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 rinsed and blued the clothes, all the time clacking cheerfully about their work and about the new dresses they were making and the coats they were planning to have before winter came on and the new shoes they would get when dad got paid for his last job of hauling and the Fair at Cynthiana, to which they were all going, dad having promised each of them a quarter to spend. Already, too, they had a nose for gossip and loved to talk about the neighbors and their doings. Again and again they told each other how stingy Uncle Ezra Pettit was and how meanly the Pettits lived in spite of their big house and all their land and money.

Judith was such poor help about the house that the twins soon stopped bothering with her and did the work themselves, only insisting that she look after her own clothes and take her turn at washing the dishes, a job that none of them enjoyed. These tasks done, she was left free to follow her father about the barnyard or run the woods and fields. Soon, however, because she was not lazy and took a deep interest in the farm animals, she made herself useful by taking over most of the out-of-door chores. She brought up the cows and milked them, fed the pigs, took care of the little chicks and saw that all the broods were cooped for the night. She hoed in the garden and kept the rows of beans and turnips thrifty and free from weeds. Like a lynx following its prey, she stalked the turkey hens and found their nests; and she would go out in any kind of storm to save the tender little turkeys from the wetting that would be their death.

Living so intimately in the life of the barnyard, the mysteries of sex were not mysteries at all to her, but matters of routine to be dealt with in the same matter-of-fact fashion in which you slopped the pigs or tied the mules to the hitching post. She knew all about the ways of roosters with hens. She saw calves born and testicles cut from squealing pigs, from young bulls to change them into fat steers and from young stallions to make them tractable in harness. These things interested her, but not more so than other barnyard activities. She was strangely free from precocious interest in