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tious. It was comforting, however, to reflect that she was less expensive, from the latter point of view, when she was dry than when she was fresh. Next morning she ate the spout off the watering-pot, and then put her head in the kitchen window and devoured two dinner-plates and the cream-jug. Then she went out and lay down on the strawberry-bed to think. While there something about Judge Twiddler's boy seemed to exasperate her; and when he came over into the yard after his ball, she inserted her horns into his trowsers and flung him across the fence. Then she went to the stable and ate a litter of pups and three feet of the trace-chain. The judge felt certain that her former owner didn't deceive him when he said her appetite was good. She had hunger enough for a drove of cattle and a couple of flocks of sheep. That day the judge went after the butcher to get him to buy her. When he returned with him, she had just eaten the monkey-wrench and the screw-driver, and she was trying to put away a fence-paling. The butcher said she was a fair-enough sort of cow, but she was too thin. He said he would buy her if the judge would feed her up and fatten her; and the judge said he would try. He gave her that night food enough for four cows, and she consumed it as if she had been upon half rations for a month. When she finished, she got up, reached for the hired man's straw hat, ate it, and then, bolting out into the garden, she put away the honeysuckle vine and a coil of India-rubber hose. The man said that if it was his cow he would kill her; and the judge told him that he had perhaps better just knock her on the head in the morning. During the night she had another attack of somnambulism, and while wandering about she ate the door-mat from the front porch, bit off all the fancy-work on top of the cast-iron gate, swallowed six loose bricks that were piled up against the house, and then had a fit among the rose bushes. When the judge came down in the morning, she seemed to be breathing her last, but she had strength enough left to seize a newspaper that the judge held in his hand; and when that was down, she gave three or four kicks and rolled over and expired. It cost the judge three dollars to have the carcase removed. Since then he has bought his butter and milk and given up all kinds of live-stock. CHAPTER X. _OUR CIVIL SERVICE_. Some of the public officers of Millburg are interesting in their way. The civil
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