“I don’t want you to dawdle in bed,” was her salutation. “I’m stirring myself mornings and I want folks about me to stir, too. Hurry and wash you, then take this dish and go down cellar for some cucumber pickles. They are in that row on the left hand side, the third jar. Now mind and remember, for I don’t want to keep telling things over to you.”
As she returned with the pickles Mr. Hagood came in with a pail of foaming milk, and Posey, who in her household experience had been accustomed to see milk measured by the pint, or more often the half-pint, gave a little cry of wonder and delight.
“I want ter know?” and Mr. Hagood’s thin, kindly face wrinkled from mouth to eyes in a smile. “Never saw so much milk as this at once before. Why I get this pail full every night and morning, and I calc’late Brindle’ll do still better when she gets out to grass.” As he spoke he had strained out a cupful of the fresh, warm milk and handed it to Posey, saying, “Drink that now, an’ see if it don’t taste good.”
“What are you doing, Elnathan?” demanded Mrs. Hagood, who was skillfully turning some eggs she was frying.
“Wal, now, Almiry, I’m just givin’ the child what she never had before in her life, a drink o’ fresh, warm milk. I thought, Almiry,” with an accent of mild reproof, “you’d like her to have what milk she wanted to drink.”
“You know as well as anybody,” was her tart retort, “that I never scrimped anybody or anything around me yet of victuals; Posey can have all the milk she wants to drink with her breakfast, but there’s no use for her to be stoppin’ her work and spendin’ time to drink it now, or you to be lettin’ the cream rise on the milk before it’s strained, to watch her.”
Breakfast out of the way Mrs. Hagood said, “Now, Posey, you may go out and feed the chickens. You will find a bag of shelled corn on the granary floor; give them the basin that stands on a barrel beside it twice full.”
It was a command that Posey gladly obeyed, but she wondered that the flock of eager fluttering chickens, who crowded around her, and flew up into the granary door, seemed so indifferent to the breakfast she scattered for them. “Go and eat,” she vainly urged, “go!”
Posey had on occasion seen city hens, poor, dirty, bedraggled fowls, but these were so different, plump and snowy, bright of eye, and sleek of plumage, that it was a pleasure to linger among them. But Mrs. Hagood’s voice soon sounded from the door, “Posey, is it going to take you all the forenoon to feed those hens?”
A little later as Posey was washing the breakfast dishes, taking great pains to follow all of Mrs. Hagood’s many directions, for she truly wished to please, she heard that lady calling her, and dropping the wiping-towel ran out into the yard to see what was wanted.