TEACHING A CALF TO DRINK.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1041, 9 December 1882, Page 4

TEACHING A CALF TO DRINK.

Those who have had the mournful experience, know that there is nothin;’ more trying to the soul than the operation of teaching a young calf to drink. The process is familiar to every man who has brought up a calf from its infancy. You seize a pail of warm milk, go into 1 the stable, catch the calf by the ears, back him into a corner, and bestride his neck. The idiot rather likes this, and while you are reaching for the pail he employs his time in slobbering the lower corners of your jacket. You discover what the blockhead is about, and box his ears. You can't help it. You feel that w T ay, and let him have it. But the calf can’t tell for the life of him why he was struck, and be gives a sudden and unexpected ‘ flounce.’ He believes he will go over and stay on the other side of the stable, but he doesn’t announce this beforehand. He starts on the impulse of the moment, and you can’t tell just when he arrives there. Y r ou ride along with him a little way. But the laws of gravitation are always about the same. Your legs—one on each side of the critter —keep up with the calf for about a second, but your body doesn’t. You slide over the calf, and your back kisses the floor. Your heap is soaking in the pail of milk. When you get up you are mad—uncommonly so. Milk runs from your hair, and imprecations out of your mouth. There is buttermilk in your eye, and you solemnly declare you will teach that calf to drink or break his blanket neck. The calf doesn’t know of this resolve, and he glares at you in stupid frigid from across the stable. He is not aware that he was the cause of your downfall, and wonders ignorantly what in thunder Is the matter. You don’t try to explain it to him, but furiously catch him by the ears, look back over your shoulder at the milk pail, and back up towards it, dragging the calf after you, who hauls out in a manner which seems to say, ‘ Is this the way you treat a fellow - creature ? You again back into the corner, sling your left leg over him, and once more try to get his head in chancery. The calf attempts a little more funny business, and plunges suddenly forward. You are on the look out for breakers this time, and have a firm hold on his ears, yon mutter through your clenched teeth, *No you don’t honey.’ But he does, though, and you ‘ cross the continent’ together by the ‘ rapid transit line.’ You hadn’t intended to go, but that is where you and the calf didn’t see it alike. You take this view of it a few minutes later. After ‘ rassling’ around a while, you get back to the point you started from, but you had been so busy that you hadn’t noticed it. The calf is out of wind, and you haven’t a particle of grace left in your heart. You are astride of the calf’s neck and, jamming the finger of one hand into its mouth, you place the other on the back of his head and sbove his nose into the pail, fully resolved to strangle him if he don’t drink. The calf holds perfectly still—ominously so—and thereis silence in the shed for the space of half a minute, at the end of which time the blockhead, who hasn’t drank a drop suddenly, makes a splurge, knocks the pail to ‘kingdom come,’ milk and all ; you are again reduced to an horizontal from a perpendicular, and when you rise the excitement is intense. You have been soaked with milk, ‘slobbered’ on, and, hurt and abused the worst way Not a drop of milk lias gone down the brute’s neck, and he stands glaring at you ready to furnish you with another free ride any where you want to go. With an affidavit you bang him over the head with the empty pail and hobble out of the pen mad and hurt all through, fully resolved to let the fourfooted fool starve ; and thus ends the first lesson.