white tuft at the extremity of her sweeping tail! Presently, as the
sustaining centrifugal force lessened and failed, she began to sway and
wabble from side to side, and finally, toppling over on her side, rolled
convulsively on her back and lay motionless with all her feet in the
air, honestly believing that the world had somehow got atop of her and
she was supporting it at a great sacrifice of personal comfort. Then she
fainted.

How long she lay unconscious she knew not, but at last she unclosed her
eyes, and catching sight of the open door of her stall, "more sweet than
all the landscape smiling near," she struggled up, stood wavering upon
three legs, rubbed her eyes, and was visibly bewildered as to the points
of the compass. Observing the iron clergyman standing fast by its faith,
she threw it a look of grieved reproach and hobbled heart-broken into
her humble habitation, a subjugated cow.

For several weeks Phoebe's right hind leg was swollen to a monstrous
growth, but by a season of judicious nursing she was "brought round all
right," as her sympathetic and puzzled mistress phrased it, or "made
whole," as the reticent man of God preferred to say. She was now as
tractable and inoffensive "in her daily walk and conversation" (Huggins)
as a little child. Her new master used to take her ailing leg trustfully
into his lap, and for that matter, might have taken it into his mouth if
he had so desired. Her entire character appeared to be radically
changed--so altered that one day my Aunt Patience, who, fondly as she
loved her, had never before so much as ventured to touch the hem of her
garment, as it were, went confidently up to her to soothe her with a pan
of turnips. Gad! how thinly she spread out that good old lady upon the
face of an adjacent stone wall! You could not have done it so evenly
with a trowel.