My Aunt Patience, who tilled a small farm in the state of Michigan, had
a favorite cow. This creature was not a good cow, nor a profitable one,
for instead of devoting a part of her leisure to secretion of milk and
production of veal she concentrated all her faculties on the study of
kicking. She would kick all day and get up in the middle of the night to
kick. She would kick at anything--hens, pigs, posts, loose stones, birds
in the air and fish leaping out of the water; to this impartial and
catholic-minded beef, all were equal--all similarly undeserving. Like
old Timotheus, who "raised a mortal to the skies," was my Aunt
Patience's cow; though, in the words of a later poet than Dryden, she
did it "more harder and more frequently." It was pleasing to see her
open a passage for herself through a populous barnyard. She would flash
out, right and left, first with one hind-leg and then with the other,
and would sometimes, under favoring conditions, have a considerable
number of domestic animals in the air at once.

Her kicks, too, were as admirable in quality as inexhaustible in
quantity. They were incomparably superior to those of the untutored kine
that had not made the art a life study--mere amateurs that kicked "by
ear," as they say in music. I saw her once standing in the road,
professedly fast asleep, and mechanically munching her cud with a sort
of Sunday morning lassitude, as one munches one's cud in a dream.
Snouting about at her side, blissfully unconscious of impending danger
and wrapped up in thoughts of his sweetheart, was a gigantic black
hog--a hog of about the size and general appearance of a yearling
rhinoceros. Suddenly, while I looked--without a visible movement on the
part of the cow--with never a perceptible tremor of her frame, nor a
lapse in the placid regularity of her chewing--that hog had gone away
from there--had utterly taken his leave. But away toward the pale
horizon a minute black speck was traversing the empyrean with the speed