My Aunt Patience, who tilled a small farm in the state of Michigan, had
a favorite cow. This creature was not a good cow, nor a profitable one,
for instead of devoting a part of her leisure to secretion of milk and
production of veal she concentrated all her faculties on the study of
kicking. She would kick all day and get up in the middle of the night to
kick. She would kick at anything--hens, pigs, posts, loose stones, birds
in the air and fish leaping out of the water; to this impartial and
catholic-minded beef, all were equal--all similarly undeserving. Like
old Timotheus, who "raised a mortal to the skies," was my Aunt
Patience's cow; though, in the words of a later poet than Dryden, she
did it "more harder and more frequently." It was pleasing to see her
open a passage for herself through a populous barnyard. She would flash
out, right and left, first with one hind-leg and then with the other,
and would sometimes, under favoring conditions, have a considerable
number of domestic animals in the air at once.
Her kicks, too, were as admirable in quality as inexhaustible in
quantity. They were incomparably superior to those of the untutored kine
that had not made the art a life study--mere amateurs that kicked "by
ear," as they say in music. I saw her once standing in the road,
professedly fast asleep, and mechanically munching her cud with a sort
of Sunday morning lassitude, as one munches one's cud in a dream.
Snouting about at her side, blissfully unconscious of impending danger
and wrapped up in thoughts of his sweetheart, was a gigantic black
hog--a hog of about the size and general appearance of a yearling
rhinoceros. Suddenly, while I looked--without a visible movement on the
part of the cow--with never a perceptible tremor of her frame, nor a
lapse in the placid regularity of her chewing--that hog had gone away
from there--had utterly taken his leave. But away toward the pale
horizon a minute black speck was traversing the empyrean with the speed
of a meteor, and in a moment had disappeared, without audible report,
beyond the distant hills. It may have been that hog.
Currying cows is not, I think, a common practice, even in Michigan; but
as this one had never needed milking, of course she had to be subjected
to some equivalent form of persecution; and irritating her skin with a
currycomb was thought as disagreeable an attention as a thoughtful
affection could devise. At least she thought it so; though I suspect her
mistress really meant it for the good creature's temporal advantage.
Anyhow my aunt always made it a condition to the employment of a
farm-servant that he should curry the cow every morning; but after just
enough trials to convince himself that it was not a sudden spasm, nor a
mere local disturbance, the man would always give notice of an intention
to quit, by pounding the beast half-dead with some foreign body and then
limping home to his couch. I don't know how many men the creature
removed from my aunt's employ in this way, but judging from the number
of lame persons in that part of the country, I should say a good many;
though some of the lameness may have been taken at second-hand from the
original sufferers by their descendants, and some may have come by
contagion.
I think my aunt's was a faulty system of agriculture. It is true her
farm labor cost her nothing, for the laborers all left her service
before any salary had accrued; but as the cow's fame spread abroad
through the several States and Territories, it became increasingly
difficult to obtain hands; and, after all, the favorite was imperfectly
curried. It was currently remarked that the cow had kicked the farm to
pieces--a rude metaphor, implying that the land was not properly
cultivated, nor the buildings and fences kept in adequate repair.
It was useless to remonstrate with my aunt: she would concede
everything, amending nothing. Her late husband had attempted to reform
the abuse in this manner, and had had the argument all his own way until
he had remonstrated himself into an early grave; and the funeral was
delayed all day, until a fresh undertaker could be procured, the one
originally engaged having confidingly undertaken to curry the cow at the
request of the widow.
Since that time my Aunt Patience had not been in the matrimonial market;
the love of that cow had usurped in her heart the place of a more
natural and profitable affection. But when she saw her seeds unsown, her
harvests ungarnered, her fences overtopped with rank brambles and her
meadows gorgeous with the towering Canada thistle she thought it best to
take a partner.
When it transpired that my Aunt Patience intended wedlock there was
intense popular excitement. Every adult single male became at once a
marrying man. The criminal statistics of Badger county show that in that
single year more marriages occurred than in any decade before or since.
But none of them was my aunt's. Men married their cooks, their
laundresses, their deceased wives' mothers, their enemies'
sisters--married whomsoever would wed; and any man who, by fair means or
courtship, could not obtain a wife went before a justice of the peace
and made an affidavit that he had some wives in Indiana. Such was the
fear of being married alive by my Aunt Patience.
Now, where my aunt's affection was concerned she was, as the reader will
have already surmised, a rather determined woman; and the extraordinary
marrying epidemic having left but one eligible male in all that county,
she had set her heart upon that one eligible male; then she went and
carted him to her home. He turned out to be a long Methodist parson,
named Huggins.
Aside from his unconscionable length, the Rev. Berosus Huggins was not
so bad a fellow, and was nobody's fool. He was, I suppose, the most
ill-favored mortal, however, in the whole northern half of
America--thin, angular, cadaverous of visage and solemn out of all
reason. He commonly wore a low-crowned black hat, set so far down upon
his head as partly to eclipse his eyes and wholly obscure the ample
glory of his ears. The only other visible article of his attire (except
a brace of wrinkled cowskin boots, by which the word "polish" would have
been considered the meaningless fragment of a lost language) was a
tight-fitting black frock-coat, preternaturally long in the waist, the
skirts of which fell about his heels, sopping up the dew. This he always
wore snugly buttoned from the throat downward. In this attire he cut a
tolerably spectral figure. His aspect was so conspicuously unnatural and
inhuman that whenever he went into a cornfield, the predatory crows
would temporarily forsake their business to settle upon him in swarms,
fighting for the best seats upon his person, by way of testifying their
contempt for the weak inventions of the husbandman.
The day after the wedding my Aunt Patience summoned the Rev. Berosus to
the council chamber, and uttered her mind to the following intent:
"Now, Huggy, dear, I'll tell you what there is to do about the place.
First, you must repair all the fences, clearing out the weeds and
repressing the brambles with a strong hand. Then you will have to
exterminate the Canadian thistles, mend the wagon, rig up a plow or two,
and get things into ship-shape generally. This will keep you out of
mischief for the better part of two years; of course you will have to
give up preaching, for the present. As soon as you have--O! I forgot
poor Phoebe. She"----
"Mrs. Huggins," interrupted her solemn spouse, "I shall hope to be the
means, under Providence, of effecting all needful reforms in the
husbandry of this farm. But the sister you mention (I trust she is not
of the world's people)--have I the pleasure of knowing her? The name,
indeed, sounds familiar, but"----
"Not know Phoebe!" cried my aunt, with unfeigned astonishment; "I
thought everybody in Badger knew Phoebe. Why, you will have to scratch
her legs, every blessed morning of your natural life!"
"I assure you, madam," rejoined the Rev. Berosus, with dignity, "it
would yield me a hallowed pleasure to minister to the spiritual needs of
sister Phoebe, to the extent of my feeble and unworthy ability; but,
really, I fear the merely secular ministration of which you speak must
be entrusted to abler and, I would respectfully suggest, female hands."
"Whyyy, youuu ooold, foooool!" replied my aunt, spreading her eyes with
unbounded amazement, "Phoebe is a _cow_!"
"In that case," said the husband, with unruffled composure, "it will, of
course, devolve upon me to see that her carnal welfare is properly
attended to; and I shall be happy to bestow upon her legs such time as I
may, without sin, snatch from my strife with Satan and the Canadian
thistles."
With that the Rev. Mr. Huggins crowded his hat upon his shoulders,
pronounced a brief benediction upon his bride, and betook himself to the
barn-yard.
Now, it is necessary to explain that he had known from the first who
Phoebe was, and was familiar, from hearsay, with all her sinful traits.
Moreover, he had already done himself the honor of making her a visit,
remaining in the vicinity of her person, just out of range, for more
than an hour and permitting her to survey him at her leisure from every
point of the compass. In short, he and Phoebe had mutually reconnoitered
and prepared for action.
Amongst the articles of comfort and luxury which went to make up the
good parson's _dot_, and which his wife had already caused to be
conveyed to his new home, was a patent cast-iron pump, about seven feet
high. This had been deposited near the barn-yard, preparatory to being
set up on the planks above the barn-yard well. Mr. Huggins now sought
out this invention and conveying it to its destination put it into
position, screwing it firmly to the planks. He next divested himself of
his long gaberdine and his hat, buttoning the former loosely about the
pump, which it almost concealed, and hanging the latter upon the summit
of the structure. The handle of the pump, when depressed, curved
outwardly between the coat-skirts, singularly like a tail, but with this
inconspicuous exception, any unprejudiced observer would have pronounced
the thing Mr. Huggins, looking uncommonly well.
The preliminaries completed, the good man carefully closed the gate of
the barnyard, knowing that as soon as Phoebe, who was campaigning in the
kitchen garden, should note the precaution she would come and jump in to
frustrate it, which eventually she did. Her master, meanwhile, had laid
himself, coatless and hatless, along the outside of the close board
fence, where he put in the time pleasantly, catching his death of cold
and peering through a knot-hole.
At first, and for some time, the animal pretended not to see the figure
on the platform. Indeed she had turned her back upon it directly she
arrived, affecting a light sleep. Finding that this stratagem did not
achieve the success that she had expected, she abandoned it and stood
for several minutes irresolute, munching her cud in a half-hearted way,
but obviously thinking very hard. Then she began nosing along the ground
as if wholly absorbed in a search for something that she had lost,
tacking about hither and thither, but all the time drawing nearer to the
object of her wicked intention. Arrived within speaking distance, she
stood for a little while confronting the fraudful figure, then put out
her nose toward it, as if to be caressed, trying to create the
impression that fondling and dalliance were more to her than wealth,
power and the plaudits of the populace--that she had been accustomed to
them all her sweet young life and could not get on without them. Then
she approached a little nearer, as if to shake hands, all the while
maintaining the most amiable expression of countenance and executing all
manner of seductive nods and winks and smiles. Suddenly she wheeled
about and with the rapidity of lightning dealt out a terrible kick--a
kick of inconceivable force and fury, comparable to nothing in nature
but a stroke of paralysis out of a clear sky!
The effect was magical! Cows kick, not backward but sidewise. The impact
which was intended to project the counterfeit theologian into the middle
of the succeeding conference week reacted upon the animal herself, and
it and the pain together set her spinning like a top. Such was the
velocity of her revolution that she looked like a dim, circular cow,
surrounded by a continuous ring like that of the planet Saturn--the
white tuft at the extremity of her sweeping tail! Presently, as the
sustaining centrifugal force lessened and failed, she began to sway and
wabble from side to side, and finally, toppling over on her side, rolled
convulsively on her back and lay motionless with all her feet in the
air, honestly believing that the world had somehow got atop of her and
she was supporting it at a great sacrifice of personal comfort. Then she
fainted.
How long she lay unconscious she knew not, but at last she unclosed her
eyes, and catching sight of the open door of her stall, "more sweet than
all the landscape smiling near," she struggled up, stood wavering upon
three legs, rubbed her eyes, and was visibly bewildered as to the points
of the compass. Observing the iron clergyman standing fast by its faith,
she threw it a look of grieved reproach and hobbled heart-broken into
her humble habitation, a subjugated cow.
For several weeks Phoebe's right hind leg was swollen to a monstrous
growth, but by a season of judicious nursing she was "brought round all
right," as her sympathetic and puzzled mistress phrased it, or "made
whole," as the reticent man of God preferred to say. She was now as
tractable and inoffensive "in her daily walk and conversation" (Huggins)
as a little child. Her new master used to take her ailing leg trustfully
into his lap, and for that matter, might have taken it into his mouth if
he had so desired. Her entire character appeared to be radically
changed--so altered that one day my Aunt Patience, who, fondly as she
loved her, had never before so much as ventured to touch the hem of her
garment, as it were, went confidently up to her to soothe her with a pan
of turnips. Gad! how thinly she spread out that good old lady upon the
face of an adjacent stone wall! You could not have done it so evenly
with a trowel.