The Birds’ Calendar 
notes coursing up and down, now high in air, 
now skimming the water,—the perpetual rural- 
ist finds nothing in these commonplace occur- 
rences worth the mention (quite likely he does 
not see them) ; but the gilded shops of the city 
do not contain their equal. Nature never 
strains for an effect-—we often fail to realize she 
has made an effect until we recall the scene— 
she has no display-windows for her wares. Her 
beauty eludes rather than seeks observation, 
seeming to exist quite as a matter of course, and 
for its own sake, without a thought whether a 
human eye sees and admires or not, but every- 
thing in its sort perfect, without a front side 
and a back side, which is man’s confession of a 
low standard. 
In pastoral scenery Nature’s chef-d’ euvre is 
the cow. Mr. Burroughs calls it ‘‘ our rural di- 
vinity ;’’—gentle, guileless, honest, and un- 
worldly, how the clumsy, patient beast embodies 
the chief attractive qualities of that childhood 
of which it is the great nourisher the world over. 
And I believe, too, there is more honest, homely 
sense of the beauty of nature in those great, mild 
eyes of the cow—the serene, benevolent, equani- 
mous cow—than in any other animal. As has 
been said of Wisdom, so we may say of her, 
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