THE BARN. 



95 



cream for the table, and milk for the hogs, give me a 

 cow that is at least part Holstein. They are big eaters, 

 because they are big-bodied; but they are big milkers, 

 too, and old Spot, when she is fresh, will give a couple 

 of pails brimful twice a day. Of course, sometimes the 

 Holstein's milk does not come up to the test; it has 

 been said that the Lord has already watered the milk 

 of the Holstein for the dairyman. Yet are they very 

 beautiful animals, with their white, clean background, 

 flecked with delicate strands or flakes of black, or irreg- 

 ularly striped or spotted, or broadly banded. 



I have seen it stated that cows do not care for their 

 young after a certain period, and finally so forget them 

 as not to recognize them any longer when they become 

 older members of the herd. This is a point whereon 

 my experience has shown differently. Our old Spot, 

 for example, had a calf that was raised and brought 

 into the herd, in due time having a calf of her own; 

 and lo ! this grand-calf, as we may call it, was old Spot's 

 special guardianship; for she hooked the other calves 

 away, but played with this one, while its mother stood 

 admiring by. 



Old Spot is part Holstein, and so, in her streaked, 

 spotted appearance, she sometimes reminds me of what 

 Thoreau said, in a beautiful random passage in his 

 journal, of a heifer that he fed with an apple: 1 



"One more confiding heifer, the fairest of the herd, did 

 by degrees approach as if to take some morsel from our hands, 

 while our hearts leaped to our mouths with expectation and 



1 See "Thoreau: the Poet-Naturalist," by William Ellery Channing; 

 pp. 65, 66. 



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