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There was the Wagoner's child that was sickly, and continually cried for its mammy; and lastly there was a buxom servant-maid, with a little straw hat and cherry ribbons over a Luton lace mob, and a pretty flowered gown pulled through the placket-holes, and a quilted petticoat, and silver buckles in her shoes, and black mits, who was going home to see her Grandmother at Stoke Pogis, so she told me, and made me bitterly remember that I had now no Grandmother, and was as clean and bright and smiling as a new pin, or the milkmaids on May morning dancing round the brave Garlands that they have gotten from the silversmiths in Cranbourn Alley.
The girl nodded and smiled, and in another instant he was seated at her side. She was dressed all in white, she was paler than Blinker imagined milkmaids and girls of humble stations to be, but she was as tidy as a cherry blossom, and her steady, supremely frank gray eyes looked out from the intrepid depths of an unshadowed and untroubled soul.
One of these shows the milkmaids going home from their work arrayed in striped petticoats, and carrying their milk pails on their heads. Others show members of the family enjoying themselves in the garden or setting out for a ride, while the clergyman of the parish, or the chaplain, is pacing one of the walks in solitary meditation, with a telescope under his arm.
"Such scenes and sounds once blest my eyes And charm'd my ears; but all have vanish'd, On May-day now no garlands go, For milkmaids and their dance are banish'd." and saw pretty Nelly standing at her lodgings' door in Drury-lane in her smock sleeves and bodice, looking upon one: she seemed a mighty pretty creature. To the Hall and there walked a while, it being term.
After us, the maidens came, milkmaids and the rest of them, with Betty Muxworthy at their head, scolding even now, because they would not walk fitly. But they only laughed at her; and she knew it was no good to scold, with all the men behind them.
It was a large room over the milk-house, some thirty feet long; the sleeping-cots of the other three indoor milkmaids being in the same apartment. They were blooming young women, and, except one, rather older than herself. By bedtime Tess was thoroughly tired, and fell asleep immediately.
I have envied Selkirk his desert island. I envy now the milkmaids there below: anything to escape and be in earnest, anything for some one to teach me to be of use!
Gold and purple milkmaids are milking purple and golden cows. Young boys bind the ripened sheaves, or bear mugs of foaming cider to the busy hay-makers, with artistic defiance of chronology. There are ploughs and harrows, hoes and spades, beehives and poultry-houses, all in the best repair, and all resplendent in purple and gold. Alas! Ilium fuit.
The swine were squealing in their styes, the cattle bawled about the straw-thatched barns in Chapel lane, and long files of gabbling ducks waddled hurriedly down to the river through the primroses under the hedge. He could hear the milkmaids calling in the meadows; and when he trundled slowly home the smoke was creeping up in pale-blue threads from the draught-holes in the wall.
The flies in the kitchen were lazy, teasing, and familiar, crawling about in the unwonted places, on the floors, into drawers, and over the backs of the milkmaids' hands. Conversations were concerning sunstroke; while butter-making, and still more butter-keeping, was a despair. They milked entirely in the meads for coolness and convenience, without driving in the cows.
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