DAIRY PRODUCTS. 203 



flavor and taste for successive generations, and some of them 

 are as well known in the market as the marks that designate an 

 Ayrshire or a Devon, or the brands of flour or tobacco. 

 Whoever, in the varied pursuits of life, accomplishes the work 

 before him in the manner that uniformly produces satisfactory 

 results, deserves to be hailed as a skilful workman, and such, 

 we emphatically assert, is the award due to the contributors of 

 cheese for the society's premiums. 



The progress of improvement in husbandry, in agricultural 

 implements and methods, has not passed the dairy room 

 untouched, but the cheese factory has come in its wake to relieve 

 the farmer's wife of a constant source of anxiety and responsi- 

 bility, of toil and perplexity. Many a generous mind, in view 

 of the years of toil his mother has endured in care of her 

 cheese, has left for other and less certainly remunerative occu- 

 pations, the home of his boyhood and the business in which his 

 father had lived and died rather than subject his chosen part- 

 ner to the life-work which in so many cases brings old age ere 

 yet the prime of life is past. 



These will hail with warm welcome a relief so much to be 

 desired. Lightening the toil, and rendering it possible for the 

 farmer's wife to share the dignity as well as the responsibility of 

 his vocation, it would seem to add new inducements to the many 

 that favor its selection as a pursuit for life. And we can but 

 express the hope that more and more of the sons of New Eng- 

 land may as they come upon the active stage, be induced to 

 tarry at the old homesteads where their fathers and mothers 

 have with more difficulties to surmount, achieved an honorable 

 distinction as the intelligent, enterprising and prosperous 

 yeomanry of the centre of the Commonwealth. 



We would by no means be understood that the cheese factory 

 has yet reached its highest development, or that there are no 

 drawbacks to its substitution for the dairy-room. In spite of a 

 temporary popularity common to new things which has caused 

 the factory cheese to command a higher price than the dairy, 

 we are constrained to believe and put on record our conviction 

 that in the richness and flavor, in adaptedness to the purest 

 taste, the dairy cheese of Worcester W^est still maintains its 

 long honored position of pre-eminent excellence, and the speci- 

 mens we have examined are worthy to be cited as example. 



