Before we left, Peter put ripe cucumbers into a sack for Mrs. Shimerda and
gave us a lard-pail full of milk to cook them in. I had never heard of
cooking cucumbers, but Antonia assured me they were very good. We had to
walk the pony all the way home to keep from spilling the milk.

VI

ONE afternoon we were having our reading lesson on the warm, grassy bank
where the badger lived. It was a day of amber sunlight, but there was a
shiver of coming winter in the air. I had seen ice on the little
horse-pond that morning, and as we went through the garden we found the
tall asparagus, with its red berries, lying on the ground, a mass of slimy
green.

Tony was barefooted, and she shivered in her cotton dress and was
comfortable only when we were tucked down on the baked earth, in the full
blaze of the sun. She could talk to me about almost anything by this time.
That afternoon she was telling me how highly esteemed our friend the
badger was in her part of the world, and how men kept a special kind of
dog, with very short legs, to hunt him. Those dogs, she said, went down
into the hole after the badger and killed him there in a terrific struggle
underground; you could hear the barks and yelps outside. Then the dog
dragged himself back, covered with bites and scratches, to be rewarded and
petted by his master. She knew a dog who had a star on his collar for
every badger he had killed.

The rabbits were unusually spry that afternoon. They kept starting up all
about us, and dashing off down the draw as if they were playing a game of
some kind. But the little buzzing things that lived in the grass were all
dead--all but one. While we were lying there against the warm bank, a
little insect of the palest, frailest green hopped painfully out of the
buffalo grass and tried to leap into a bunch of bluestem. He missed it,
fell back, and sat with his head sunk between his long legs, his antennae
quivering, as if he were waiting for something to come and finish him.
Tony made a warm nest for him in her hands; talked to him gayly and
indulgently in Bohemian. Presently he began to sing for us--a thin, rusty
little chirp. She held him close to her ear and laughed, but a moment
afterward I saw there were tears in her eyes. She told me that in her
village at home there was an old beggar woman who went about selling herbs
and roots she had dug up in the forest. If you took her in and gave her a
warm place by the fire, she sang old son