The fact was that a new world was just being revealed to me, together with the taste of the simple herbs on which I was feeding. Just as my eyes, my ears and my muzzle sent to my brain visions, sounds, and smells hitherto unimagined, my tongue with its strange papillæ was bound to afford me very original sensations of taste.
Simple herbs gave a savor of which human palates have no idea. The cuisine of the epicure cannot possibly give them as much pleasure with twelve courses, as a bull gets in a small meadow.
I could not refrain from comparing the taste of my fodder with that of my former food. There is more difference between lucern and clover than between a fried sole and a rib of venison with sauce chasseud.
Plants have all sorts of tastes for the mouth of a graminivorous animal.
The buttercup is rather insipid, the thistle rather peppery, but nothing equals fragrant and many-flavored hay. Pastures are a continually spread feast to which hunger impels their denizens to devote themselves.
The water of the trough changed in taste, according to the time and the weather. At one time acidulous—at another time salt or sweet. Light in the morning, and syrupy in the evening.
I cannot describe the delight of drinking it, and I think that the lamented Olympians, in their vindictive and jocular testimentary disposition, leaving men only the power of laughter, left as a legacy to other animals the tasting of ambrosia in the grass of the lawns and the drinking of nectar at every fountain.
I was initiated into the delights of chewing the cud, and I understood the placid moods of those grave epicures, the oxen, during the activity of their four stomachs, when, with the scents of the fields, a whole pastoral symphony fills their nostrils.
By dint of experimenting with my senses, and testing my faculties, I obtained strange impressions. The best memory that remains to me is that of my muzzle—that tactile center—that invaluable and subtle touchstone of good and bad grains—that warner of an enemy’s approach—that pilot and councilor—that sort of authoritative and dogmatic consciousness—that oracle of yes and no, which never fails, and is always obeyed.
It is a question if the god Jupiter, when he put on the form of a bull, for the benefit of the Princess Europa, was not more charmed by his muzzle, than with all the rest of that scandalous escapade.