OUR RURAL DIVINITY 137 
about a mile out on the commons. My conscience 
instantly told me that one of them was mine. It 
would be a fit closing of the third act of this pas- 
toral drama. Thitherward I bent my steps, and 
there upon the smooth plain I beheld the scorched 
and swollen forms of two cows slain by thunderbolts, 
but neither of them had ever been mine. 
The next day I continued the search, and the 
next, and the next. Finally I hoisted an umbrella 
over my head, for the weather had become hot, and 
set out deliberately and systematically to explore 
every foot of open common on Capitol Hill. I 
tramped many miles, and found every man’s cow 
but my own,—some twelve or fifteen hundred, I 
should think. I saw many vagrant boys and Irish 
and colored women, nearly all of whom had seen a 
buffalo cow that very day that answered exactly to 
my description, but in such diverse and widely sepa- 
rate places that I knew it was no cow of mine. And 
it was astonishing how many times I was myself 
deceived; how many rumps or heads, or line backs 
or white flanks, I saw peeping over knolls, or from 
behind fences or other objects that could belong to 
no cow but mine! 
Finally I gave up the search, concluded the 
cow had been stolen, and advertised her, offering a 
reward. But days passed, and no tidings were 
obtained. Hope began to burn pretty low, — was 
indeed on the point of going out altogether, — when 
one afternoon, as I was strolling over the commons 
(for in my walks I still hovered about the scenes of 
