"You said, Mrs. Jardine, that you'd never seen butter made. Now I've got the first churning from the Guernsey cow in the churn, and if you would like to see it--" She never finished the sentence, for I rushed past her so that she had to follow me into the milk-room. (Bee wanted me to call it "the dairy.") I sat by while Katie churned and told stories. Then while she was turning it out, and I was raving over the colour of it, I heard a suspicious sniffing behind me, and behold, there was Mary, with her apron to her eyes, murmuring, brokenly, "My poor dear mother! Oh, my poor dear mother!" Seeing that she had attracted my attention, she walked away, stumbling over the threshold to emphasize her grief. "What's the matter with Mary, Mrs. Jardine?" asked old Katie, wonderingly. "Her mother used to churn, she told me, and I suppose it brings it all back to her to see you churn," I said, with as straight a face as I could muster. "Dear me!" said Katie, in high disgust. "_I_ had a mother and _she_ used to churn, but it doesn't turn me into salt water every time I hear the dasher going!" Katie is a shrewd woman, so I said nothing in answer to that. Finally Katie lifted her chin--a way she had--and added: "I'm thinking it sits bad on her mind to see you in here with me, instead of with her!" As I still said nothing, she apparently repented herself, for she said, a moment later: "But Mary was mighty fond of her old father and mother. She keeps mementoes of them ahl over the place. She has now what she calls his Polean pitcher--" "His what?" "Shure _I_ don't know! But she says it is. It's got a man on the outside, and you pours out of his three-cornered hat." "Oh, yes," I said. "I remember now. What did you say she called it?" "There it is now, on the shelf above your head. But how it got there, _I_ don't know. And Mary would be throwing fits if she saw it." "Why?" "Because she says her father used to send her every night, when she was a little girl, to get his Polean pitcher filled with beer. She says she minds him every time she looks at it--Gahd rest his soul." I turned and looked at the little squat figure of Napoleon. It was the pitcher the little man had given Mary for getting our trade for him, when we were first married. "She cried once when I put some cream in it to make pot-cheese," said Katie. "And she emptied it and washed it and kissed it; then she stood it on th' shelf with her picture of the Pope that you gave her." Just then Mary, as if suspecting something, appeared at the door. She looked suspiciously from one to the other. "I was just afther telling the Missis, Mary, how careful you are of the Polean pitcher you used to rush the growler with for your poor dear father," said Katie, with a shy grin that was gone before we fairly saw it. Mary turned away without a word. She never spoke to me on the subject, nor I to her.