foreseen the way I was to spend it I would have been justified in flatly
refusing to carry out my horoscope. Suppose, for instance, while I was
in the midst of the wonderful dinner Peter Vandyne's cousin, Count Henri
de Berssan, gave me in Brussels, a week before the storm broke that
carried him before cannon and bayonet, I had seen a mental picture of
myself six months from that minute, out in the woods on the side of a
Harpeth hill under an old cedar-pole shed with my jacket off, my
embroidered blouse sleeves rolled to the shoulder, filling a tin can,
which had a long spout to be poked down a cow's throat, with a vile,
greasy mixture out of a black bottle, at the directions of a
shirt-sleeved little man and a red-headed farmer in blue overalls, while
a wisp of a boy writhed in and out and around and under a pathetic old
Jersey cow, who was being rescued from the jaws of death. Now I wonder
just what I would have done to escape such an experience? Slated myself
for Belgian widowhood, perhaps, as a kinder fate, or stayed right there
in New York to help Peter on "The Emergence." I wonder if Peter ever saw
a dear, big-eyed, trustful old Jersey cow have medicine poured down her
throat. It is called "drenching." I wish he could see it before he
finishes that play. The sight produces a peculiar kind of emotion that
might be worth recording in an all-comprehensive drama of American life.
In fact, I know that what I felt at the end was worth recording in any
kind of literature, by any kind of a poet--if we were equal to it. Old
Dr. Chubb leaned breathlessly against a rough post, I staggered down on
an upturned bucket, and Sam reached out his long, blue-overalled arms
and embraced Buttercup's neck and buried his head on her patient
shoulder, just as a faint streak of April dawn showed behind the
oak-trees, for we realized then that the dreadful cramp was gone and
that she could chew the wisp of hay offered by Byrd.

"Hic-chew! All out of the woods," wheezed Dr. Chubb, as he looked at old