KEEPING ONE COW. 29 



scours, a change to dry food will correct it, but it is well to watch 

 and not to permit the disease to become seated. A few years ago, 

 a very valuable young Jersey heifer, received from the vicinity of 

 Philadelphia, was taken in this way, while undergoing the usual 

 course of acclimation incident to northern cattle brought south, 

 and the simpler treatment proving of no effect, I gave injections 

 twice a day of rice-water and laudanum, besides drenching her 

 with corn-gruel and laudanum. This was kept up for ten days ; 

 we carried her safely through, and her present value amply com- 

 pensates for the time and trouble expended. 



FOOD OF THE COW. 



But let us return to the cow. On the morning of June twenty- 

 ninth, we began giving her a fair feed of green corn, adding 

 to it wheat bran, and cotton-seed meal. July second we fed 

 her all the corn stalks she would eat, continuing to add bran 

 and cotton meal, giving four quarts of the former and two of the 

 latter; and this was her daily food, including the German Millet, 

 treated in the same way, until September. The green food was 

 given three times a day, but the bran and cotton meal added only 

 morning and night. Occasionally a day's supply was cut early in 

 the morning, and allowed to wilt before feeding, but in this, as 

 well as in many other matters, my man-of-all-work did as circum- 

 stances permitted. His various duties about the place gave him 

 but little time to reduce to an exact system the care and feed 

 of a cow. She had a good stable, and plerty to eat, received 

 daily a good brushing, and was treated kindly. Yet, she was our 

 servant (and a most faithful one she was), and we were not her's, 

 or slaves to any arbitrary clock-work regularity. She was fed and 

 milked at regular intervals, but beyond this it was not always con- 

 venient to have regular hours at her stable. We did not keep her 

 as an exhibition of a model cow in a model stable, and to exem- 

 plify a model system of care and keep. Like thousands all over 

 the land, we kept her simply for the profit she yielded, in 

 the way of milk and butter. It has often struck me, in read- 

 ing the many suggestions and hints about how to keep a cow, 

 to be found in some agricultural and live-stock journals, that 

 were they all carried into practical operation, it would take the 

 entire time of two able-bodied men to at end one animal one to 

 be always on hand during the day, the other to serve at night. 

 Now common sense is a good thing, even when applied to the 

 management of cows, and my experience convinces me that the 



