by
lightning about a mile out on the commons. My conscience instantly told
me that one of them was mine. It would be a fit closing of the third act
of this pastoral drama. Thitherward I bent my steps, and there upon the
smooth plain I beheld the scorched and swollen forms of two cows slain
by thunderbolts, but neither of them had ever been mine.

The next day I continued the search, and the next, and the next. Finally
I hoisted an umbrella over my head, for the weather had become hot, and
set out deliberately and systematically to explore every foot of open
common on Capitol Hill. I tramped many miles, and found every man's cow
but my own,--some twelve or fifteen hundred, I should think. I saw many
vagrant boys and Irish and colored women, nearly all of whom had seen a
buffalo cow that very day that answered exactly to my description, but
in such diverse and widely separate places that I knew it was no cow of
mine. And it was astonishing how many times I was myself deceived; how
many rumps or heads, or line backs or white flanks, I saw peeping over
knolls, or from behind fences or other objects, that could belong to no
cow but mine!

Finally I gave up the search, concluded the cow had been stolen, and
advertised her, offering a reward. But days passed, and no tidings were
obtained. Hope began to burn pretty low,--was indeed on the point of
going out altogether,--when one afternoon, as I was strolling over the
commons (for in my walks I still hovered about the scenes of my lost
milcher), I saw the rump of a cow, over a grassy knoll, that looked
familiar. Coming nearer, the beast lifted up her head; and, behold! it
was she! only a few squares from home, where doubtless she had been most
of the time. I had overshot the mark in my search. I had ransacked the
far-off, and had neglected the near-at-hand, as we are so apt to do. But
she was ruined as a milcher, and her history thenceforward was brief and
touching!

VII BEFORE GENIUS

If there did not something else go to the making of literature besides
mere literary parts, even the best of them, how long ago the old bards
and the Biblical writers would have been superseded by the learned
professors and the gentlemanly versifiers of later times! Is there
to-day a popular poet, using the English language, who does not, in
technical acquirements and in the artificial adjuncts of poetry,--rhyme,
metre, melody, and especially sweet, dainty fancies,--surpass Europe's
and