When I was young and used to roam around over the country, gathering
water-melons in the light of the moon, I used to think I could milk
anybody's cow, but I do not think so now. I do not milk a cow now unless
the sign is right, and it hasn't been right for a good many years. The
last cow I tried to milk was a common cow, born in obscurity; kind of a
self-made cow. I remember her brow was low, but she wore her tail high and
she was haughty, oh, so haughty.
I made a common-place remark to her, one that is used in the very best of
society, one that need not have given offence anywhere. I said “So”--and
she “soed.” Then I told her to “hist” and she histed. But I thought she
overdid it. She put too much expression in it.
Just then I heard something crash through the window of the barn and fall
with a dull, sickening thud on the outside. The neighbors came to see what
it was that caused the noise. They found that I had done it in getting
through the window.
I asked the neighbors if the barn was still standing. They said it was.
Then I asked if the cow was injured much. They said she seemed to be quite
robust. Then I requested them to go in and calm the cow a little, and see
if they could get my plug hat off her horns.
I am buying all my milk now of a milkman. I select a gentle milkman who
will not kick, and feel as though I could trust him. Then, if he feels as
though he could trust me, it is all right.
[Illustration: THE WILD COW.]
Spinal Meningitis.
So many people have shown a pardonable curiosity about the above named
disease, and so few have a very clear idea of the thrill of pleasure it
affords the patient, unless they have enjoyed it themselves, that I have
decided to briefly say something in answer to the innumerable inquiries I
have received.
Up to the moment I had a notion of getting some meningitis, I had never
employed a physician. Since then I have been thrown in their society a
great deal. Most of them were very pleasant and scholarly gentlemen, who
will not soon be forgotten; but one of them doctored me first for
pneumonia, then for inflammatory rheumatism, and finally, when death was
contiguous, advised me that I must have change of scene and rest.
I told him that if he kept on prescribing for me, I thought I might depend
on both. Change of physicians, however, saved my life. This horse doctor,
a few weeks afterward, administered a subcutaneous morphine squirt in the
arm of a healthy servant girl because she had the headache, and she is now
with the rest of this veterinarian's patients in a land that is fairer
than this.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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