"Don't you want to go out in the barn and hunt for eggs?" said she.
No, I certainly didn't. If I had wanted to I should have found it out without her speaking of it. But I was only a little girl; so I had to go, and couldn't answer back. The neighbors' children were few and far between; and though I strolled about for hours behind cousin Joseph Tenney and the hired man, there were times when I liked to see what was going on in the kitchen, and it was vexing to hear Julia say,—
"If I was a little girl about your age, I never should get tired of looking at that speckled bossy out in the barn."
Indeed! I almost wished she had to be fastened into the stall a while, just to see if she wouldn't get tired of that speckled bossy.
But when the time came to make my cheese, I had a right to stay in the house. Cousin Lydia let me look on, and see it all done. First, I picked the pigweed and tansy, or how could she have made the cheese? Then she strained some milk into a pan, and squeezed the green juices through a thin cloth. After that she put in a little rennet with a spoon.
"There," said she, "isn't that a pretty color? Watch it a few minutes, and you will see it grow thick, like blanc-mange, and that will be curd."
Then she made some white curd in another pan, without any green juice. After the curd "came," it was very interesting to cross it off with a pudding-stick, and this she let me do myself. Next morning she drained the curd in a cloth over a cheese-basket, and put on a stone to press out the whey. When it was drained dry enough, she let me cut it up in the chopping-tray, and she mixed the two curds together, the green and the white, salted them, and put them in that cunning hoop, and then set the hoop in the cheese-press, turned a crank, and weighed it down with a flatiron. There, that is the way to make a cheese. When it came out of the press it was a perfect little beauty, white, with irregular spots of green, like the streaks in marble cake. I knew then how that greedy Harry felt, in the story, when his mother sent him a plum cake, and he couldn't wait for a knife, but "gnawed it like a little dog."
Of course I did not gnaw the cheese, but I did want to have it cut open, to see if it tasted like any other I ever ate. But cousin Lydia covered it with tissue paper, and oiled it, and set it in a safe, and every day she oiled it again, and turned it. I would have spent half my time looking at it, only she said I must not open the dairy-room door to let the flies in.