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.