Up in Maine: Stories of Yankee Life Told in Verse. Holman Day

HOSKINS’S COW

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      Hoskins’s cow got into the pound and the notice

      was tacked on the meetin’-house door:

      “Come into my yard, one brindle cow with three

      white feet, and her shoulders sore,

      —Galled by a poke—and the owner is asked

      to call at the pound and take her away.”

      Well, Hoskins knew she was his all right, but,

      you see, he hadn’t wherewith to pay.

      The cow was breachy—she wasn’t to blame,

      for Hoskins had turned her abroad to roam;

      She had to battle for daily grass, for the bovine

      cupboard was bare at home.

      So Hoskins had hitched on her withered neck a

      wooden “regalia”—sort of a yoke,

      Supposed to keep her from breachy tricks, but

      the poor old creature employed the “poke”

      To rip up fences and let down bars; her hunger

      sharpened her slender wits,

      And somehow she sneaked through the guarded

      gates, and gave the garden sass regular fits.

      The neighbors pitied her starving state, but at

      last she stubbornly wouldn’t shoo;

      They pounded tattoos on her skinny ribs till it

      really seemed they would whack ’em through.

      But she got so toughened and callous and hard,

      and the stiffened frame of her mortised bones

      Formed such an excellent armor-plate against

      the broadsides of sticks and stones,

      That they “pounded” her then in a different

      way—in the village pound—whose walls

      would hold

      The breachiest cow that ever strayed—and the

      notice was posted as I have told.

      She stood there a day and she stayed there a

      night; she cropped the scanty bushes and

      grass,

      And moo-ed and loo-ed in a yearning way, when-

      ever a person chanced to pass.

      —She ate the leaves from some alder sprouts

      for a scanty breakfast the second day,

      And munched the twigs for her dinner, alas,

      and longed, oh, so much, for some meadow

      hay.

      That night she gnawed at her dry old poke—

      a painful meal, for the slivers ran

      In her tongue; so she crouched by the high-

      barred gate and seemed deserted of God and

      man.

      And Hoskins knew that they had his cow, and

      Hoskins knew of her solemn fast,

      For he’d gone up the highway and looked

      through the gate in her dumb, reproachful eyes

      as he passed.

      Yet what, may I ask, could the poor man do?

      He was right in a place where he couldn’t

      Pay,

      —He had three dollars, ’tis true enough,

      and ’twould square the bill, but, you see, that day

      The catchers had come and taken his dogs: a

      hound, a setter, and brindle-pup,

      And a man like Hoskins would ne ’er endure to

      have the dog-pound gobble them up,

      For he gunned on Sundays behind the hound,

      and the bull was entered and backed to fight.

      And Hoskins, you see, as a sporting man had a

      reputation to keep upright.

      I wonder, friends, if you’ve ever thought, while

      you’ve stormed at rum as the poor man’s curse,

      There are chaps so built on the mental plan that

      keeping dogs will warp them worse?

      The “dog” man may be reclaimed, but I’ve

      been compelled, alas, to see

      That there doesn’t appear to be much hope for

      the wretched critter condemned to three.

      And Hoskins’s duty was plain to him: his

      youngsters wailed for the milk they missed,

      But Hoskins thought of his poor, poor dogs and

      gripped his dollars tight in his fist.

      He shut his ears to his children’s cries, he steeled

      his heart when he passed the pound,

      To the mute appeal in the old cow’s eyes; but

      he smiled at last when his dogs were found.

      And he gladly proffered the three lone plunks

      to sate the greed of the legal hogs,

      And proudly he took the highway back, a-lead-

      ing his licensed, bailed-out dogs.

      And they barked and yipped and yapped and

      yawped at a poor old tottering cow they found

      Absorbed in a desperate, hungry reach for a

      thistle outside the village pound.