long-drawn-out sighing breath when exhausted and suffering like
ourselves, and their enjoyment of rest with the same grateful looks as
ours. We recognized their kinship also by their yawning like ourselves
when sleepy and evidently enjoying the same peculiar pleasure at the
roots of their jaws; by the way they stretched themselves in the
morning after a good rest; by learning languages,--Scotch, English,
Irish, French, Dutch,--a smattering of each as required in the
faithful service they so willingly, wisely rendered; by their
intelligent, alert curiosity, manifested in listening to strange
sounds; their love of play; the attachments they made; and their
mourning, long continued, when a companion was killed.

When we went to Portage, our nearest town, about ten or twelve miles
from the farm, it would oftentimes be late before we got back, and in
the summer-time, in sultry, rainy weather, the clouds were full of
sheet lightning which every minute or two would suddenly illumine the
landscape, revealing all its features, the hills and valleys, meadows
and trees, about as fully and clearly as the noonday sunshine; then as
suddenly the glorious light would be quenched, making the darkness
seem denser than before. On such nights the cattle had to find the way
home without any help from us, but they never got off the track, for
they followed it by scent like dogs. Once, father, returning late from
Portage or Kingston, compelled Tom and Jerry, our first oxen, to leave
the dim track, imagining they must be going wrong. At last they
stopped and refused to go farther. Then father unhitched them from the
wagon, took hold of Tom's tail, and was thus led straight to the
shanty. Next morning he set out to seek his wagon and found it on the
brow of a steep hill above an impassable swamp. We learned less from
the cows, because we did not enter so far into their lives, working
with them, suffering heat and cold, hunger and thirst, and almost