94 AROUND AN OLD HOMESTEAD. 



the wisps and stalks, and slash the great corn leaves 

 about! The milking is generally attended to while 

 they eat, and that, too, is always an interesting proc- 

 ess that is, to outsiders. Swish, swosh! swish, swoshf 

 swish, swoshf goes the milk into the buckets, in a kind 

 of rough purring rhythm. In summer it is not quite 

 so pleasant, on account of the flies that bother us. 

 Homer compares the thronging Greeks, in their eager- 

 ness to get to the Trojans, to the swarms of flies that 

 buzz and hover about the full milk pails in the spring 

 and summer evenings. Theocritus, though, goes even 

 further, and says that the laborers in his time had to 

 fasten "guards of wood, with shapely thongs, about 

 the feet of the kine," so that they could draw near 

 enough to milk them in safety. Nowadays, however, 

 men are getting more merciful, and so spray their cows 

 with a sort of fly preventive to give peace while they 

 milk; although I have heard of an ingenious fellow 

 who had an apparatus which tied the cow's tail to the 

 ceiling during his period of torture, and I have seen 

 another take a long loop of rope and chain (using the 

 fastener in the stanchion for the purpose) and fling it 

 over the cow's hind-quarters at milking time, this prov- 

 ing an effectual barrier to the switch of her tail. But 

 watch them chew their cud in the cow-yard afterwards. 

 Don n't you wish you could look so contented? 



There is much difference in the yield of each indi- 

 vidual cow, and a still greater difference in the quality 

 and quantity of milk from the different breeds. The 

 Jerseys are by far the best cows for butter; indeed, their 

 rich yellow milk would seem to be almost all butter fat. 

 But for a "general purpose" cow, to furnish butter, 



