It is thirty-odd years since I first came across this thrilling adventure in the pages of a child’s book, very popular at the time. How well I remember how my young blood--to be exact, my seven-year-old blood--thrilled as I mentally watched this frail girl, with a start of just three feet, lead the tremendous and horribly savage bull in a three-hundred-yard sprint, only to trip at last on the only obstruction in the ten-acre field; how, just as the bull reached her, she flung her red shawl a few rods to the right; how the bull, leaving her, plunged after it; how she, weak and trembling, ran to the stone wall and managed to vault it just as her lover, a brawny blacksmith, who had seen the whole affair at too great a distance to be of immediate service, reached the wall and received her in his arms. “Oh, Kenston,” she murmured, “you have saved my life!” And then she fainted, and I believe the bull ate up the shawl; at any rate, its part in that particular story was ended. I have always felt that, thrilling as this scene was, it had not been worked for all it was worth; but an extensive reading since then has brought me to the conclusion that, first and last, it has been worked for its full value. The next time that I read the enthralling narrative I was some years older, but the memory of the other telling was still fresh within me; and so, when, in the second chapter, I read about a savage old bull, one Hector, the property of Squire Flint, the meanest man in the county,--not that his meanness had anything to do with the story, but it is one of the conventions that a savage bull shall be owned by a cross, crabbed, and thoroughly stingy man,--I say, when I had read thus far my pulse quickened. Inexperienced as I was, I somehow sensed the coming situation. I seemed to know as by clairvoyance that, however limited the heroine’s wardrobe might be in some respects, there was one article of apparel that she surely possessed, or would possess in time to meet the exigencies. True enough, in the very next chapter her maiden aunt, a saintly old lady of ninety, died and bequeathed to her sorrowing niece a red pongee shawl of great value--as a bull-enrager. The book had seemed prosy at the start, but now that I knew what was coming, and that it was _that_ that was coming, I read on breathlessly. [Illustration]