gins to pick strawberries as I goes along,
and you never see any thing so thick as they were, and wherever
the grass was long, they'd stand up like a little bush, and hang in
clusters, most as big and twice as good, to my likin', as garden ones.
Well, the sun, it appears to me, is like a hoss, when it comes near dark
it mends its pace, and gets on like smoke, so afore I know'd where I
was, twilight had come peepin' over the spruce tops.

"Off I sot, hot foot, into the bushes, arter the cows, and as always
eventuates when you are in a hurry, they was further back than common
that time, away ever so fur back to a brook, clean off to the rear of
the farm, so that day was gone afore I got out of the woods, and I got
proper frightened. Every noise I heerd I thought it was a bear, and when
I looked round a one side, I guessed I heerd one on the other, and I
hardly turned to look there before, I reckoned it was behind me, I was
e'en a'most skeered to death.

"Thinks I, 'I shall never be able to keep up to the cows if a bear comes
arter 'em and chases 'em, and if I fall astarn, he'll just snap up a
plump little corn fed feller like me in less than half no time. Cryin','
says I, 'though, will do no good. You must be up and doin', Sam, or it's
gone goose with you.'

"So a thought struck me. Father had always been a-talkin' to me about
the leadin' men, and makin' acquaintance with the political big bugs
when I growed up and havin' a patron, and so on. Thinks I, I'll take
the leadin' cow for my patron. So I jist goes and cuts a long tough ash
saplin, and takes the little limbs off of it, and then walks along side
of Mooley, as meachin' as you please, so she mightn't suspect nothin',
and then grabs right hold of her tail, and yelled and screamed like mad,
and wallopped away at her like any thing.

"Well, the way she cut dirt was cautionary; she cleared stumps, ditches,
windfalls and every thing, and made a straight track of it for home as
the crow flies. Oh, she was a dipper: she fairly flow again, and if ever
she flagged, I laid it into her with the ash saplin, and away we started
agin, as if Old Nick himself was arter us.

"But afore I reached home, the rest of the cows came a bellowin', and a
roarin' and a-racin' like mad arter us, and gained on us too, so as most
to overtake us, jist as I come to the bars of the cow yard, over went
Mooler, like a fox, brought me whap up agin 'em, which knocked all the
wind out of my lungs a