i 7 8 



ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES. 



save himself by sacrificing a favorite minister. Four- 

 legged mutineers, too, are mostly illogical enough to 

 spare the Padisha of the animal empire, while they mob 

 his pashaws. In stress of circumstances they recognize 

 his superiority by claiming his protection ; in America, 

 especially, their independence has been too short to efface 

 the traces of so many centuries of servitude. In Hindo- 

 stan, where our black cattle come from, they are kept 

 only for the sake of their milk and their sacredness ; 

 centuries before Herodotus visited the temple of the 

 Egyptian god-bull, the Hindoos treated the cow as a 

 privileged being, and it takes rather rough evidence to 

 convince her that man is her enemy. The greatest 

 North-American slaughterer of horned cattle is per- 

 haps Captain J. Kellerman, proprietor of the Fronteras 

 matanza, or beef-packery, near Matamoros, Mexico. 

 He kills them and skins them by thousands, both at his 

 establishment and in the open prairie, where his steeple- 

 chasers wage unremitting war against all unbranded 

 cows ; but the survivors once proved that they trusted 

 him, after all. He had pitched his camp near Agua- 

 deras, in the midst of a big chaparral, when, just before 

 nightfall, the crashing gallop of a cow-herd put his 

 butchers on the qui vive. They made a rush for their 

 horses, but there was no need of them : the cows headed 

 straight for the camp, and by no means accidentally, for 

 they only accelerated their career when they saw the 

 camp-fires. When they had approached within a hun- 



