Indeed, Stevenson's family seemed to be a pattern of American domestic life;--the interior of the house, simple, it is true, and even poor, was as bright and clean as one could have wished it; the utensils shone and glittered again, and the mother with her two grown-up daughters, clad in the homespun grey of the western forests, looked like the ideal of a worthy matron, surrounded and supported by youth and beauty. The strangers soon felt happy in their neighbourhood, and it only required a few words of encouragement to make them move about with as much freedom and ease as though they were at home in their own houses. The storm which had so vexed them, and wetted them to the skin, like all other things in this world, had its bright side, too, for it had driven in the cattle towards the protecting dwellings of man, instead of wandering about the woods in all directions, as they otherwise would have been. Cows and horses stood in peaceful agreement, side by side, and licked the salt which a little fair-haired boy strewed for them, upon troughs hollowed out and fixed for the purpose, with an eagerness and enjoyment which told distinctly enough how long they had been deprived of it, and how fond they were of it. A small flock of sheep, with their leader, a stately ram, also approached, but the protector of the cows, a stout, broad-shouldered bull, did not seem particularly to relish his company, and lowered his sinewy neck towards him, and pawed the ground threateningly with his foot. The ram, on the other hand, who did not like to be looked upon as a coward before all his dames, and to forfeit the respect which he considered his due, also assumed a hostile attitude, bent down his head, and ran full tilt, carrying the war into the enemy's territory, at his hundred-fold superior adversary, so that the latter was quite taken aback, and merely awaited the attack with horns pointed down. But the ram was too wide awake to let himself into a quarrel where he undoubtedly must come off second best, and therefore, when he found himself close before the bull, he turned suddenly off to the right, bringing a couple of cows between himself and his antagonist, called his own little flock together by a peculiar bleat, and in the next moment was on his way to the woods with it; so that the deluded bull, when at last, he threw up his powerful head in defiance, to see what had become of the threatened attack, saw no enemy in his vicinity, and could only express his contempt by a loud, hollow bellow, and by a little sand which he scraped up and threw in the eyes of a couple of cows. Herbold had looked on at the whole game with much pleasure, and now turned to his friendly host with the question, whether sheep were advantageous and profitable stock in the backwoods.