THIRD ANNUAL YEAR BOOK — PART IX. 491 



share from the skimmed milk tank. We have a ponderous combined 

 churn and butter worker, a damp, noisy place where coloring, pasteurizing 

 and testing are praticed, and bacteria, starters and over runs are talked. 

 We have a hairy-armed, rubber-booted athlete weighing milk, stoking the 

 engine, operating the machinery and shoveling butter into tubs, with as 

 little grace and refinement of manner as Pat shoveling gravel onto a 

 flat car — a strictly business like, matter of fact way of doing things, that 

 knocks all the poetry and sentiment out of the business. 



We came across one of those old time spring milk houses this 

 summer, up among the hills of northeastern Iowa. Its glory was departed. 

 It was no longer used. Nestling close up to a rocky bank, a Virginia Creeper 

 was doing its best in nature's kindly way to hide the dismantled roof 

 and crumbling walls .and where the water, clear and sweet as of old, 

 welled up from the rocky depths, a flock of gabbling dirty ducks befouled 

 its purity. The good wife who used to set the milk, skim off the rich 

 cream and work the old dash churn to the music of the babbling- 

 spring and the orioles in the over arching elm, now rests from her labors, 

 while her daughter buys her butter from the creamery, reads the Ladies 

 Home Journal, and does not know the name of a cow in the farm herd. 

 The justification for all this lies in the fact, that more and better butter 

 is made with far less labor than in the old poetic days, and that no boy 

 is now required to work an old dash churn on a lot of balky winter cream 

 while he studies his next Sunday school lesson. The best butter maker 

 in the neighborhood has also dissappeared — the dear good woman, who 

 regardless of tests, coloring, starters, bacteria, temperature and age of 

 cream, could somehow make that brand of good old dairy butter with that 

 nutty flavor, which just melted in your mouth, and which drew first 

 prizes at the county fairs, even if there was a hair in it once and a while. 

 None of this kind of butter could be had now for love or money. 



When we look at it there is something remarkable about the amount 

 of fraud and cussedness man has been able to develop in connection with 

 so common and indispensible an article as the milk of the cow. Every 

 class which handles either it or its products having invented some fraud 

 or counterfeit in connection with it. The solemn old deacon has been 

 caught watering his milk, and selling the second milking to the factory; 

 the good wife has been tempted to sell rolls of poor butter coated over 

 with good; schemes without number to substitute coloring matter for 

 cream, to mix casine and water with butter, to steal the cream and sub- 

 stitute cheap fats in cheese, and last but not least the champion fraud 

 of all to try to run a dairy with steers instead of cows, and with drugs and 

 tallow palm off upon a confiding public a product labeled as the finest 

 creamery goods. Fortunately the test has eradicated most of the old 

 time petty frauds and now men have to be honest whether they want 

 to or not. while congressman who realized that farmers were after them 

 wiped out the oleo fraud and gave the cow and her owner their legal 

 rights. 



All honor to the men who made this fight in the interest of pure 

 food, and a fair show for one of the country's most important industries. 



