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Then she rolled the sleeves of her flowered calico dress above her elbows, and she knelt by the tub With her hands she rubbed and scrubbed the corn until the hulls came off and floated on top of the water

Often she poured the water off, and filled the tub again with buckets of water fro the corn between her hands, and changing the water, until every hull came off and ashed away

Ma looked pretty, with her bare arms plump and white, her cheeks so red and her dark hair s, while she scrubbed and rubbed the corn in the clear water She never splashed one drop of water on her pretty dress

When at last the corn was done, Ma put all the soft, white kernels in a big jar in the pantry Then at last, they had hulled corn and milk for supper

Sometimes they had hulled corn for breakfast, with maple syrup, and sos But Laura liked them best with milk

Autuood things to eat, solike the squirrels, froht

One frostyit, and two men were on it The horses hauled it up into the field where Pa and Uncle Henry and Grandpa and Mr Peterson had stacked their wheat

Two more men drove after it another, smaller machine

Pa called to Ma that the threshers had come; then he hurried out to the field with his team Laura and Mary asked Ma, and then they ran out to the field after hiet in the way

Uncle Henry ca up and tied his horse to a tree Then he and Pa hitched all the other horses, eight of them, to the s stick that ca iron rod lay along the ground, fro machine

Afterward Laura and Mary asked questions, and Pa told the machine was called the separator, and the rod was called the tu rod, and the little ht horses were hitched to it and ht-horsepower machine

Awas ready he clucked to the horses, and they began to go They walked around hi stick to which it was hitched, and following the team ahead As they went around, they stepped carefully over the turound

Their pullingover, and the rod moved the machinery of the separator, which stood beside the stack of wheat

All this ing Laura and Mary held tight to each other’s hand, at the edge of the field, and watched with all their eyes They had never seen a machine before They had never heard such a racket

Pa and Uncle Henry, on top of the wheat stack, were pitching bundles down on to a board A man stood at the board and cut the bands on the bundles and crowded the bundles one at a time into a hole at the end of the separator