94 My Little Farm 



temper, with a big, innocent eye, at peace with 

 all things. She will not quarrel even with 

 Mammy-Long-Legs, who jumps a wire fence to 

 trespass on my sweeter grass ; but receives her 

 with a well-bred curiosity, as if in doubt as to 

 whether the visitor is really a cow or a specimen 

 of some remotely kindred genus. 



Betty's daughter is a big improvement on 

 Mamma, a generation more shorthorn, and 

 apparently several generations more to my pur- 



Eose, especially in shape and flesh twice as much 

 ke Togo as his own daughter. They are at least 

 twenty pounders, and let us now see the sort of 

 stock from which they started fourteen years 

 ago. 



The best of them was sold at her best as a 

 springer for .8 IDS. She was the last of a tribe my 

 father had for forty years, good little cows of their 

 kind, good milkers for their weight, sound and 

 hardy, but always wasteful in their cost of pro- 

 duction. Both in price and in production, one of 

 mine is worth nearly three of them, and does not 

 approach two of them in her cost of production. 

 They were the native stock, with possibly a thin 

 survival of shorthorn blood in them. The colour 

 was red and white, the legs too long, the maturity 

 a year too late, and the shape an excess of middle 

 for the frame as if the result of an evolutionary 

 effort to enlarge the digestive department out of 



aortion for the accommodation of inferior 

 In forty years my father could not advance 

 on 8 IDS. In about a fourth of the time I 



