Now contrast these domestic animals with a much more necessary and
useful one, the cow. Any stockman knows that a cow is a beast of very
high nervous organization, but she has no very large number of ways of
telling us how she feels: just a few tones to her lowing, a few changes
of expression to her eye, a small number of shades of uneasiness, a
little manner with her eyes, showing the whites when troubled or letting
the lids droop in satisfaction--these things 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.
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