way in the
land. The neighing of the horse is a call to battle; but the lowing of
old Brockleface in the valley brings the golden age again. The savage
tribes are never without the horse; the Scythians are all mounted; but
the cow would tame and humanize them. When the Indians will cultivate
the cow, I shall think their civilization fairly begun. Recently, when
the horses were sick with the epizooetic, and the oxen came to the city
and helped to do their work, what an Arcadian air again filled the
streets! But the dear old oxen,--how awkward and distressed they looked!
Juno wept in the face of every one of them. The horse is a true citizen,
and is entirely at home in the paved streets; but the ox,--what a
complete embodiment of all rustic and rural things! Slow, deliberate,
thick-skinned, powerful, hulky, ruminating, fragrant-breathed, when he
came to town the spirit and suggestion of all Georgics and Bucolics came
with him. O citizen, was it only a plodding, unsightly brute that went
by? Was there no chord in your bosom, long silent, that sweetly vibrated
at the sight of that patient, Herculean couple? Did you smell no hay or
cropped herbage, see no summer pastures with circles of cool shade, hear
no voice of herds among the hills? They were very likely the only horses
your grandfather ever had. Not much trouble to harness and unharness
them. Not much vanity on the road in those days. They did all the work
on the early pioneer farm. They were the gods whose rude strength first
broke the soil. They could live where the moose and the deer could. If
there was no clover or timothy to be had, then the twigs of the basswood
and birch would do. Before there were yet fields given up to grass, they
found ample pasturage in the woods. Their wide-spreading horns gleamed
in the duskiness, and their paths and the paths of the cows became the
future roads and highways, or even the streets of great cities.

All the descendants of Odin show a bovine trace, and cherish and
cultivate the cow. In Norway she is a great feature. Professor Boyesen
describes what he calls the _saeter_, the spring migration of the dairy
and dairymaids, with all the appurtenances of butter and cheese making,
from the valleys to the distant plains upon the mountains, where the
grass keeps fresh and tender till fall. It is the great event of the
year in all the rural districts. Nearly the whole family go with the
cattle and remain with them. At evening the cows a