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He bowed, setting the buttercup a-rocking, and introduced himself: "Bobbie, of the family of rose-beetles." Maya had to laugh to herself. She knew very well he was not a rose-beetle; he was a dung-beetle. But she passed the matter over in silence, not caring to mortify him. "Don't you mind the rain?" she asked. "Oh, no. I'm accustomed to the rain from the roses, you know.
They went to the pasture and said good-bye to Bonny-Belle, Bess, and Buttercup, and to frisky little Don. They even stood at the fence and waved good-bye to bad Big Ben. Then the two mothers and the three little girls said good-bye to Mrs. White and Billy and Molly and last of all to dear little Mary, who promised to come and visit them at Christmas time.
Do not listen to hear whom a woman praises, to know where her heart is! do not ask for whom she expresses the most earnest enthusiasm! but if there be one she once knew well, whose name she never speaks, if she seem to have an instinct to avoid every occasion of its mention, if, when you speak, she drops into silence and changes the subject, why, look there for something! just as, when going through deep meadow-grass, a bird flies ostentatiously up before you, you may know her nest is not there, but far off, under distant tufts of fern and buttercup, through which she has crept with a silent flutter in her spotted breast, to act her pretty little falsehood before you.
First she took the children to the pasture to see the cows. There were three of them, Bonny-Belle, Bess, and Buttercup. Beside Buttercup was the dearest little calf with long thin legs and a soft tan coat. It was Don, Buttercup's first baby. He was just two months old and very full of life and mischief. "Is that another cow over there?" said Peggy, pointing to a field beyond the pasture.
"It mayn't be as lively as riding elephants and playing with bears, but it is respectable; and I guess you'll be happier switching Brindle and Buttercup than being switched yourself," said Mrs. Moss, shaking her head at him with a smile. "I guess I will, ma'am," answered Ben, with sudden meekness, remembering the trials from which he had escaped.
The picture would have struck terror to the sad-eyed æsthete, but an artist who liked to see colors burn and glow on the canvas would have been glad to paint her: a little frock of buttercup yellow calico, bare neck and arms, full of dimples, hair that put the yellow calico to shame by reason of its tinge of copper, skin of roses and milk that dared the microscope, red smiling lips, one stocking and ankle-tie kicked off and five pink toes calling for some silly woman to say "This little pig went to market" on them, a great bunch of nasturtiums in one warm hand and the other buried in Rags, who was bursting with the white cat's dinner, and in such a state of snoring bliss that his tail wagged occasionally, even in his dreams.
So the hag put down the sack on the road, and went aside by herself into the wood, and lay down to sleep. Meantime Buttercup set to work and cut a hole in the sack with his knife; then he crept out and put a great root of a fir-tree into the sack, and ran home to his mother. When the hag got home and saw what there was in the sack, you may fancy she was in a fine rage.
Baxter and Rebecca caught a glimpse of the two at sundown, as they returned from the pasture to the twilight milking, Buttercup chewing her peaceful cud, her soft white bag of milk hanging full, her surprised eye rolling in its accustomed "fine frenzy."
Silverweed lays its golden flower like a buttercup without a stalk level on the ground; it has no protection, and any passing foot may press it into the dust. A few white or pink flowers appear on the brambles, and in waste places a little St. John's wort remains open, but the seed vessels are for the most part forming. St.
Like the ox-eye daisy, the buttercup is a typical meadow flower, tall, so that it tops the grasses and catches the sun in its petals, thin-foliaged, for no real grass-growing flower has broad or remarkable leaves, and with a habit of deep, underground growth far below the upper surface of the matted grass roots. You cannot easily pull up a buttercup root, or that of any flower of the meadows.
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