But gates are not the only things that inspire cows. Doors also seem to have a very stimulating effect on their cerebral processes. Sometimes when I turn the cows out to water I just go down the line unloosing their chains. When the first cow reaches the door and gets a glimpse of the fair round world she stops to reflect on its beauty. The cows behind her, lacking this inspiration, begin to hook and bunt one another until the stable is a howling pandemonium, but the cow in the door is in no wise disturbed. She stands there and thinks, and thinks, and thinks. As for me, well--perhaps I hadn't better tell what I am thinking and saying. As a rule, before I am too severely trampled I manage to get hold of a fork and break the reverie of the thinker in the doorway. In my opinion Rodin missed a great opportunity when sculptoring "The Thinker." He should have hewn a cow out of marble rather than a man who looks like G. Bernard Shaw. When it comes to real thinking, give me a cow. I suspect that she gets as far with her problems as the best thinker of us all.
Now that I think of it, there is another cow problem that I should like to have solved. Does any man of wide experience know how to drive half-a-dozen cows across a ten-acre field without zigzagging back and forward until he has travelled about ten miles? Sometimes in the summer when I went to milk I would find that the cows were standing in the farthest corner of the field licking one another's ears and having a nice, quiet sociable time together. They would pay no attention to my alluring calls of "Co-Boss," and in the end I would have to hang the pails on the gate and go after them. Though they would be nicely grouped before I disturbed them, they would promptly spread out like a fan, and I would have to run along behind them driving each cow a few rods and then rushing on to the next. And each cow after I left her would stop and look at me with mild, wondering eyes as if trying to figure out just what I was trying to do. None of them would move except when I was raging behind them, and each time they moved they would move farther apart. If any one knows a practical method of keeping cows bunched while being driven across a field I am open for instruction. Cows are certainly useful and indispensable animals, but there are times when they are trying, very trying.