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post of the orchard gate and snapping it off like a carrot. Inches behind came the thunder and wind of the bull's passing, and then he was gone, out into the herd, and away they all went in a mad gallop among the apple trees. I picked myself up, and then I heard my father's voice as he emerged from the nearby loose box.
    “Damn brave of the boy, Fred,” he said to a farmer of long acquaintance. “He tried to stop him.”
    “Stop un?” said Fred. “He never. He were trying to bloody miss un.”
    The “boy” at that time was twenty-five. It was nowthree years since that hand grenade had blown me sky-high in that dark Apennine wood. At last I was fit again, fit to fly for my life. We looked about for the bovine bomb that had just gone off and saw him being shepherded back into the cowshed, safely hedged about with puffing, blowing cows. Nobody, it seemed, was keen to buy him, and when I went to see him later, they had made a belt-and-braces job of his security. Round his thick neck was a heavy plaited chain, and a short rope led from his ring to a stanchion at the back of the standing. As bulls do, he screwed his head round slowly and rolled one eye at me. I'll be happier when you're gone, you rascal you, I thought.
    A week later, the lorry came to take him to the slaughterhouse. We tied a length of rope through his ring and led it right up the shed and through a pulley at the far end of the lorry bed. Helpers unchained him, and carefully I took the strain and winched him up. He went in like a lamb.
    “Fuss about nothing,” said the lorry driver as we locked up the tailgate. “Wouldn't hurt a fly. I knows a bad bull when I sees one. Thissun won't give no trouble.”
    Later the news filtered back. The smells, the sights, and the sounds of the slaughterhouse were by no means to the liking of Old Mobbs's bull, and he had come out of the lorry like a tornado. Around the slaughterhouse he went, smashing anything in his path and refusing all attemptsto pen him. I don't know what the proprietors of china shops do, but these slaughtermen kept a high-powered rifle for such a contingency as this, and they called up their marksman. So the Shorthorn bull perished, but not at the first shot. In the general confusion the rifleman must have loosed off a little carelessly. The bull kept galloping, but above the rumble of his hooves was heard a cry of pain as an onlooker fell with a bullet in his shoulder.
    It was Gladwyn who told me the final twist in the tale of Old Mobbs's bull. Gladwyn was a Welshman from the Valleys, a year or so younger than me, who had worked for the Mobbs family and stayed on to work for us, for fifteen years as it turned out. We were mucking out the pen where the late beast had lived in semidarkness. It was in a section — two stalls' worth — of the old stables, lit by a small window only. No ray of sunlight had ever entered. In the gloom at the far end, another of my purchases, Bob the one-eyed carthorse, stamped and ground his teeth.
    I said, “You can't wonder that that poor devil went wild on getting out of this dim poky hole. Did he ever see the light of day?”
    “Oh, we used to take him outside for service,” said Gladwyn. “Mind you,” he said, “it would have been awkward with the roof being a bit low, but they'd sooner have brought the cow in here.”
    “Why?”
    “More discreet, see.”
    “Discreet?”
    Gladwyn had a sudden high, shrieking laugh, often ending in copious weeping if the joke was funny enough. He whinnied loudly now, and Bob started against his head rope.
    “Mr. Mobbs thought it was rude,” said Gladwyn, and he began to cry. When at last I got the facts from him, between snorts and snuffles and much mopping of the eyes, they were these.
    Whenever a cow or heifer in the Mobbs herd had come on bulling, an unvarying routine took place at Woodlands Farm. First Old Mobbs would order Young Mobbs, then rising eighteen, into the house and would ensure that Mrs. Mobbs and Miss