One morning at the breakfast table, laying her knife and fork down for emphasis and waiting for everyone’s complete attention, the mother announced, “Children”—and she gave them a squelching glare—“we were very pleased to learn last night that Miss Wigglesworth has won a bull.”

It was not something that one expected to hear about Miss Wigglesworth, and there was a moment of silence while Miss Wigglesworth dabbed at her teeth daintily with a napkin and blushed with pride. “Miss Hamilton herself presented me with the gift,” she said.

Miss Hamilton was an eccentric Yankee spinster of the prominent Pennsylvania Hamiltons, who, in the poor days after the War Between the States, had swept down South from Philadelphia and bought the old Baggett place. She had made the house elegant with chandeliers and Persian rugs, and then, blessed with money to indulge her whims, she had turned the tired, old cotton plantation into an elegant little dairy, with whitewashed fences enclosing flowery meadows, green-and-white milking parlors with Ionic columns, and cows imported from the Isle of Jersey. As a kind of goodwill gesture to her poor neighbors, when the cement was dry on the serpentine brick walls and the stone drinking troughs were filled with water and the highbred Jersey cows were settled down from their Atlantic crossing, Miss Hamilton held a kind of jamboree. Long tables with linen tablecloths were set up in the meadows, lined with silver pitchers of iced creamy drinks, and Blue Willow platters piled high with buttered sandwiches and cakes and cookies in the shape of cows. At the height of the festivities Miss Hamilton herself appeared on an upstairs balcony, dressed in a kind of Marie Antoinette milkmaid costume, with a silk satin dirndl skirt and ruffled pantaloons, and selected the winning raffle ticket from a gleaming brass milk pail.

“And our Miss Wigglesworth,” said the mother, smiling down the table, “was the happy winner of a week-old Jersey bull calf!”

No one told Miss Wigglesworth that a bull calf in a dairy herd is useless, something to be gotten rid of, like chicken litter from an egg farm. And he was an adorable little thing, as all week-old calves must be, a delicate fawn color, with smudges of black around his shiny eyes and a black, shiny nose always poking for something to suck.