pen any gate, outrun any dog and ruin the
patience of any minister. We had her a year, and yet she never got over
wanting to go to the vendue. Once started out of the yard, she was bound to
see the sheriff. We coaxed her with carrots, and apples, and cabbage, and
sweetest stalks, and the richest beverage of slops, but without avail.

As a milker she was a failure. "Mike," who lived just back of our place,
would come in at nights from his "Kerry cow," a scraggly runt that lived on
the commons, with his pail so full he had to carry it cautiously lest it
spill over. But after our full-blooded had been in clover to her eyes all
day, Bridget would go out to the barnyard, and tug and pull for a supply
enough to make two or three custards. I said, "Bridget, you don't know how
to milk. Let me try." I sat down by the cow, tried the full force of
dynamics, but just at the moment when my success was about to be
demonstrated, a sudden thought took her somewhere between the horns, and
she started for the vendue, with one stroke of her back foot upsetting the
small treasure I had accumulated, and leaving me a mere wreck of what I
once was.

She had, among other bad things, a morbid appetite. Notwithstanding we gave
her the richest herbaceous diet, she ate everything she could put her mouth
on. She was fond of horse blankets and articles of human clothing. I found
her one day at the clothes line, nearly choked to death, for she had
swallowed one leg of something and seemed dissatisfied that she could not
get down the other. The most perfect nuisance that I ever had about my
place was that full-blooded.

Having read in our agricultural journals of cows that were slaughtered
yielding fourteen hundred pounds neat weight, we concluded to sell her to
the butcher. We set a high price upon her and got it--that is, we took a
note for it, which is the same thing. My bargain with the butcher was the
only successful chapter in my bovine experiences. The only taking-off in
the whole transaction was that the butcher ran away, leaving me nothing but
a specimen of poor chirography, and I already had enough of that among my
manuscripts.

My friend, never depend on high-breeds. Some of the most useless of cattle
had ancestors spoken of in the "Commentaries of Caesar." That Alderney
whose grandfather used to graze on a lord's park in England may not be
worth the grass she eats.

Do not depend too much on the high-sounding name of Durham or Devon. A