She strove to save the lactual juice to feed her darling boy;
So we had to fling her on her back to fill our souls with joy.
Now Tank an’ Happy were too proud to compete with a calf,
So they sat them down an’ dined on wind, while they weakly tried to laugh.
I’m but a simple-minded cuss, not proud like one of these;
So I filled myself so full of milk, I’m now a cottage cheese.”
Horace was as proud o’ this song as though it was the first one ever sung. He used the same tune on it that blind men on corners use. I reckon that tune fits most any sort of a song; it’s more like the “Wearin’ of the Green” than anything else but ten times sadder an’ more monotonous. He said he had once wrote a Greek song at college but it wasn’t a patch on this one, and hadn’t got him nothin’ but a medal. I used to know twelve or eighteen verses, but I’ve forgot most of it. It was a hard one to remember because the verses wasn’t of the same length. Sometimes a feller would have to stretch a word all out of shape to make it cover the wave o’ the tune, an’ sometimes you’d have to huddle the words all up into a bunch. Horace said that all high class music was this way; but it made it lots more bother to learn than hymns.
The verse which pleased me the most was the forty-third. Horace himself said ’at this was about as good as any, though he liked the seventy-ninth one a shade better, himself. The forty-third one ran:
“A cow-boy does not live on milk, that’s all a boy-cow’ll drink;
But the cow-ma loves the last the most, which seems a funny think,