red-thorn trees, where the fruit begins to drop in September; tossing their heads above the orchard wall, where the fragrance of ripening apples is on the air; in the autumn lying upon the cold, damp ground and ruminating contentedly, with no fear of our ills and pains before them; wading in the swamps, converging slowly toward the pasture-bars as milking-time draws nigh, with always some tardy, indifferent ones that the farm-dog has to hurry up; many colored--white, black, red, brown--at times showing rare gentleness and affection toward one another, such as licking one another’s heads or bodies, then spitefully butting or goring one another; occasionally one of them lifting up her head and sending her mellow voice over the hills like a horn, as if to give voice to a vague unrest, or invoking some far-off divinity to release the imprisoned Io--what a series of shifting rural pictures I thus have spread out before me! Such an atmosphere of peace and leisure over it all! The unhurrying and ruminating cattle make the days long; they make the fields friendly, the hills eloquent, the shade-trees idyllic. I wake up to hear the farmer summoning them from the field in the dewy summer dawns, and I listen for his call to them on the tranquil afternoons. One season an especially musical voice did the evening calling--a trained voice from beyond the hills. What a pleasure it was as we swung in our hammocks under apple-trees to hear the free, sonorous summons, and to see the response of the herd in many-colored lines converging down the slope to the bar-way! When the meadows have gotten a new carpet of tender grass in September, and the cows are free to range in them, a new series of moving pictures greets the eye. The grazing forms have a finer setting now, and contentment and satisfaction are in every movement. How they sweep off the tender herbage, into what artistic groups they naturally fall, what pictures of peace and plenty they present! When they lie down to ruminate, Emerson’s sentence comes to mind: “And the cattle lying on the ground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts.” As a matter of fact, I suppose no more vacant mind could be found in the universe than that of the cow when she is reposing in a field, chewing her cud. But she is the cause of tranquil if not of great thoughts in the lookers-on, and that is enough. Tranquillity attends her wherever she goes; it beams from her eyes, and lingers in her footsteps. I sympathize with Whitman as he expressed himself in these lines: “I think I could turn and live with the animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d, I stand and look at them, long and long.