How could they?
But it's very poor pay, you know, and she'll be getting old by and by." "Not to-morrow, Turkey." "No, not to-morrow, nor the day after," said Turkey, looking up with some surprise to see what I meant by the remark.
He then discovered that my eyes had led my thoughts astray, and that what he had been saying about his mother had got no farther than into my ears.

For on the opposite side of the stream, on the grass, like a shepherdess in an old picture, sat a young girl, about my own age, in the midst of a crowded colony of daisies and white clover, knitting so that her needles went as fast as Kirsty's, and were nearly as invisible as the thing with the hooked teeth in it that looked so dangerous and ran itself out of sight upon Turkey's mother's spinning-wheel.

A little way from her was a fine cow feeding, with a long iron chain dragging after her.

The girl was too far off for me to see her face very distinctly; but something in her shape, her posture, and the hang of her head, I do not know what, had attracted me.
"Oh! there's Elsie Duff," said Turkey, himself forgetting his mother in the sight--"with her granny's cow! I didn't know she was coming here to-day." [Illustration] "How is it," I asked, "that she is feeding her on old James Joss's land ?" "Oh! they're very good to Elsie, you see.

Nobody cares much about her grandmother; but Elsie's not her grandmother, and although the cow belongs to the old woman, yet for Elsie's sake, this one here and that one there gives her a bite for it--that's a day's feed generally.