COWS. 5 



complacently the ferocious gale, on his exalted lair 

 among the pointed rocks — with back exposed to the 

 pitiless storm, bare as the travelled household trunk 

 of a bygone generation — being contented, apparently, 

 with the rug wherewith Nature has considerately en- 

 wrapped his nether limbs, in everlasting compensa- 

 tion, it would seem, for his obligatory existence on 

 those icy Asian wastes, where litter must be scarce : 

 the other, with such queenly calmness, scarce ob- 

 servant of your entrance — chewing quietly the cud 

 across her recumbent calf, as the world-renowned 

 bailiff of Towneley rolls back the door of her stall 

 — on whose mellow cubic form you can detect no 

 shade or hollow, and the elastic padding of whose 

 meat-clad rib your finger dents in vain. 



Again, too, shall it be said, that from the same 

 ultimate source came the black dwarf of Brittany, 

 which I regret to see superseding the picturesque 

 rich Alderney — as though the fair dames of England 

 were returning to something of that capricious taste 

 which prevailed by way of interlude in the days of 

 chivalry ; — the bucolic plebeian Hereford ; the juicy 

 red Devon ; the mangy buffalo of the Italian wain ; 

 the grotesque Orcadian ox ; the spirited, bold kine 

 of Skye ; the diminutive domestic Kerry ; the sa- 

 gacious, highly-trained "backely" artillery of the 

 Hottentot armies ; the ash-blue lord of the Cam- 

 pagna ; the Sussex plough-slave ; the Pembroke 

 " poor man's " cow ; the cream- white cattle of Chil- 

 lingham, whose wild instinct it is yet to conceal 

 their precociously fierce offspring amidst the closest 

 recesses of the brake ; the bonnie stot, whose inoffen- 



