er succeed in getting near her in
the pasture, and that any kind of success in the milking operations
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