ions
required my vigorous personal exertions morning and evening, the
matter wore a more serious aspect, and I began to feel quite pensive
and apprehensive. It is very well to talk of the pleasures of the
milkmaid going out in the balmy freshness of the purple dawn; but
imagine a poor fellow pulled out of bed on a drizzly, rainy morning,
and equipping himself for a scamper through a wet pasture lot, rope in
hand, at the heels of such a termagant as mine! In fact, madam
established a regular series of exercises, which had all to be gone
through before she would suffer herself to be captured; as, first, she
would station herself plump in the middle of a marsh, which lay at the
lower part of the lot, and look very innocent and absent-minded, as if
reflecting on some sentimental subject. "Suke! Suke! Suke!" I
ejaculate, cautiously tottering along the edge of the marsh, and
holding out an ear of corn. The lady looks gracious, and comes
forward, almost within reach of my hand. I make a plunge to throw the
rope over her horns, and away she goes, kicking up mud and water into
my face in her flight, while I, losing my balance, tumble forward into
the marsh. I pick myself up, and, full of wrath, behold her placidly
chewing her cud on the other side, with the meekest air imaginable, as
who should say, "I hope you are not hurt, sir." I dash through swamp
and bog furiously, resolving to carry all by a _coup de main_. Then
follows a miscellaneous season of dodging, scampering, and bopeeping,
among the trees of the grove, interspersed with sundry occasional
races across the bog aforesaid. I always wondered how I caught her
every day; and when I had tied her head to one post and her heels to
another, I wiped the sweat from my brow, and thought I was paying dear
for the eccentricities of genius. A genius she certainly was, for
besides her surprising agility, she had other talents equally
extraordinary. There was no fence that she could not take down;
nowhere that she could not go. She took the pickets off the garden
fence at her pleasure, using her horns as handily as I could use a
claw hammer. Whatever she had a mind to, whether it were a bite in the
cabbage garden, or a run in the corn patch, or a foraging expedition
into the flower borders, she made herself equally welcome and at home.
Such a scampering and driving, such cries of "Suke here" and "Suke
there," as constantly greeted our ears, kept our little establishment
in a constant