blouse. “Worst first,” says she, and begins upon the shirts.
The cups washed, Nance proposes that I should see the butter, and takes me over to the dairy-shed, where Eva, a second edition of Flo, though several years older, smiles merrily out at us from behind a great, pale-primrose-coloured hill. Long before breakfast, I learn, with the help of old Dobbin—harnessed to the cream-barrel, and steadily tramping round and round—the butter “came” in about ten minutes; then it was copiously washed with clear, cold spring-water; and now, well worked and salted, here it lies upon the dark wood table, a mellow, shining mass, from which Eva is deftly wedging out, and weighing, and shaping, pile upon pile of “regulation” pounds. Table and concrete floor are running with clean water; Eva has gumboots on her feet, her skirt, of dark-blue cambric, is pinned up, her snowy apron covers her from collar to hem. Bright are her great grey eyes, and her cheeks very pink and pretty. The very air seems clean and coloured in the dairy, and we stay there a good while, chatting.
Then, after a satisfactory inspection of affairs in the cooking-shed, Nance takes me up to the oat-paddock. “For, though I am cook this week (Flo and Eva and I take it in turns),” she explains, “the dinner’s all on now, and, besides, Mother’s here.” Watch, the old rough-coated dog, comes with us, and on the way there is yellow-haired Custard to be seen, with her six unparalleled pups. From the pigeon-cote above the cart-shed, a flock of snowy fantail pigeons comes circling round our heads, not at all timidly; and Nance says, “You can see they’re
