loves peas, but not those that go with her into the pot.

In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something
in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the
human voice--take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for
instance--which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds
me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests.
It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for
my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of
the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which
good men and lovers meet.

I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native
rights--any evidence that they have not wholly lost their
original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks
out of her pasture early in the spring and boldly swims the
river, a cold, gray tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide,
swollen by the melted snow. It is the buffalo crossing the
Mississippi. This exploit confers some dignity on the herd in my
eyes--already dignified. The seeds of instinct are preserved
under the thick hides of cattle and horses, like seeds in the
bowels of the earth, an indefinite period.

Any sportiveness in cattle is unexpected. I saw one day a herd of
a dozen bullocks and cows running about and frisking in unwieldy
sport, like huge rats, even like kittens. They shook their heads,
raised their tails, and rushed up and down a hill, and I
perceived by their horns, as well as by their activity, their
relation to the deer tribe. But, alas! a sudden loud WHOA! would
have damped their ardor at once, reduced them from venison to