At the very farthest end of the Parsonage garden I play, all by myself, a most delightful kind of play. I am awfully fond of cows and sheep and everything about a farm. That is why I used to think I would be a milkmaid, you see, but, as I told you, I have given up that idea. I prefer to be an author.
Well, far down in the garden where nobody ever comes, under some old gooseberry-bushes, I have lots of cattle,—cows and calves and sheep and lambs! The cows are big round smooth stones; they stand in their stalls with fresh green grass before them; the calves—smaller round stones,—stand in calf-pens. Everything is nicely arranged, I assure you. The sheep and lambs are pretty white stones that I find on the shore.
Near my barns I have built a little bit of a hut of moss and stone with a tiny piece of glass in it for a window. Inside the hut there are two dolls,—the milkmaids who take care of the cows. Oh, I love all such planning and arranging and pretending!
But when I happened to speak of it one day, that horrid old lawyer began to make fun of me because I at my age could find pleasure in such make-believe things. And somehow after that, I began to be tired of my cattle farm under the gooseberry-bushes. It would be a different matter if one could have a real cow to take care of.
In the south meadow that summer there was a big brown-and-white cow named Brownie. She was so quarrelsome that she could not be with the other cows. Great-Aunt told Karsten and me to look out for ourselves when near her, because she was very cross. But I used to go often to look at her, and soon I had a tremendous desire that Brownie should be my cow, as it were, and that I should take the entire care of her myself.
One day I decided that I would put Brownie in the old smithy that no one used any more; and there I would feed her and milk her every day. But first I must have a collar for her; so I went to the cow-house, where I found an old one. It was firmly fastened in a stall, but I jiggled and twisted and jerked and tugged at it until I finally got it out. Then I hammered it into the wall of the smithy. The next thing was to get Brownie into her new quarters.
The first time I went near her she gave me such a forcible push in my chest that I fell right over. However, I don’t give up very easily, and I coaxed and pushed and pulled at Brownie so long that at last I got her into the smithy and the collar on her neck. Hurrah! Now I had a cow-house and a cow with a collar on, just for myself alone. What fun!
I tore up a lot of grass and laid it before her so that she should not be hungry, and I fastened the door with a stick. Of course I must milk her. The milk I could set up on the shelf there in the smithy; perhaps I could churn butter! As for cream porridge, there would be no difficulty at all about having that now as often as I wished.
I stole into the kitchen to get something I could milk into, but Great-Aunt came upon me so suddenly that I couldn’t get hold of anything but a pint measure. That was pretty small for the use I had for it, but I must try to make it do.
I don’t know whether any of you ever tried to milk a cow, but I can tell you that it isn’t easy to milk one that kicks and thrashes its tail about—especially if you have to milk into a pint measure. At last I got the measure full, however, and set it up on the shelf. Of course it was rather sooty and dirty there, but I would wash the shelf in the morning. I gave Brownie a new supply of grass and then left her for the night. I had not said a word about all my plans for the cow to a single person.