As for a cat, she has no such rich language as a dog; but see what she can do: purring, rubbing against things, arching her back, glaring out of her eyes, setting her hair on end, swelling out her tail, sticking out her claws and scratching at posts, sneaking along as if ready to pounce, pouncing either in earnest or in fun, mewing in many voices, catching at things with nails drawn back or just a little protruded, or drawing the blood with them, laying back her ears, looking up pleadingly and asking for milk--why a cat can say almost anything she wants to say. Now contrast these domestic animals with a much more necessary and useful one, the cow. Any stockman knows that a cow is a beast of very high nervous organization, but she has no very large number of ways of telling us how she feels: just a few tones to her lowing, a few changes of expression to her eye, a small number of shades of uneasiness, a little manner with her eyes, showing the whites when troubled or letting the lids droop in satisfaction--these things exhausted, and poor bossy's tale is told. You can get nothing more out of her, except in some spasm of madness. She is driven to extremes by her dumbness. I am brought to this sermon by two things: what happened to me when Rowena Fewkes came over to see me in the early summer of 1859, a year almost to a day from the time when Magnus and I left Blue-grass Manor after our spell of work there: and what our best cow, Spot, did yesterday. We were trying to lead Spot behind a wagon, and she did not like it. She had no way of telling us how much she hated it, and how panicky she was, as a dog or a cat could have done; and so she just hung back and acted dumb and stubborn for a minute or two, and then she gave an awful bellow, ran against the wagon as if she wanted to upset it, and when she found she could not affect it, in as pathetic a despair and mental agony as any man ever felt who has killed himself, she thrust one horn into the ground, broke it off flush with her head, and threw herself down with her neck doubled under her shoulder, as if trying to commit suicide, as I verily believe she was. And yet dogs and cats get credit for being creatures of finer feelings than cows, merely because cows have no tricks of barking, purring, and the like.