Very Bad Payment for a Bad Debt.

Waikato Times, Volume XXIV, Issue 1994, 18 April 1885, Page 2 (Supplement)

Very Bad Payment for a Bad Debt.

11 1 can remember," said Henry Ward Beecher, 11 when I received an old cow in payment of a bad debt. It was a very bad debt, and I oiine to oonsider it a bad payment. She waa a fchia cow, but the former owner said she wajs better than she looked, being a cross between a Jeraey and the Durham. She looked aa if she might have been a cro33 between an old hair trunk and an abandoned hoopskirt. I kept the brute three days, and no one, except, perhapa, Lieutenant Atwell, coujd ever appreciate the suffering I endured in that time. Tha first night she broke through the fence and reduced to a pulp all the underclothing belonging to my next door neighbor. She pnt her horns through my bath tub, and ate up all ray geraniums. She was to give three gallons of milk a day, but she seemed sh irt just then, and never had that to spare while we kept her. The second day she walked into the kitchen, upset a pan of butter and a tub of lard. Then she fell down a well, and when I got her out, at a cost of 95, she took the colic, whooping-cough or something and kept us awake all night. Not a green thing was left in my garden; my neighbor's peach trees and the rope on which his underwear grew were as bare of fruit as a singletree, and ho did not have a twig of shrubbery left. My neighbor came over to see me, and said : " ' Now, I don't de-sire any quarrel, but I want you to keep your cow out of my shrubbery.' " ' And I want you, my friend,' said I, • to keep your shrubbery out of my cow.' " — Burlington llawkcye.