The Smiling Hill-Top | Page 5

I couldn't see that we got any more milk. The Finn woman said that the flies annoyed her and that no cow would give as much milk if she were constantly kicking and stamping to get them off. She advised me to get some burlap for her. That seemed simple, but it wasn't. Nothing was simple connected with that cow. I found I could only get stiff burlap, such as you put on walls, in art green, and I couldn't picture Poppy in a kimono of that as being anything but wretched. Finally, in a hardware store, the proprietor took an interest in my sad tale, and said he'd had some large shipments come in lately wrapped in burlap, and that I could have a piece. He personally went to the cellar for it and gave it to me as a present.
Much cheered, I hurried home and we put Poppy into her brown jacket, securing it neatly with strings. By morning, I regret to say, she had kicked it to shreds. Also the Finn woman decided that she needed higher pay and more milk as her perquisite. Since we were obviously "city folks" she thought she might as well hold us up, and she felt sure that I couldn't get any one in her place. I surprised her by calmly replying that she could go when her week was up, and I would get some one else. It was a touch of rhetoric on my part, for I didn't suppose that I could any more than she did, though I was resolved to make a gallant fight, even if I had to enlist the services of the dry cleaner, who was the only person who voluntarily called almost daily to see if we had any work to be done.
The joke of it was that I had no trouble at all. A youth of sixteen, who viewed me in the light of "opportunity knocking at the door," gladly accepted my terms. He was the son of the foreman at a dairy in the neighborhood, and rode over night and morning on a staid old mare loaned him by the dairyman.
Donald was bright and willing, and eventually was able to get near enough to Poppy to milk her, though she never liked him. The Finn woman was the only person with whom she was in sympathy. I think they were both Socialists. Donald said we must do something about the flies. I told him about my attempts to dress her in burlap, and we concluded that a spray was the thing. Donald brought a nice antiseptic smelling mixture, and we put it on her with the rose sprayer. Probably we were too impulsive; anyway, the milk was very queer. Did you ever eat saffron cake in Cornwall? It tasted like that. The children declined it firmly, and I sympathized with them. After practice we managed to spray her in a more limited way.
By this time we were having sherbet instead of ice-cream for Sunday dinner, and my ideas of a private cow had greatly altered.
I have a black list that has been growing through life; things I wish never to have again: tapioca pudding, fresh eggs if I have to hear the hen brag about it at 5 A.M., tripe, and home-grown milk, and to this list I have lately added cheese. Every one is familiar with the maxim that rest is a change of occupation. J----, being tired of Latin verbs, Greek roots, and dull scholars generally, took up some interesting laboratory work after we emigrated to California. Growing Bulgarian bacilli to make fermented milk that would keep us all perennially amiable while we grew to be octogenarians, was one thing, but when the company, lured by the oratory of a cheese expert, were beguiled into making cream cheese--just the sort of cheese that Lucullus and Ponce de Leon both wanted but did not find--our troubles began. The company is composed of one minister with such an angelic expression that no one can refuse to sign anything if he holds out a pen; one aviator with youth, exuberant spirits, and a New England setness of purpose; one schoolmaster--strong on facing facts and callous to camouflage, and one temperamental cheese man. (It turned out afterward, however, that the janitor could make the best cheese of them all.) Developing a cheese business is a good deal like conducting a love affair--it blows hot and cold in a nerve-racking way. It is "the Public." You never can tell about the Public! Sometimes it wants small packages for a small sum, or large packages for more, but mostly, what it frankly wants is a large package for a small sum! Some dealers didn't like the trade-mark. It was changed. It then turned out that the