XIII

I once saw a cow that had lost her cud. How forlorn and desolate
and sick at heart that cow looked! No more rumination, no more of
that second and finer mastication, no more of that sweet and juicy
reverie under the spreading trees, or in the stall. Then the farmer
took an elder and scraped the bark and put something with it, and
made the cow a cud, and, after due waiting, the experiment took, a
response came back, and the mysterious machinery was once more in
motion, and the cow was herself again.

Have you, O poet, or essayist, or story-writer, never lost your
cud, and wandered about days and weeks without being able to start
a single thought or an image that tasted good,--your literary
appetite dull or all gone, and the conviction daily growing that it
was all over with you in that direction? A little elder-bark,
something fresh and bitter from the woods, is about the best thing
you can take.



XIV

Notwithstanding what I have elsewhere said about the desolation of
snow, when one looks closely it is little more than a thin veil
after all, and takes and repeats the form of whatever it covers.
Every path through the fields is just as plain as before. On every
hand the ground sends tokens, and the curves and slopes are not of
the snow, but of the earth beneath. In like manner the rankest