The thing was incredible. It was intolerable—just cause for mutiny. Talk about injustice, arrogant denial of the equal rights of man and beast! Well, here was a spectacle calculated to make the heavens weep. Yet never had a June sky revealed a deeper shade of blue for fleecy clouds to sail upon. The wind that should have risen in a shriek of indignation blew softly around the corner of the barn, and was laden with fragrance from all the flowers that bloom. In the meadow just beyond the stone fence, the tall grass waved gently, whispering contentment to the brook that gurgled with happiness. Birds sang, grasshoppers chirped—
Clarence could stand it no longer. With his neck stretched far out of his stall window, the colt lifted up his voice and whinnied remonstrance.
“O Amanda! Why are we still prisoners, and the sun half-way up the roof of heaven? It is an outrage, Amanda. Come quickly and let us out.”
Reginald—the round fat one with the tight kink in his tail—stood on his hind-legs inside the barnyard fence under the colt’s nose, and voiced his personal grievance in short sharp squeaks.
“Let me out, let me out, let me out! My trough is empty. My flattened belly cleaves to my backbone.”
On either side of him were Mrs. Cowslip and Gustavius, with their heads over the fence and their noses in the air.
“Amanda, O Amanda!” bawled the bull-calf, while his mother—she of the liquid eyes and the crumpled horn—lowed her gentle reminder:—
“Good, kind Amanda, this yard is barren; in the pasture the long grass is luscious. Amanda, O Amanda!”
And William, the big-horned and bearded one, butted foolishly at the hinges of the barnyard gate.
The others gave no heed to William’s puerile devices. He was only an addle-pated goat anyway, devoid of reasoning power and puffed up with vanity. They put their noses together and considered the matter, the bull-calf wrinkling his yellow muzzle at Clarence’s ear and dropping now and then a superfluous comment. Ordinarily the colt, having an exalted sense of his own superiority, would have indulged in no such familiarity with a placid old cow and her lubberly calf; but it was plain that the present occasion was one demanding the sinking of the individual in the organization. So Clarence patiently reviewed the situation, inviting their suggestions.