A DITHYRAMBUS OF BUTTEEMILK
One discovery of some importance you make in walking the roads is the
comparative rarity and exceeding preciousness of buttermilk. We had, as I
said, caught up with Summer. Summer, need one say, is a thirsty
companion, and the State seemed suddenly to have gone dry. We looked in
vain for magic mirrors by the roadside, overhung with fairy grasses,
littered with Autumn leaves, and skated over by nimble water-bugs. As our
friend had said, the springs seemed to have dried up. Now and again we
would hail with a great cry a friendly pump; once we came upon a
cider-mill, but it was not working, and time and again we knocked and
asked in vain for buttermilk. Sometimes, but not often, we found it. Once
we met a genial old man just leaving his farm door, and told him that we
were literally dying for a drink of buttermilk. Our expression seemed to
tickle him.
"Well!" he said, laughing, "it shall never be said that two poor
creatures passed my door, and died for lack of a glass of buttermilk,"
and he brought out a huge jug, for which he would accept nothing but our
blessings. He seemed to take buttermilk lightly; but, one evening, we
came upon another old farmer to whom buttermilk seemed a species of the
water of life to be hoarded jealously and doled out in careful quantities
at strictly market rates.
In town one imagines that country people give their buttermilk to the
pigs. At any rate, they didn't give it to us. We paid that old man
twenty cents, for we drank two glasses apiece. And first we had knocked
at the farm door, and told our need to a pretty young woman, who
answered, with some hesitancy, that she would call "father." She seemed
to live in some awe of "father," as we well understood when a tall,
raw-boned, stern, old man, of the caricature "Brother Jonathan" type,
appeared grimly, making an iron sound with a great bunch of keys. On
hearing our request, he said nothing, but, motioning to us to follow,
stalked across the farmyard to a small building under a great elm-tree.
There were two steps down to the door, and it had a mysterious
appearance. It might have been a family vault, a dynamite magazine, or
the Well at the World's End. It was the strong-room of the milk; and,
when the grim old guardian of the dairy unlocked the door, with a sound
of rusty locks and falling bolts, there, cool and cloistral, were the
fragrant pans and bowls, the most sacred vessels of the farm.
"_She bathed her body many a time
In fountains filled with milk_."
I hummed to Colin; but I took care that the old man didn't hear me. And
we agreed, as we went on again along the road, that he did right to guard
well and charge well for so noble and so innocent a drink. Indeed, the
old fellow's buttermilk was so good that I think it must have gone to my
head. In no other way can I account for the following dithyrambic song:
_Let whoso will sing Bacchus' vine,
We know a drink that's more divine;
'Tis white and innocent as doves,
Fragrant and bosom-white as love's
White bosom on a Summer day,
And fragrant as the hawthorn spray.
Let Dionysus and his crew,
Garlanded, drain their fevered brew,
And in the orgiastic bowl
Drug and besot the sacred soul;
This simple country cup we drain
Knows not the ghosts of sin and pain,
No fates or furies follow him
Who sips from its cream-mantled rim.
Yea! all his thoughts are country-sweet,
And safe the walking of his feet,
However hard and long the way--
With country sleep to end the day.
To drain this cup no man shall rue--
The innocent madness of the dew
Who shall repent, or frenzy fine
Of morning star, or the divine
Inebriation of the hours
When May roofs in the world with flowers!
About this cup the swallows skim,
And the low milking-star hangs dim
Across the meadows, and the moon
Is near in heaven_--_the young moon;
And murmurs sweet of field and hill
Loiter awhile, and all is still.
As in some chapel dear to Pan,
The fair milk glimmers in the can,
And, in the silence cool and white,
The cream mounts through the listening night;
And, all around the sleeping house,
You hear the breathing of the cows,
And drowsy rattle of the chain,
Till lo! the blue-eyed morn again_.