he 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. Oh, 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. What were those old Vikings but thick-hided bulls
that delighted in nothing so much as goring each other? And has not the
charge of beefiness been brought much nearer home to us than that? But
about all the northern races there is something that is kindred to
cattle in the best sense--something in their art and literature that is
essentially pastoral, sweet-breathed, continent, dispassionate,
ruminating, wide-eyed, soft-voiced--a charm of kine, the virtue of
brutes.

The cow belongs more especially to the northern peoples, to the region
of the good, green grass. She is the true _grazing_ animal. That broad,
smooth, always dewy nose of hers is just the suggestion of green sward.
She caresses the grass; she sweeps off the ends of the leaves; she reaps
it with the soft sickle of her tongue. She crops close, but she does not
bruise or devour the turf like the horse. She is the sward's best
friend, and will make it thick and smooth as a carpet.

The turfy mountains where live the nibbling sheep

are not for her. Her muzzle is too blunt; then she does not _bite_ as do
the sheep; she has not upper teeth; she _crops_. But on the lowe