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On the Brailsford farm the season rushed tumultuously into June bringing honey-locust bloom, wild roses, blue spiderwort and vetch, changing black fields to the geometrical green of growing corn, transforming Attila, the black pony colt with his white star and fiery eyes into a frisking, mischievous rascal who worried his mother constantly, metamorphosing the Jersey calves from fawn-eyed babies delicate as gazelles into willful stubborn young ladies who butted their pails of skim milk all over the barn lot.
"You little she-devils," said Gus, "you carnsarned little hussies, keep your heads in your own pails and try to learn some table manners."
But either Gus was never cut out for a barnyard Emily Post, or the husky young heifers, shoats, and foals didn't give a tinker's damn which was the salad fork, for certainly to the most casual observer it was obvious that the little pigs thoroughly enjoyed wallowing in the delicious swill that filled their feeding troughs, loved to hang on squealing and complaining while their matronly mothers wandered aimlessly about the pig yard, and had no objection to nosing through the fence for a sinful afternoon among the radishes, peas, and lettuce of the garden plot. Attila, with forefeet braced, tugged at the mare's black udders until she sometimes turned and nipped his downy hide, and once when the foolhardy little colt started nuzzling around his daddy's flank, the Admiral, insulted to the very core of his masculine being, kicked and bit his tactless son into temporary good behavior. Nor were the black kittens in the barn above stealing milk from the brimming milk pails.
Peter, his imagination soaring at the thought of a trailer factory in Brailsford Junction, dreamed through the corn on the sulky cultivator, went through the whole eighty acres of waving green, then started through it again in an endless battle against the weeds. Early Ann picked half a milk pail full of wild strawberries on a southern slope.
The tobacco land was worked and reworked until the soil was as fine as silk before the tobacco setter with its big red barrel began its monotonous journey back and forth across the field leaving rows of green plants in its wake. Gus and Peter dropped plants from the low rear seats while Stanley drove the team, sitting high up on the barrel.
Evenings the men, covered with dirt and sweat, went down to the lake to bathe, waded out over hard sand nearly one hundred yards until they were in water deep enough for swimming. They splashed and roared and spluttered, sometimes raced half a mile out into the lake and back again.
The corn grew so fast that Stud claimed you could hear it if you listened carefully at night. The pumpkin vines between the hills of corn spread wide green leaves, and the spring lambs which Stud was pasturing in peas and clover began to look like something which would taste good with mint sauce.
At last it was haying time. And so with hard work and little time for play Stanley and Sarah Brailsford approached their twentieth wedding anniversary.