To return to Poppy.  At first I was delighted with the thought of unlimited milk, bought a churn and generally prepared to enjoy being a dairymaid.  I soon found out my mistake.  Poppy was “drying up” just as the vegetation was.  The Finn woman who milked her morning and night, and who seemed to be in much closer sympathy with her than I ever hoped to be, said that what she must have was green food.  Having no lawn, for reasons previously stated, that was a poser.  My brother-in-law’s chauffeur, who was lent to me for a month, unbent sufficiently to go to town and press a bill into the hand of the head gardener of “The Place” of the village, so that we might have the grass mowed from that lawn.  Alas for frail human nature!  It seems that he disappeared from view about once in so often, and that his feet at that moment were trembling on the brink.  So he slid over the edge, and the next man in charge had other friends with other cows.  I tried the vegetable man next.  He was a pleasant Greek, and promised me all his beet-tops and wilted lettuce.  That was good as far as it went, but Poppy would go through a crate of lettuce as I would a bunch of grapes, and I couldn’t see that we got any more milk.  The Finn woman said that the flies annoyed her and that no cow would give as much milk if she were constantly kicking and stamping to get them off.  She advised me to get some burlap for her.  That seemed simple, but it wasn’t.  Nothing was simple connected with that cow.  I found I could only get stiff burlap, such as you put on walls, in art green, and I couldn’t picture Poppy in a kimono of that as being anything but wretched.  Finally, in a hardware store, the proprietor took an interest in my sad tale, and said he’d had some large shipments come in lately wrapped in burlap, and that I could have a piece.  He personally went to the cellar for it and gave it to me as a present.

Much cheered, I hurried home and we put Poppy into her brown jacket, securing it neatly with strings.  By morning, I regret to say, she had kicked it to shreds.  Also the Finn woman decided that she needed higher pay and more milk as her perquisite.  Since we were obviously “city folks” she thought she might as well hold us up, and she felt sure that I couldn’t get any one in her place.  I surprised her by calmly replying that she could go when her week was up, and I would get some one else.  It was a touch of rhetoric on my part, for I didn’t suppose that I could any more than she did, though I was resolved to make a gallant fight, even if I had to enlist the services of the dry cleaner, who was the only person who voluntarily called almost daily to see if we had any work to be done.

The joke of it was that I had no trouble at all.  A youth of sixteen, who viewed me in the light of “opportunity knocking at the door,” gladly accepted my terms.  He was the son of the foreman at a dairy in the neighborhood, and rode over night and morning on a staid old mare loaned him by the dairyman.