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Page 15
Wouldn't Aunt Frances have been astonished if she could have looked in
on Elizabeth Ann that very first morning of her stay at the hateful
Putney Farm and have seen her wrapped in a gingham apron, her face
bright with interest, trotting here and there in the stone-floored milk-
room! She was allowed the excitement of pulling out the plug from the
bottom of the churn, and dodged back hastily to escape the gush of
buttermilk spouting into the pail held by Aunt Abigail. And she poured
the water in to wash the butter, and screwed on the top herself, and,
again all herself (for Uncle Henry had gone off as soon as the butter
had "come"), swung the barrel back and forth six or seven times to swish
the water all through the particles of butter. She even helped Aunt
Abigail scoop out the great yellow lumps--her imagination had never
conceived of so much butter in all the world! Then Aunt Abigail let her
run the curiously shaped wooden butter-worker back and forth over the
butter, squeezing out the water, and then pile it up again with her
wooden paddle into a mound of gold. She weighed out the salt needed on
the scales, and was very much surprised to find that there really is
such a thing as an ounce. She had never met it before outside the pages
of her arithmetic book and she didn't know it lived anywhere else.
After the salt was worked in she watched Aunt Abigail's deft, wrinkled
old hands make pats and rolls. It looked like the greatest fun, and too
easy for anything; and when Aunt Abigail asked her if she wouldn't like
to make up the last half-pound into a pat for dinner, she took up the
wooden paddle confidently. And then she got one of the surprises that
Putney Farm seemed to have for her. She discovered that her hands didn't
seem to belong to her at all, that her fingers were all thumbs, that she
didn't seem to know in the least beforehand how hard a stroke she was
going to give nor which way her fingers were going to go. It was, as a
matter of fact, the first time Elizabeth Ann had tried to do anything
with her hands except to write and figure and play on the piano, and
naturally she wasn't very well acquainted with them. She stopped in
dismay, looking at the shapeless, battered heap of butter before her and
holding out her hands as though they were not part of her.
Aunt Abigail laughed, took up the paddle, and after three or four passes
the butter was a smooth, yellow ball. "Well, that brings it all back to
me!" she said? "when _I_ was a little girl, when my grandmother first
let me try to make a pat. I was about five years old--my! what a mess I
made of it! And I remember? doesn't it seem funny--that SHE laughed and
said her Great-aunt Elmira had taught her how to handle butter right
here in this very milk-room. Let's see, Grandmother was born the year
the Declaration of Independence was signed. That's quite a while ago,
isn't it? But butter hasn't changed much, I guess, nor little girls
either."
Elizabeth Ann listened to this statement with a very queer, startled
expression on her face, as though she hadn't understood the words. Now
for a moment she stood staring up in Aunt Abigail's face, and yet not
seeing her at all, because she was thinking so hard. She was thinking!
"Why! There were real people living when the Declaration of Independence
was signed--real people, not just history people--old women teaching
little girls how to do things--right in this very room, on this very
floor--and the Declaration of Independence just signed!"
To tell the honest truth, although she had passed a very good
examination in the little book on American history they had studied in
school, Elizabeth Ann had never to that moment had any notion that there
ever had been really and truly any Declaration of Independence at all.
It had been like the ounce, living exclusively inside her schoolbooks
for little girls to be examined about. And now here Aunt Abigail,
talking about a butter-pat, had brought it to life!
Of course all this only lasted a moment, because it was such a new idea!
She soon lost track of what she was thinking of; she rubbed her eyes as
though she were coming out of a dream, she thought, confusedly: "What
did butter have to do with the Declaration of Independence? Nothing, of
course! It couldn't!" and the whole impression seemed to pass out of her
mind. But it was an impression which was to come again and again during
the next few months.
CHAPTER IV
BETSY GOES TO SCHOOL
Elizabeth Ann was very much surprised to hear Cousin Ann's voice
calling, "Dinner!" down the stairs. It did not seem possible that the
whole morning had gone by. "Here," said Aunt Abigail, "just put that pat
on a plate, will you, and take it upstairs as you go. I've got all I can
do to haul my own two hundred pounds up, without any half-pound of
butter into the bargain." The little girl smiled at this, though she did
not exactly know why, and skipped up the stairs proudly with her butter.
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