I sold my lawn mower and put a short rope around my cow’s horns. To this I fastened the chain of an old chain-pump. The pump had served its day, and was now laid aside. This old pump-chain was about sixteen feet long, and through the end of it I stuck an old iron garden stake into the ground, and staked my cow out on the lawn. In the chain I put rings one yard apart, and by running my garden stake through a ring nearer or farther from the rope around the cow’s horns, I could give her a larger or smaller circle to graze on, and so let her eat very near to evergreens and other shrubbery without danger of having them injured. She pulled up the stake several times at first, but the remedy for this came of itself. In my desire to make her very secure, I had tied the rope around her horns too tightly and made her head sore. She ceased pulling, and though her head soon got well, she has never since pulled up the stake; so that my mistake in fastening the rope, though it caused me self-reproaches at the time, really proved a blessing in the end, for had she formed the habit of pulling the stake up, I should have been forced to discontinue staking her out for fear of her destroying the shrubbery. My cow seems to have a spite at shrubbery proportioned to its beauty, and this spite seems intensified against such plants as she cannot eat. A young cedar, for instance, she will never pass without trying to demolish it with her horns. By means of the rings in my chain, I could stake her so that she could eat up to the edge of an evergreen without being able to touch it with her horns, and I found the horns the only part that the shrubbery had to fear, for she never yet has tried to destroy anything with her heels. My lawn, under the care of this new one-cow lawn-mower, became the admiration and envy of the whole neighborhood. The chickens followed her and scattered her droppings, so that the lawn was always clean. I found it a great improvement on the old hand lawn-mower, and much less labor, for the staking out was far less trouble than running the mower. Besides, I sold the old machine for almost half the price I paid for the cow. But, strange as it seems to me now, I at first felt a little ashamed of my new mower, for I got in the practice of staking the cow on the front lawn at night, and moving her to the back lawn early in the morning. She did her work so silently in the darkness that my neighbors wondered much that in so well-kept a lawn they never heard the click of the lawn-mower. We have no storms in the summer in this latitude from which a cow needs any more protection than a tree affords. When it rained I milked her under the shelter of a beech.