The Devils Pool | Page 4

and who, when
one loses the other, refuse to work with a new comrade, and pine away
with grief. People who are unfamiliar with the country call the love of
the ox for his yoke-fellow a fable. Let them come and see in the corner
of the stable one of these poor beasts, thin and wasted, restlessly

lashing his lean flanks with his tail, violently breathing with mingled
terror and disdain on the food offered him, his eyes always turned
toward the door, scratching with his hoof the empty place at his side,
sniffing the yokes and chains which his fellow used to wear, and
incessantly calling him with melancholy lowings. The ox-herd will say:
"There is a pair of oxen gone;' this one will work no more, for his
brother is dead. We ought to fatten him for the market, but he will not
eat, and will soon starve himself to death." The old laborer worked
slowly, silently, and without waste of effort His docile team were in no
greater haste than he; but, thanks to the undistracted steadiness of his
toil and the judicious expenditure of his strength, his furrow was as
soon plowed as that of his son, who was driving, at some distance from
him, four less vigorous oxen through a more stubborn and stony piece
of ground.
My attention was next caught by a fine spectacle, a truly noble subject
for a painter. At the other end of the field a fine-looking youth was
driving a magnificent team of four pairs of young oxen, through whose
somber coats glanced a ruddy, glow-like name. They had the short,
curry heads that belong to the wild bull, the same large, fierce eyes and
jerky movements; they worked in an abrupt, nervous way that showed
how they still rebelled against the yoke and goad, and trembled with
anger as they obeyed the authority so recently imposed. They were
what is called "newly yoked" oxen. The man who drove them had to
clear a corner of the field that had formerly been given up to pasture,
and was filled with old tree-stumps; and his youth and energy, and his
eight half-broken animals, hardly sufficed for the Herculean task.
A child of six or seven years old, lovely as an angel, wearing round his
shoulders, over his blouse, a sheepskin that made him look like a little
Saint John the Baptist out of a Renaissance picture, was running along
in the furrow beside the plow, pricking the flanks of the oxen with a
long, light goad but slightly sharpened. The spirited animals quivered
under the child's light touch, making their yokes and head-bands creak,
and shaking the pole violently. Whenever a root stopped the advance of
the plowshare, the laborer would call every animal by name in his
powerful voice, trying to calm rather than to excite them; for the oxen,

irritated by the sudden resistance, bounded, pawed the ground with
their great cloven hoofs, and would have jumped aside and dragged the
plow across the fields, if the young man had not kept the first four in
order with his voice and goad, while the child controlled the four others.
The little fellow shouted too, but the voice which he tried to make of
terrible effect, was as sweet as his angelic face. The whole scene was
beautiful in its grace and strength; the landscape, the man, the child, the
oxen under the yoke; and in spite of the mighty struggle by which the
earth was subdued, a deep feeling of peace and sweetness reigned over
all. Each time that an obstacle was surmounted and the plow resumed
its even, solemn progress, the laborer, whose pretended violence was
but a trial of his strength, and an outlet for his energy, instantly
regained that serenity which is the right of simple souls, and looked
with fatherly pleasure toward his child, who turned to smile back at
him. Then the young father would raise his manly voice in the solemn
and melancholy chant that ancient tradition transmits, not indeed to all
plowmen indiscriminately, but to those who are most perfect in the art
of exciting and sustaining the spirit of cattle while at work. This song,
which was probably sacred in its origin, and to which mysterious
influences must once have been attributed, is still thought to possess the
virtue of putting animals on their mettle, allaying their irritation, and of
beguiling the weariness of their long, hard toil. It is not enough to guide
them skilfully, to trace a perfectly straight furrow, and to lighten their
labor by raising the plowshare or driving it into the earth; no man can
be a consummate husbandman who does not know how to sing to his
oxen, and that is an art that requires taste