dollars of farther expenditure
would plunge me into bottomless insolvency. I must confess that this
disclosure of my financial condition added zest to the undertaking, and
filled me with that fine excitement which accompanies a desperate
speculation. I have always felt that another cow would have made a
financier of me, and that I could have taken my place among my brethren
in Wall Street without a tremor of the muscles or the least sense of
inferiority.

"The cows were both black in color; so black that they would make a spot
in the darkness of the blackest night that ever gloomed under the
cypresses of the Guadaloupe. 'If those cows,' I said to myself as I
looked them over, 'if those cows ever do bring forth calves at the rate
that the Texan of whom I purchased them figured out on his saddle,
they'll put the whole State under an eclipse.'

"I cannot say,--speaking with that restraint which I have always
cultivated,--I cannot say, ladies and gentlemen, that I regarded either
cow with any great affection. There were peculiarities about them, which
checked the outgoing of my emotional nature. They had a way of looking
at me through the wire fence, that made me feel grateful to the inventor
of barbed wire. I cannot describe the look exactly. It was a direct,
earnest, steady, intense inspection of my person, that made me feel out
of place, as it were, and caused me to remember that I had duties at
home, which required me to get there as rapidly as possible.

"One morning, seeing that the basis of my speculation was near the
centre of the field, and busily feeding on the bountiful growths of
nature, I crept softly through the wires of the fence that I might
gather some pecan nuts under a big tree that stood some twenty rods
away. I reached the tree in safety, and proceeded to pick up the nuts. I
had filled one pocket only when I heard a noise behind me, and, looking
up, I saw that all the profits of my stock speculation, and all my stock
itself, were coming toward me on a jump. I was never more collected in
my life. My mind instantly reached the conclusion that the pecan crop
that year was so large in Texas that it would not pay to pick up another
nut under that tree; that the whole thing should stand over, as it were,
until another fall, and that, the sooner I retired from that field, the
better it would be for me and the few pecans I had about me.

"Acting in harmony with this conclusion,--which to my mind carried wit