228 WILD WHITE CATTLE OF GREAT BRITAIN. 



stood round the outer paled fence of the paddock while 

 the keepers quietly drove them tolerably near to us. 

 They stood grouped together for perhaps half an hour, 

 within thirty or forty yards of us, moving about now 

 and then among themselves. There was no wildness 

 or impatience — a little timidity, certainly, which pre- 

 vented their being driven yet nearer to us ; but fortified 

 as they were by the presence of their fellows and of 

 the keepers who fed them, they took little notice of us. 

 I feel convinced it would have been otherwise had the 

 keepers not been there, and we had approached this 

 their sanctuary alone. There were ten cows, two bulls, 

 and six or seven steers of various ages, all, save and 

 except the differences of sex, alike as peas. Their uni- 

 formity of type and colour was surprising, and no 

 experienced person could doubt what that type was. 

 They were what an agricultural writer would call 

 Long -horns, and, if of the colour that attaches to that 

 breed, might have been sold as such : the similarity 

 being not only in the horns, but also in form, size, and 

 general character. In this we were all agreed ; and of 

 the six visitors who then stood round, all of us were 

 well acquainted with the old Long-horns, most of us 

 from childhood, and four of us had seen the heifers of 

 that breed sold the day before. The horns, though 

 very considerable in length, did not attain that extreme 

 size which some of the " Improved Long-horns " pre- 

 sented, nor did they show the same eccentricity of 

 growth; on the contrary, allowing for the differences 

 of sex, and some very slight individual variations, the 

 horns were singularly uniform. But then we know on 

 good authority that these peculiarities, in their extreme 

 development, were not characteristics of the original 



