84 My Little Farm 



a better milker than the shorthorn when the butter 

 is reckoned, a better beefer, and very much easier 

 to feed. She eats the big bunches and lies down to 

 make milk of them, while the ordinary shorthorns 

 are seeking the sweeter grass on the bare spaces 

 between. Except in the three months of her 

 heaviest milking, she looks always fit to go to the 

 butcher. She wants no bag stuff to milk, even in 

 winter, given good hay and plenty of roots, but I 

 always try to keep some piece of pasture not eaten 

 too bare when the winter sets in. In summer a 

 succession of vetch plots is ready before the flies, 

 when the cows are in all day and out at night, the 

 opposite of the arrangements around me, where 

 the flies hunt in the milkers and the dog hunts 

 them out again all day. Between the dogs and 

 the flies and the cur bulls, there are not many 

 cows that could qualify for the dairy herd 

 book. 



Polly II. is a happy blend of these two fine 

 types, with the exterior of the shorthorn and the 

 constitution of the red poll, which seems to run 

 in the female foundation, even after the fourth 

 generation from pure shorthorn sires. There is a 

 theory, and I think it is more than a theory, that 

 the dam has the more to do with the constitution. 

 I had that also in view when incorporating the red 

 poll factor. In so far as my experience goes, the 

 theory is a very plain fact, and I am dealing with 

 an average of eighteen animals in the year on a 

 scrap of land in a congested district which was 

 regarded as permanent waste in my grandfather's 



