She declared that she could stand it, and her zest and willingness

seemed to win him over. "Well, I suppose you'll want a dish o' tay, or victuals of some sort,

hey? Not yet? Well, do as ye like about it. But faith, if 'twas I,

I should be as dry as a kex wi' travelling so far."

"I'll begin milking now, to get my hand in," said Tess.

She drank a little milk as temporary refreshment--to the

surprise--indeed, slight contempt--of Dairyman Crick, to whose mind

it had apparently never occurred that milk was good as a beverage.

"Oh, if ye can swaller that, be it so," he said indifferently, while

holding up the pail that she sipped from. "'Tis what I hain't

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touched for years--not I. Rot the stuff; it would lie in my innerds

like lead. You can try your hand upon she," he pursued, nodding to

the nearest cow. "Not but what she do milk rather hard. We've hard

ones and we've easy ones, like other folks. However, you'll find out

that soon enough."

When Tess had changed her bonnet for a hood, and was really on her

stool under the cow, and the milk was squirting from her fists

into the pail, she appeared to feel that she really had laid a new

foundation for her future. The conviction bred serenity, her pulse

slowed, and she was able to look about her.

The milkers formed quite a little battalion of men and maids, the

men operating on the hard-teated animals, the maids on the kindlier

natures. It was a large dairy. There were nearly a hundred

milchers under Crick's management, all told; and of the herd the

master-dairyman milked six or eight with his own hands, unless away

from home. These were the cows that milked hardest of all; for his

journey-milkmen being more or less casually hired, he would not

entrust this half-dozen to their treatment, lest, from indifference,

they should not milk them fully; nor to the maids, lest they should

fail in the same way for lack of finger-grip; with the result that in

course of time the cows would "go azew"--that is, dry up. It was not

the loss for the moment that made slack milking so serious, but that

with the decline of demand there came decline, and ultimately

cessation, of supply.

After Tess had settled down to her cow there was for a time no talk

in the barton, and not a sound interfered with the purr of the

milk-jets into the numerous pails, except a momentary exclamation

to one or other of the beasts requesting her to turn round or stand

still. The only movements were those of the milkers' hands up and

down, and the swing of the cows' tails. Thus they all worked on,

encompassed by the vast flat mead which extended to either slope

of the valley--a level landscape compounded of old landscapes long

forgotten, and, no doubt, differing in character very greatly from

the landscape they composed now.




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