OUR RURAL DIVINITY 119 
again. The savage tribes are never without the 
horse; the Scythians are all mounted; but the cow 
would tame and humanize them. When the Indians 
will cultivate the cow, I shall think their civiliza- 
tion fairly begun. Recently, when the horses were 
sick with the epizootic, and the oxen came to the 
city and helped to do their work, what an Arcadian 
air again filled the streets! But the dear old oxen, 
— how awkward and distressed they looked! Juno 
wept in the face of every one of them. The horse 
is a true citizen, and is entirely at home in the paved 
streets; but the ox — what a complete embodiment 
of all rustic and rural things! Slow, deliberate, 
thick-skinned, powerful, hulky, ruminating, fragrant- 
breathed, when he came to town the spirit and sug- 
gestion of all Georgics and Bucolics came with him. 
O citizen, was it only a plodding, unsightly brute 
that went by? Was there no chord in your bosom, 
long silent, that sweetly vibrated at the sight of 
that patient, Herculean couple? Did you smell no 
hay or cropped herbage, see no summer pastures 
with circles of cool shade, hear no voice of herds 
among the hills? They were very likely the only 
horses your grandfather ever had. Not much trou- 
ble to harness and unharness them. Not much 
vanity on the road in those days. ‘They did all the 
work on the early pioneer farm. They were the 
gods whose rude strength first broke the soil. They 
could live where the moose and the deer could. If 
there was no clover or timothy to be had, then the 
twigs of the basswood and birch would do. Before 
