A Dancing Cow.
We made strange acquaintances on those long voyages, up a stream navigated by no other keel than ours, and, among other natural curiosities, we fell in with a musical cow. This creature, a small, cream-colored specimen of the Alderney breed, suckled her calf, along with a dozen other vaccine mothers, in a meadow which sloped down to the river’s brink.
Whenever we turned the bend of the river, “with our voices in tune as the oars kept time,” and the meadow came in sight, there we were sure to see the white cow, standing up to the shoulders in the water, whither she had advanced to meet us, her neck stretched out and her dripping nose turned toward the boat.
As we skirted the meadow, she kept pace with us on the bank, testifying her delight by antics of which no cow in her senses would have been thought capable. She would leap, skip, roll on her back, rear on her hind legs, and then hurl them aloft in the air like a kicking horse—now rushing into the water to look at us nearer, now frisking off like a kitten at play.
When she came to the meadow-fence, she dashed through it furiously into the next field, and so on through the next fence, and the next after that. The fourth being railed, she would turn it by wading the river, and was only prevented from following us farther by a steep, precipitous bank which stopped her progress.
After these mad gambols, she always returned to her calf, first saluting us with a long, plaintive kind of bellow, by way of farewell.