"The amount of it is this. I live out in Jefferson county, and I come in on the new Northwestern road, just to get recreation. I am a farmer, and keep cows. I recently read an article in your paper about a dairymen's convention, where one of the mottoes over the door was, 'Treat your cow as you would a lady,' and the article said it was contended by our best dairymen that a cow, treated in a polite, gentlemanly manner, as though she was a companion, would give twice as much milk. The plan seemed feasible to me. I had been a hard man with stock, and thought maybe that was one reason my cows always dried up when butter was forty cents a pound, and gave plenty of milk when butter was only worth fifteen cents a pound. I decided to adopt your plan, and treat a cow as I would a lady. I had a brindle cow that never had been very much mashed on me, and I decided to commence on her, and the next morning after I read your devilish paper, I put on my Sunday suit and a white plug hat that I bought the year Greeley ran for President, and went to the barn to milk. I noticed the old cow seemed to be bashful and frightened, but taking off my hat and bowing politely, I said, 'Madame, excuse the seeming impropriety of the request, but will you do me the favor to hoist?' At the same time I tapped her gently on the flank with my plug hat, and putting the tin pail on the floor under her, I sat down on the milking stool." "Did she hoist?" said we, rather anxious to know how the advice of President Smith, of Sheboygan, the great dairyman, had worked. "Did she hoist? Well, look at me, and see if you think she hoisted. Say, I tell you now in confidence, and I don't want it repeated, but that cow raised right up and kicked me with all four feet, switched me with her tail, and hooked me with both horns, all at once; and when I got up out of the bedding in the stall, and dug my hat out of the manger, and the milking-stool out from under me, and began to maul that cow, I forgot all about the proper treatment of horned cattle. Why, she fairly galloped over me, and I never want to read your old paper again." We tried to explain to him that the advice did not apply to brindle cows at all, but he hobbled out, the maddest man that ever asked a cow to hoist in diplomatic language. WILLIAM F. KIRK William F. Kirk is no longer a resident of Milwaukee, he having been called to a larger sphere of work on New York papers. But for a period of some eight or ten years he endeared himself to the readers of the Milwaukee Sentinel by his daily column. In it he had many quips which reminded one of Eugene Field in his "Sharps and Flats." But perhaps the most popular type of his work appeared in his "Norsk Nightingale" sketches, of which one is here given. A PSALM OF LIFE From the "NORSK NIGHTINGALE, BEING THE LYRICS OF A 'LUMBER YACK'," by William F. Kirk. Copyright, 1905, by Small, Maynard & Co. (Inc.).