IN THE CATSKILLS 



woods are a good substitute. Butter is the staple 

 product. Every housewife is or wants to be a 

 famous butter-maker, and Delaware County butter 

 rivals that of Orange in market. Delaware is a high, 

 cool grazing country. The farms lie tilted up against 

 the sides of the mountain or lapping over the hills, 

 striped or checked with stone walls, and presenting 

 to the eye long stretches of pasture and meadow 

 land, alternating with plowed fields and patches 

 of waving grain. Few of their features are pic- 

 turesque ; they are bare, broad, and simple. The 

 farmhouse gets itself a coat of white paint, and 

 green blinds to the windows, and the barn and 

 wagon-house a coat of red paint with white trim- 

 mings, as soon as possible. A penstock flows by 

 the doorway, rows of tin pans sun themselves in 

 the yard, and the great wheel of the churning- 

 machine flanks the milk-house, or rattles behind it 

 The winters are severe, the snow deep. The prin- 

 cipal fuel is still wood, beech, birch, and maple. 

 It is hauled off the mountain in great logs when 

 the first November or December snows come, and 

 cut up and piled in the wood-houses and under a 

 shed. Here the axe still rules the winter, and it 

 may be heard all day and every day upon the wood- 

 pile, or echoing through the frost-bound wood, the 

 coat of the chopper hanging to a limb, and his 

 white chips strewing the snow. 



Many cattle need much hay; hence in dairy sec- 

 64 



