Alas, the President has got that cow after all! If it was a cow. Some say it was a bear—a real bear. These were eye-witnesses, but they were all White House domestics; they are all under wages to the great hunter, and when a witness is in that condition it makes his testimony doubtful. The fact that the President himself thinks it was a bear does not diminish the doubt, but enlarges it. He was once a reasonably modest man, but his judgment has been out of focus so long now that he imagines that everything he does, little or big, is colossal. I am sure he honestly thinks it was a bear, but the circumstantial evidence that it was a cow is overwhelming. It acted just as a cow would act; in every detail, from the beginning to the end, it acted precisely as a cow would act when in trouble; it even left a cow track behind, which is what a cow would do when in distress, or, indeed, at any other time if it knew a President of the United States was after it—hoping to move his pity, you see; thinking, maybe he would spare her life on account of her sex, her helpless situation, and her notorious harmlessness. In her flight she acted just as a cow would have done when in a frenzy of fright, with a President of the United States and a squadron of bellowing dogs chasing after her; when her strength was exhausted, and she could drag herself no further, she did as any other despairing cow would have done—she stopped in an open spot, fifty feet wide, and humbly faced the President of the United States, with the tears running down her cheeks, and said to him with the mute eloquence of surrender: “Have pity, sir, and spare me. I am alone, you are many; I have no weapon but my helplessness, you are a walking arsenal; I am in awful peril, you are as safe as you would be in a Sunday-school; have pity, sir—there is no heroism in killing an exhausted cow.”Ⓐtextual note

Here are the scare-heads that introduce the wonderful dime-novel performance:

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There it is—he hugged the guides after the kill. It is the President all over; he is still only fourteen years old,Ⓐtextual note after living half a century; he takes a boy’s delight in showing off; he is always hugging something or somebody—when there is a crowd around to see the hugging and envy the hugged. A grown person would have milked the cow and let her go; but no, nothing would do this lad but he must kill her and be a hero. The account says:

These names will go down in history forever, in the company of an exploit which willⒶtextual note take a good deal of the shine out of the twelve labors of Hercules. Testimony of the witnesses:

Very likely. Everybody knows what mere sportsmanlike bearing is, unqualified by an adjective, but none of us knows quite what it is when it is extremely sportsmanlike, because we have never encountered that inflamed form of the thing before. The probabilities are that the sportsmanlike bearing was not any more extremely sportsmanlike than was that of Hercules; it is quite likely that the adjective is merely emotional, and has the hope of a raise of wages back of it. The chase of the frightened creature lasted three hours, and reads like a hectic chapter in a dime-novel—and this time it is a chapter of pathetically humbleⒶtextual note heroics. In the outcome the credit is all with the cow, none of it is with the President. When the poor hunted thing could go no further it turned, in fine and picturesque defiance, and gallantly faced its enemies and its assassin. From a safe distance Hercules sent a bullet to the sources of its life; then, dying, it made fight—so there was Ⓐtextual note a hero present after all. Another bullet closed the tragedy, and Hercules was so carried away with admiration of himself that he hugged his domestics and bought a compliment from one of them for twenty dollars. But this résuméⒶtextual note of mine is pale; let us send it down to history with the colors all in it:

Whatever Hercules does is to him remarkable; when other people are neglectful, and fail to notice a detail, here and there, proper for admiration and comment, he supplies the omission himself. Mr. Ennolds lost a chance; if he had been judiciously on watch he could have done the alligator compliment himself, and got another twenty for it.

The paragraph about the wild hogs naïvely furnishes a measure of the President’s valor: he isn’t afraid of a cow, he isn’t afraid of an alligator, but—Ⓐtextual note