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Updated: June 3, 2025
She is up at daylight superintending the feeding of the stock, the butter-making, the sending off of the milk for sale; a thousand things get done while most people are fast asleep, and before lazy folk are well at breakfast she is off in her pony-carriage to the other farms on the place, to rate the "mamsells," as the head women are called, to poke into every corner, lift the lids off the saucepans, count the new-laid eggs, and box, if necessary, any careless dairymaid's ears.
In them do the common occupations of life find niche and channel. While bright weather holds, we wash out of doors on a Monday morning, the wash-bench in the solid block of shadow thrown by the house. We churn there, also, at the hour when Sweet-Breath, the cow, goes afield, modestly unconscious of her own sovereignty over the time. There are all the varying fortunes of butter-making recorded.
In farm-houses where old-fashioned ways of butter-making are still followed, and the thermometer is ignored, it happens sometimes that after some hours' churning the butter does not "come." The traditional remedy is then tried of introducing one or two half-crowns into the churn, partly, I think, as a kind of charm, and partly with the idea of what is called "cutting the curd."
This occasioned on our part an outlay of $10, and this small sum was the source of considerable saving to us yearly. We were more fortunate with our bread than with our butter-making, for Mary was a capital baker; our bread was always made from the best flour. We all liked it much better than bakers' bread, and it was much more nourishing.
We were told by another book, "that if it was not washed it would be of two colors, and dreadfully rank." We thought that it would be easier not to wash it, and it was bad enough to justify the term "muck," which was applied to it by the kitchen oracles, who rejoiced exceedingly in our discomfiture. We left the dairy half inclined to abjure butter-making for the future.
One on "Butter-Making," of which I will quote the opening passage, fairly makes the mouth water: With green grass comes golden butter. With the bobolinks and the swallows, with singing groves, and musical winds, with June, ah, yes! with tender, succulent, gorgeous June, all things are blessed. The dairyman's heart rejoices, and the butter tray with its virgin treasure becomes a sight to behold.
But the moment Sylvia saw she had been giving her mother pain, she left off her wilful little jokes, and kissed her, and told her she would manage all famously, and ran out of the back-kitchen, in which mother and daughter had been scrubbing the churn and all the wooden implements of butter-making.
"Because I have enough to do as it is," snapped Jen, "without your butter-making when you are playing the lady down the house!" Grandmother's black eyes crackled fire. She turned threateningly to her daughter. "By my saul, Lady Lyon," she cried, "there is a stick in yon corner that ye ken, and if you are insolent to your mother I will thrash you yet woman-grown as ye are.
It is of little use for me to tell you that Hetty's cheek was like a rose-petal, that dimples played about her pouting lips, that her large dark eyes hid a soft roguishness under their long lashes, and that her curly hair, though all pushed back under her round cap while she was at work, stole back in dark delicate rings on her forehead, and about her white shell-like ears; it is of little use for me to say how lovely was the contour of her pink-and-white neckerchief, tucked into her low plum-coloured stuff bodice, or how the linen butter-making apron, with its bib, seemed a thing to be imitated in silk by duchesses, since it fell in such charming lines, or how her brown stockings and thick-soled buckled shoes lost all that clumsiness which they must certainly have had when empty of her foot and ankle of little use, unless you have seen a woman who affected you as Hetty affected her beholders, for otherwise, though you might conjure up the image of a lovely woman, she would not in the least resemble that distracting kittenlike maiden.
Rayne's face always seemed to crown her costume like a rose out of green leaves, yet I cannot but think that if I had seen her first in a calico gown and sitting on a three-legged stool milking a cow, I should still have thought her a queen among women. While I sat like a lotos-eater, forgetful of home and butter-making, a servant brought in a parcel and a note. Mrs.
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