62 BIRDS AND POETS 
XTII 
I once saw a cow that had lost her cud. How 
forlorn and desolate and sick at heart that cow 
looked! No more rumination, no more of that sec- 
ond and finer mastication, no more of that sweet 
and juicy revery under the spreading trees, or in 
the stall. Then the farmer took an elder and 
scraped the bark and put something with it, and 
made the cow a cud, and, after due waiting, the ex- 
periment took, a response came back, and the mys- 
terious machinery was once more in motion, and the 
cow was herself again. 
Have you, O poet, or essayist, or story-writer, 
never lost: your cud, and wandered about. days and 
weeks without being able to start a single thought 
or an image that tasted good,— your literary appetite 
dull or all gone, and the conviction daily growing 
that it is all over with you in that direction? A 
little elder-bark, something fresh and bitter from 
the woods, is about the best thing you can take. 
XIV 
Notwithstanding what I have elsewhere said about 
the desolation of snow, when one looks closely it 
is little more than a thin veil after all, and takes 
and repeats the form of whatever it covers. Every 
path through the fields is just as plain as before. 
On every hand the ground sends tokens, and the 
curves and slopes are not of the snow, but of the 
earth beneath. In like manner the rankest vegeta- 
