Sometimes, when he had not many “peelings,” he would go to town and get a load of decayed vegetables, that grocers were glad to have him take off their hands.

This food, together with poor hay, made the cows give very poor milk, and Jenkins used to put some white powder in it, to give it “body,” as he said.

Once a very sad thing happened about the milk, that no one knew about but Jenkins and his wife.  She was a poor, unhappy creature, very frightened at her husband, and not daring to speak much to him.  She was not a clean woman, and I never saw a worse-looking house than she kept.

She used to do very queer things, that I know now no housekeeper should do.  I have seen her catch up the broom to pound potatoes in the pot.  She pounded with the handle, and the broom would fly up and down in the air, dropping dust into the pot where the potatoes were.  Her pan of soft-mixed bread she often left uncovered in the kitchen, and sometimes the hens walked in and sat in it.

The children used to play in mud puddles about the door.  It was the youngest of them that sickened with some kind of fever early in the spring, before Jenkins began driving the cows out to pasture.  The child was very ill, and Mrs. Jenkins wanted to send for a doctor, but her husband would not let her.  They made a bed in the kitchen, close to the stove, and Mrs. Jenkins nursed the child as best she could.  She did all her work near by, and I saw her several times wiping the child’s face with the cloth that she used for washing her milk pans.

Nobody knew outside the family that the little girl was ill.  Jenkins had such a bad name, that none of the neighbors would visit them.  By-and-by the child got well, and a week or two later Jenkins came home with quite a frightened face, and told his wife that the husband of one of his customers was very ill with typhoid fever.

After a time the gentleman died, and the cook told Jenkins that the doctor wondered how he could have taken the fever, for there was not a case in town.

There was a widow left with three orphans, and they never knew that they had to blame a dirty, careless milkman for taking a kind husband and father from them.

* * * * *

CHAPTER II

THE CRUEL MILKMAN

I have said that Jenkins spent most of his days in idleness.  He had to start out very early in the morning, in order to supply his customers with milk for breakfast.  Oh, how ugly he used to be, when he came into the stable on cold winter mornings, before the sun was up.

He would hang his lantern on a hook, and get his milking stool, and if the cows did not step aside just to suit him, he would seize a broom or fork, and beat them cruelly.

My mother and I slept on a heap of straw in the corner of the stable, and when she heard his step in the morning she always roused me, so that we could run out-doors as soon as he opened the stable door.  He always aimed a kick at us as we passed, but my mother taught me how to dodge him.