Beautiful Joe | Page 6

some of the people that took milk from him would come and look at
his cows. In the spring and summer he drove them out to pasture, but during the winter
they stood all the time in the dirty, dark stable, where the chinks in the wall were so big
that the snow swept through almost in drifts. The ground was always muddy and wet;
there was only one small window on the north side, where the sun only shone in for a
short time in the afternoon.
They were very unhappy cows, but they stood patiently and never complained, though
sometimes I know they must have nearly frozen in the bitter winds that blew through the
stable on winter nights. They were lean and poor, and were never in good health. Besides
being cold they were fed on very poor food.
Jenkins used to come home nearly every afternoon with a great tub in the back of his cart
that was full of what he called "peelings." It was kitchen stuff that he asked the cooks at
the different houses where he delivered milk, to save for him. They threw rotten
vegetables, fruit parings, and scraps from the table into a tub, and gave them to him at the
end of a few days. A sour, nasty mess it always was, and not fit to give any creature.
Sometimes, when he had not many "peelings," he would go to town and get a load of
decayed vegetables, that grocers were glad to have him take off their hands.
This food, together with poor hay, made the cows give very poor milk, and Jenkins used
to put some white powder in it, to give it "body," as he said.
Once a very sad thing happened about the milk, that no one knew about but Jenkins and
his wife. She was a poor, unhappy creature, very frightened at her husband, and not
daring to speak much to him. She was not a clean woman, and I never saw a
worse-looking house than she kept.
She used to do very queer things, that I know now no housekeeper should do. I have seen
her catch up the broom to pound potatoes in the pot. She pounded with the handle, and
the broom would fly up and down in the air, dropping dust into the pot where the potatoes
were. Her pan of soft-mixed bread she often left uncovered in the kitchen, and sometimes
the hens walked in and sat in it.
The children used to play in mud puddles about the door. It was the youngest of them that
sickened with some kind of fever early in the spring, before Jenkins began driving the
cows out to pasture. The child was very ill, and Mrs. Jenkins wanted to send for a doctor,
but her husband would not let her. They made a bed in the kitchen, close to the stove, and
Mrs. Jenkins nursed the child as best she could. She did all her work near by, and I saw
her several times wiping the child's face with the cloth that she used for washing her milk
pans.
Nobody knew outside the family that the little girl was ill. Jenkins had such a bad name,

that none of the neighbors would visit them. By-and-by the child got well, and a week or
two later Jenkins came home with quite a frightened face, and told his wife that the
husband of one of his customers was very ill with typhoid fever.
After a time the gentleman died, and the cook told Jenkins that the doctor wondered how
he could have taken the fever, for there was not a case in town.
There was a widow left with three orphans, and they never knew that they had to blame a
dirty careless milkman for taking a kind husband and father from them.
CHAPTER II
THE CRUEL MILKMAN
I HAVE said that Jenkins spent most of his days in idleness. He had to start out very
early in the morning, in order to supply his customers with milk for breakfast. Oh, how
ugly he used to be, when he came into the stable on cold winter mornings, before the sun
was up
He would hang his lantern on a hook, and get his milking stool, and if the cows did not
step aside just to suit him, he would seize a broom or fork, and beat them cruelly.
My mother and I slept on a heap of straw in the corner of the stable, and when she heard
his step in the morning she always roused me, so that we could run out-doors as soon as
he opened the stable door. He always aimed a kick at us as we passed, but my mother
taught me