test. Offer a thorough-bred Virginia cow hay, and she will laugh in your
face; but rattle the husks or shucks, and she knows you to be her
friend.

The new comer even declined corn meal at first. She eyed it furtively,
then sniffed it suspiciously, but finally discovered that it bore some
relation to her native "shucks," when she fell to eagerly.

I cherish the memory of this cow, however, as the most affectionate
brute I ever knew. Being deprived of her calf, she transferred her
affections to her master, and would fain have made a calf of him, lowing
in the most piteous and inconsolable manner when he was out of her
sight, hardly forgetting her grief long enough to eat her meal, and
entirely neglecting her beloved husks. Often in the middle of the night
she would set up that sonorous lamentation and continue it till sleep
was chased from every eye in the household. This generally had the
effect of bringing the object of her affection before her, but in a mood
anything but filial or comforting. Still, at such times a kick seemed a
comfort to her, and she would gladly have kissed the rod that was the
instrument of my midnight wrath.

But her tender star was destined soon to a fatal eclipse. Being tied
with too long a rope on one occasion during my temporary absence, she
got her head into the meal barrel, and stopped not till she had devoured
nearly half a bushel of dry meal. The singularly placid and benevolent
look that beamed from the meal-besmeared face when I discovered her was
something to be remembered. For the first time also her spinal column
came near assuming a horizontal line.

But the grist proved too much for her frail mill, and her demise took
place on the third day, not of course without some attempt to relieve
her on my part. I gave her, as is usual in such emergencies, everything
I "could think of" and everything my neighbors could think of, besides
some fearful prescriptions which I obtained from a German veterinary
surgeon, but to no purpose. I imagined her poor maw distended and
inflamed with the baking sodden mass which no physic could penetrate or
enliven.

Thus ended my second venture in live stock. My third, which followed
sharp upon the heels of this disaster, was scarcely more of a success.
This time I led to the altar a buffalo cow, as they call the "mully"
down south--a large, spotted, creamy-skinned cow, with a fine udder,
that I persuaded a Jew drover to part with for ninety dollars. "P