As the verses progressed, the sentiment became more tender, but the diction and measure were perfectly appalling in their untutored originality. At each new limp or poetical hobble, the girls would laugh gaily; but when Mora looked at Grace with a significant smile, the application of the following lines was readily seen:—
"My love she's golden hair and eyes
Of deepest, finest blue.
I love her better than ['Gooseberry pies!' cried Maud] any thing,
My heart will always be true to you."
Although the author had promoted his lady love from the obscure position of third person to the station of second person in the space of a second, yet even this was not enough to induce Grace to remain longer; for she fled away with burning blushes, while Mora still continued to read lines, the syntax of which disclosed the revolting fact that their author had throttled his own mother tongue, had slain persons without regard to sex or condition, and, like a vandal, had cut off the feet of his best subject at some critical moment.
At the close Miss Estill folded the paper, and as she placed it in a cabinet she said, it would yet serve to pay off some old scores with Hugh. She must have kept her word, for on his return he was immeasurably shocked on opening his county paper to see, staring at him from the first page: "A Poem To My Love. By H. E."
After Mr. Estill had praised the dappled Normans and cared for them in a very hospitable manner, he led the young men out to a near-by pasture to show them his Jersey cows. While they were admiring the graceful animals, their host said:—
"For twenty-five years we had either depended on Texan cows for milk, or had used the concentrated article without even once thinking of the folly of such a course. We had so long been accustomed to seeing the herders lasso the wild, infuriated creatures before milking them, that we had actually forgotten there was any other way. It may have been owing to our trusting the operation wholly to the cow-boys that no progress was made in subduing the animals or reducing them to a domestic state; but we never had thought it safe to allow a woman inside of the corral since that morning, a score of years ago, when my wife had been kicked insensible by a beast that she had attempted to milk. One evening, after Mora had returned from Cincinnati, she witnessed the usual proceedings in the milk-yard,—two broad-hatted and bespurred herders lassoing a cow. Then, after tying her head to one post and hind-foot to another, one of the valiant milk-men stripped a few streams of the precious fluid into a cup, while his partner stood by, whip in hand, ready to punish any movement on the part of the bellowing brute. Only then did she realize how infamously undairy-like the affair really was. When I met her a few moments later, she said with a shade of contempt in her tone:—
"'Oh, why do you allow such barbarous work on the ranch?'
"'But, my dear,' I replied, 'there is no other way. Why, I would rather tackle a mountain lion than one of those fiery creatures while she is loose.'
"'Then, why not buy some Jerseys?' Mora said.
"Yes, indeed, why not? I thought, and so I lost no time over deliberations, but wrote at once to Major Kingsbury, who sent me these gentle creatures, which now we value above anything else on the ranch."