Ellen milked her cow by the little gate which led from the dooryard to the pasture. In three days she had learned to make the milk flow easily, stroking the animal flesh with deft fingers. The cow was a slim tan Jersey with a bright face and quick horns. Her body was bony and full of knots – bone joints, and her sides were unsymmetrically balanced. She had slender short legs and small sharp feet. She seemed to Ellen to be all paunch, a frame skeleton supporting a subtended belly with buds of milk, a machine to produce milk hung under a bony frame. Ellen looked at her each milking time; she knew the wrinkles on her skin around the eyes and her wrinkled neck, her loud breathing, her corrugated tongue and lips, her moist muzzle, and her pathetic mouth with its drooping lower lip. The tight eyelids seemed scarcely large enough to fit over the large round eyes and the hair spread out from a centre on her forehead, making a star. Her horns were like dark rough pearl and they slanted up over the big skeleton of her face. She moved about very slowly, turning away from the milking place when she had been drained dry, always humble and enslaved, or she walked off across the pastures joining many others at the feeding rick near the stock barns. Ellen saw the men milking in the barn lot, or three or four men and a woman, doing one thing and another, seeming very earnest about the opening of a gate or the hitching of a team. The land rolled out in all directions from Ellen’s milking place. There were rolling hills laid out in fields reaching north and east into a long distance but standing closer and higher in the other points. Through the pasture a farm road ran, unfenced, passing into fields through gates and finally out into MacMurtrie land and then over the west hill. The February white frost lay over the farm in these first mornings and the gentle north hills rolled away like low waves. Day after day Ellen saw the men moving about the farmyards and pens, a negro man – Ben – three white men and one or two women. Some day she might get to know them. They went briskly up and down in the February cold or they stood by gates and called to one another. They might some day call to her; they might be saying quick things to her some day, upward-bending words. For her the people were all folded into one mass which passed and turned, now quick and now slow. The silo tower stood up against the sky. Sound fitted upon sound, never returning, the pageant always flowing.

Henry was pleased with his new place. He went to work early each morning, building fence, clearing new ground on a hillside, making ready his plant bed. He grubbed away roots and chopped out brush, and by the middle of February the smoke went up from his clearing, for he piled brush onto the ground and burnt it for the good of the soil. On other hills near and far away other fires were burning; from the hillside Ellen would see the great flames leap into the air and then smoulder down to a smoke that arose all day. She helped her father clear the plant bed of its stones, and working on this hillside she could see MacMurtrie’s house where it stood toward the south, a dull wall of dark bricks seen through old cedar trees, and she would hear over and over the echoes of Henry’s satisfaction with the new place and of Nellie’s relief, ‘I’m right glad we got shed of Hep Bodine.’ The excitement of the new life kept her aware of all her acts. Each time she passed from door to door on the little porch she saw the low hillrim to the east, a part of the north valley, the white walls of the barns, and the upper planes of the house, grey in the sun but blue in the shade. It was a larger house than Bodine’s, more reserved and more remote.