infidel as the result of a rather unexpected series of
incidents. I don't think I have said before that we have for some time
been expecting a great event on this farm. We have raised corn and
buckwheat, we have a fertile asparagus bed and onions and pie-plant
(enough to supply the entire population of this community) and I can't
tell how many other vegetables. We have had plenty of chickens hatched
out (I don't like chickens, especially hens, especially a certain gaunt
and predatory hen named [so Harriet says] Evangeline, who belongs to a
neighbour of ours) and we have had two litters of pigs, but until this
bright moment of expectancy we never have had a calf.

Upon the advice of Horace, which I often lean upon as upon a staff, I
have been keeping my young heifer shut up in the cow-yard now for a week
or two. But yesterday, toward the middle of the afternoon, I found the
fence broken down and the cow-yard empty. From what Harriet said, the
brown cow must have been gone since early morning. I knew, of course,
what that meant, and straightway I took a stout stick and set off over
the hill, tracing the brown cow as far as I could by her tracks. She had
made way toward a clump of trees near Horace's wood lot, where I
confidently expected to find her. But as fate would have it, the pasture
gate, which is rarely used, stood open and the tracks led outward into
an old road. I followed rapidly, half pleased that I had not found her
within the wood. It was a promise of new adventure which I came to with
downright enjoyment (confidentially--I should have been cultivating
corn!). I peered into every thicket as I passed: once I climbed an old
fence and, standing on the top rail, intently surveyed my neighbour's
pasture. No brown cow was to be seen. At the crossing of the brook I
shouldered my way from the road down a path among the alders, thinking
the brown cow might have gone that way to obscurity.

It is curious how, in spite of domestication and training, Nature in her
great moments returns to the primitive and instinctive! My brown cow,
never having had anything but the kindest treatment, is as gentle an
animal as could be imagined, but she had followed the nameless,
ages-old law of her breed: she had escaped in her great moment to the
most secret place she knew. It did not matter that she would have been
safer in my yard--both she and her calf--that she would have been surer
of her food; she could only obey the old wild la