g of her slim near foreleg. On our first interview I thought she
favored me with a coy glance, but as it was accompanied by an
irrelevant "Look out!" from her owner, the teamster, I was not certain.
I only know that after some conversation, a good deal of mental
reservation, and the disbursement of considerable coin, I found myself
standing in the dust of the departing emigrant wagon with one end of a
forty-foot _riata_ in my hand and Chu Chu at the other.

I pulled invitingly at my own end and even advanced a step or two
towards her. She then broke into a long disdainful pace and began to
circle round me at the extreme limit of her tether. I stood admiring
her free action for some moments--not always turning with her, which
was tiring--until I found that she was gradually winding herself up _on
me_! Her frantic astonishment when she suddenly found herself thus
brought up against me was one of the most remarkable things I ever saw
and nearly took me off my legs. Then when she had pulled against the
_riata_ until her narrow head and prettily arched neck were on a
perfectly straight line with it, she as suddenly slackened the tension
and condescended to follow me, at an angle of her own choosing.
Sometimes it was on one side of me, sometimes on the other. Even then
the sense of my dreadful contiguity apparently would come upon her like
a fresh discovery, and she would become hysterical. But I do not think
that she really _saw_ me. She looked at the _riata_ and sniffed it
disparagingly; she pawed some pebbles that were near me tentatively
with her small hoof; she started back with a Robinson-Crusoe-like
horror of my footprints in the wet gully, but my actual personal
presence she ignored. She would sometimes pause, with her head
thoughtfully between her forelegs, and apparently say, "There is some
extraordinary presence here: animal, vegetable, or mineral--I can't
make out which--but it's not good to eat, and I loathe and detest it."

When I reached my house in the suburbs, before entering the "fifty
vara" lot inclosure, I deemed it prudent to leave her outside while I
informed the household of my purchase; and with this object I tethered
her by the long _riata_ to a solitary sycamore which stood in the
centre of the road, the crossing of two frequented thoroughfares. It
was not long, however, before I was interrupted by shouts and screams
from that vicinity and on returning thither I found that Chu Chu, with
the assistan