"Can you tell me, then, where I can get pure milk?"
My policeman whistled! I don't know what there was in my appearance that tempted him to "guy" me, but with a droll twinkle in his eye he said:—
"Now look 'ere, lady! If you was to go on a little further, you'd get to Flatbush; and then you'd see the mizzable critters standing up to their knees in stagnant water, with their hoofs rotting off. Sure and you wouldn't want any of their milk!"
The neighborhood was sparsely settled; a number of vacant lots surrounded our house, which was one of a row all alike. I reflected that the people living in those houses must occasionally eat! And so I walked on and on until I reached a cross street on which cars were running. There I found a stand of cakes and apples, before which a woman sat knitting. "My good woman," I said amiably, "are your cakes plain?"
She dropped her work and glared at me. "Clane, is it! You think I put dirt in 'em?" Her manner was so threatening that I turned and fled. Her voice pursued me—"An' the blarney of her;" (mimicking), "'Me good ooman'! 'Me good ooman,' indade!—the loikes of her!"
What my mistake had been I could not then imagine. I now know that I had, unconsciously, a manner unwarranted by my appearance. Turning up a new thoroughfare, I encountered a grocery store, with vegetables and fruit at the door. There I learned with terror the cost of provisions in this part of the world. At home I could buy a chicken for 25 cents—here I must give 30 cents for a pound of him! Whortleberries (the grocer called them "blueberries") could be bought at home for a few pennies a quart. Here 20 cents was demanded for a shallow box of withered specimens. Fifty cents in Petersburg would buy a large beefsteak. I purchased an infant steak for $1.50, and with this I turned my steps homeward.
A small shanty, a squatter's hut, was in the corner of the vacant lot behind our house. Two or three children were playing in the dirt at the door, and a goat eating paper beside them. Ah! there was a cow tethered to a tree not far away!
A kindly-faced Irish woman answered my knock. I frankly told her my dilemma and she sympathized at once. Her name was Mrs. Foley, and she would milk her cow in my sight morning and evening, just behind my house, so I could be sure of the purity of the milk. "An' sure in a wake ye'll see the darlint fatten," she assured me. And a great comfort was old Mrs. Foley all the time I lived near her.
I must confess the days passed wearily enough through July and into August. The heat was extreme and of a depressing quality. We were so far away from my general's office that his long journey morning and evening, accompanied by Theo, was exhausting to both of them. I taught Mary and Roger, but the children were very listless and unhappy. They found no pleasure in walking up and down the uninteresting sidewalk of a hot, dreary street. Loneliness, enhanced by the far-off hum of the city, the mournful fog-horns and whistles on the river, and the not less depressing sounds from the incessant pianos around us, oppressed us all. We seemed to find nothing to take hold of, nothing to live for.
I one day found Hannah raining tears into her tubs as she washed our linen, and having no mind to have my handkerchiefs anointed with other tears than my own, I essayed to comfort her. Finally she confessed she had never seen New York. She didn't know if it was "thar"—for she'd "never seen sight of it." Moreover, Jim was writing to ask her what she thought of Central Park and she "cert'nly was 'shamed to tell Jim she had heerd tell of it but never set foot in it."