ngs exhausted, and poor bossy's
tale is told. You can get nothing more out of her, except in some spasm
of madness. She is driven to extremes by her dumbness.

I am brought to this sermon by two things: what happened to me when
Rowena Fewkes came over to see me in the early summer of 1859, a year
almost to a day from the time when Magnus and I left Blue-grass Manor
after our spell of work there: and what our best cow, Spot, did
yesterday.

We were trying to lead Spot behind a wagon, and she did not like it. She
had no way of telling us how much she hated it, and how panicky she was,
as a dog or a cat could have done; and so she just hung back and acted
dumb and stubborn for a minute or two, and then she gave an awful
bellow, ran against the wagon as if she wanted to upset it, and when she
found she could not affect it, in as pathetic a despair and mental agony
as any man ever felt who has killed himself, she thrust one horn into
the ground, broke it off flush with her head, and threw herself down
with her neck doubled under her shoulder, as if trying to commit
suicide, as I verily believe she was. And yet dogs and cats get credit
for being creatures of finer feelings than cows, merely because cows
have no tricks of barking, purring, and the like.

It is the same as between other people and a Dutchman. He has the same
poverty of expression that cows are cursed with. To wear his feelings
like an overcoat where everybody can see them is for him impossible. He
is the bovine of the human species. This is the reason why I used to
have such fearful crises once in a while in my dumb life, as when I was
treated so kindly by Captain Sproule just after my stepfather whipped
me; or when I nearly killed Ace, my fellow-driver, on the canal in my
first and successful rebellion; or when I used to grow white, and cry
like a baby in my fights with rival drivers. I am thought by my
children, I guess, an unfeeling person, because the surface of my nature
is ice, and does not ripple in every breeze; but when ice breaks up, it
rips and tears--and the thicker the ice, the worse the ravage. The only
reason for saying anything about this is that I am an old man, and I
have always wanted to say it: and there are some things I have said, and
some I shall now have to say, that will seem inconsistent unless the
truths just stated are taken into account.

But there are some things to be told about before this crisis can be
understood. Life dragg