“Of course I know you think you’re doing no end of good, but it’s all rot! None of that butter will be _really_ fit to eat--you know it as well as I do. You wash and work all the goodness out of it, for one thing. Yet, in a minute, you and all the rest of the crowd will get up and say what first-class stuff it is, just because it looks pretty squatting on that table with a silly pattern sprawling over it. You’ve admitted yourself that I sent you in the best cream of all the farmers round. Very well! I can send you in a sample of the best butter to match. But I didn’t learn how to make it in a rotten tent from a mass of theories walking about with a notebook. I learned it from hard experience and Stubbs’s swears when he had to eat the result. Butter-making on the stage, _I_ call it!” Harriet finished, glaring round at the trim, white figures. “Might be a Gaiety chorus getting ready to sing ‘We are the Churniest Churners!’ or, ‘Never forget your Plug!’ Let ’em go home and learn the real thing from their mothers!” Wiggie looked in over the heads of the pleased crowd. “Harriet, I’d be awfully obliged if you could persuade Geronimo to come out of the duck-pond! And I rather believe that Stubbs has emptied the Little Great Quetta out of the bath-chair.” Harriet flew, nearly annihilating the examiner. Wiggie met Lanty’s eyes with the smile that he had already seen on another pair of lips. “Oh, nothing dangerous! Come out and talk, will you, when business is over? Isn’t this jolly? I don’t care _what_ Harriet says. I should like to eat _all_ that butter myself!” He moved away, followed by looks of passionate gratitude from the disheartened competitors, and Lanty mounted the platform. “Seen Dandy Anne?” Hamer asked him in a loud whisper, when he had shaken hands all round, and found a chair. Grumphy crawled from under the table, and snored against his knee. Hamer laughed with suppressed jollity. “She’s making butter!” he announced in a joyful undertone. “Insisted on having a shot at seeing what she could make out. Taken all the ten lessons, as serious as seven Sundays all in a lump! Our Dandy Anne! Funny, isn’t it?--though you needn’t say I said so. I hope she’ll pull through all right. Mother here’ll be sadly vexed if she comes out with a duck-egg!” He pointed surreptitiously, and, looking along the lines of farmers’ daughters, running his eye from faces he knew personally to others whose parentage was easily placed, Lanty found Dandy at last no more than two churns away.