e heavy new
tires. One of the lessons I learned early is that men are timid of a
woman's driving them in any vehicle, and I was surprised that I at last
rounded the bend and drew up beside a long, low shed which Sam had
calmly pointed out to me, without having had a single remonstrance from
the back seat.

"Moo," came in a gentle, sad voice from the depths of the shed as we all
began to disembark at the same time.

"Well, one is alive, anyway," said Sam as he set Byrd on the ground and
held up his arms to me. "It's good to have you back, Betty," he
whispered, in an undertone, as he turned me against his shoulder to set
me down. "It 'll all go right now that you are here to--"

"Now tell us what to do, Doctor." I interrupted him determinedly,
because I felt that it was not the occasion for friendly
sentimentalities.

If at any time in the three years that preceded that night I had
foreseen the way I was to spend it I would have been justified in flatly
refusing to carry out my horoscope. Suppose, for instance, while I was
in the midst of the wonderful dinner Peter Vandyne's cousin, Count Henri
de Berssan, gave me in Brussels, a week before the storm broke that
carried him before cannon and bayonet, I had seen a mental picture of
myself six months from that minute, out in the woods on the side of a
Harpeth hill under an old cedar-pole shed with my jacket off, my
embroidered blouse sleeves rolled to the shoulder, filling a tin can,
which had a long spout to be poked down a cow's throat, with a vile,
greasy mixture out of a black bottle, at the directions of a
shirt-sleeved little man and a red-headed farmer in blue overalls, while
a wisp of a boy writhed in and out and around and under a pathetic old
Jersey cow, who was being rescued from the jaws of death. Now I wonder
just what I would have done to escape such an experience? Slated myself
for Belgian widowhood, perhaps, as a kinder fate, or stayed right there
in New York to help Peter on "The Emergence." I wonder if Peter ever saw
a dear, big-eyed, trustful old Jersey cow have medicine poured down her
throat. It is called "drenching." I wish he could see it before he
finishes that play. The sight produces a peculiar kind of emotion that
might be worth recording in an all-comprehensive drama of American life.
In fact, I know that what I felt at the end was worth recording in any
kind of literature, by any kind of a poet--if we were equal to it. Old
Dr. Chubb leaned b