid who has
carefully culled it from the maternal fount, the thrifty farmer
drives her upon the railway track, wrecks a train with her,
then sues the company for $150 damages. Of course the
company kicks worse than ever the cow did, but the farmer
secures an intelligent jury of brother agriculturalists and the
soulless corporation has to come to taw.
Her consort is less brilliant and more impulsive. He has a
surly, unsocial disposition and uncertain temper, but can be
very polite when he chooses. He has been known to
neglect his regular business to assist an embarrassed
young man over a rail fence, or entertain a party of
picnickers from the city. He has a natural antipathy for red
flags, and will cross a forty-acre field to make a mop rag of
one and rub its bearer's nose in the mud--an example that
might be advantageously followed by the Chicago authorities.
The calf is one of the most interesting studies in the
science of natural history. In its earliest youth it wears long
wobbly legs and an expression of angelic innocence; but
before it is a week old it knows more than some men who
have been honored with high offices and expensive
funerals. The calf will eat anything it can swallow, and what
it can't get through its neck it will chew and suck the juice.
Tablecloths, hickory shirts, store pants, lace curtains, socks,
in fact the entire range of articles familiar to the laundry are
tid-bits to the calf. A calf that has any ambition to
distinguish himself will leave the maternal udder any time to
chew one leg off a new pair of "boughten" pantaloons or
absorb the flowing narrative of a "biled" shirt. The calf
learns bad habits as readily as an Indian, and the man who
did not have a youthful masculine bovine for partner in his
boyish deviltry looks back upon a barren and uneventful youth.
I remember one promising calf that I taught to "bunt" like a
William goat. One day my eldest brother and my parent on
my father's side were cleaning out an open well, while the
calf and myself lingered near, waiting for a glorious
opportunity to merit killing. The old gentleman
superintended the work and pulled up in an iron kettle the
mud which the son of his youth industriously scraped from
the bottom of an eighteen-foot well with much labor and an
old tin pan. While he was leaning over the mouth of the
well, pulling up a kettle of slush, his suspender buttons
groaning and his tailor-made pantaloons strained to the
utmost tension, I called the calf's attention to him. The
bovine grasped the situation, lowered his head, kicked up
his heels, emitted a triumphant bellow, shot forward like a
baseball reaching for the stomach of an amateur shortstop,
and struck the rear elevation of the head of our
distinguished house with the solid impact of an hydraulic
ram toying with a stone fence. A moment later there
was a sound from the bowels of the earth, but it was not a
sound of revelry. It resembled an able-bodied cyclone
ripping up four miles of plank road and driving it through the
pulsating heart of a colored camp-meeting. The calf had
forgotten to remember the well, and while my respected
sire was chasing the kettle to the bottom, the calf was
chasing him. Half a dozen robust neighbors armed with a
windlass and a two-inch rope dragged the youthful ox and
his unfortunate companions from the pit, and the volunteer
fire brigade was sent for to turn the hose on them. I
haven't forgotten the sequel to this little story; but it would
not possess that lively interest for the great public that it did
for me, so I will let it pass.
* * *
CHRISTIAN ENGLAND IN INDIA.