No. 7. DEFARTMEiNT OF AGRICULTURE. 311 



your head, and say it doesn't pay, and turn your head away from 

 the animals, and say, I don't care, I am not going to bother with 

 cows; they are too much trouble. Don't attempt to keep a herd of 

 cattle unless you make yourself master of the whole situation. 

 Study the cow's whole constitution and understand your individual 

 cows. 



You can't take some old thing that has no nervous system and 

 make a cow out of her; she must have a splendid nervous system in 

 order to make a good dairy cow out of her. If you take a cow with 

 a poor nervous system, you will never find one such cow to turn 

 out to be a great dairy cow. 



Take a horse that has the right shaped head, and well knit, well 

 proportioned body. He has courage for any service that you want 

 him for. Take a dairy cow again and look at her constitution. If 

 she has a good nervous system, you may take that one friendless 

 cow on the farm and take a shovel and go and dig it into her and 

 never think of stroking her face and never think of stroking her 

 hair the right way at all, but rather always the wrong way, when 

 you do stroke it, and you will not have a good dairy cow, with such 

 treatment as that. What is milking but simply taking so much 

 vitality from the cow. When you begin to milk, you should com- 

 mence to coax the cow, and learn to flirt with your cow a little; 

 she will never fill the milk pail for you until you do. It is astonish- 

 ing what a sympathy there must be between the dairyman and his 

 cow. Just watch what she will eat and not what she leaves. Just 

 feed her so that she will always eat it up nicely. She should not 

 be confronted with feed that is not agreeable to her appetite. There 

 is a foolishness in it you may say. Well, yes, I will admit there is, 

 but there is also a profit in it, and the profit that you derive from 

 the dairy animal under those circumstances will continue to enrich 

 your farm, and the cow will continue to fill your bucket, and you 

 will get the results that you are after. A man will say, "It costs 

 too much to feed a cow in that way." Now what is your experience 

 in the matter? Day before yesterday I had a spreader drive on 

 the scales and the spreader contained a load taken from thirty- 

 three cattle, and I had 2,650 pounds of manure on that spreader from 

 the thirty-three cattle; it bore out my calculations splendidly. A 

 good cow will make forty pounds of solid manure to add to the fer- 

 tility of your fields, and thirty pounds of liquid manure to add to 

 your fields when she is fed properly, and she will give you from 

 twenty-five to thirty pounds of milk. Now look what you are wast- 

 ing when you throw that into the barnyard. What is manure but 

 plant growth? I would just as soon talk to a stone wall as to at- 

 tempt to argue with a man who does not take as good care of his 

 manure as he does of his milk; he is no farmer. 



I regard a man as a merchant when he is like John Wanamaker; 

 when he takes an old freight depot and starts a store in it, and fills 

 it up with laces and silks, and studies his business until by and by 

 he builds a proud marble structure eighteen or twenty stories high; 

 I call that man a store-keeper; I call him a merchant. He knows 

 his business. When a man takes care of his dairy as well, he will 

 succeed. When a man takes off a crop of rye in May, I call that 

 farming. When he puts in his grass seed in August, when the 

 neixt season turns around, and he takes off two tons to the acre, 



