118 STRAY-AWAYS 



be that of a duenna of the most respectable and 

 fastidious kind. 



There was another pighouse, with even more pigs 

 in it, the manager assured us, with a touching anxiety 

 for our happiness, and perhaps some remote remem- 

 brance of the partiahty of the Irish for the pig. 

 Happily for us, our hostess realised that we had had 

 as much of the national pet as for the moment we 

 required, and intervened with a suggestion that we 

 should be shown the milk separator. We were taken 

 to a doorway at a refreshing distance, and going down 

 stone steps encountered the innocent fragrance of 

 fresh milk, cooled in pure vessels and airy twilight. 

 It was a gospel of cleanliness and perfection, and the 

 pig saturnalia was forgotten. In the stone chamber 

 below, deep stone vats held lakes of milk, and a 

 separator in the background occupied itself with 

 rivers of it. Everything was cold, enormous, and 

 full of milk. There was a quiet and well-oiled click 

 of machinery somewhere, and the thrust and return of 

 a steel arm were visible behind the separator, one 

 of the antennae of the steam-engine that lurked in its 

 private den and dominated all things in the maierei. 

 Granaries, hay-lofts, or churning-houses, in every one 

 the same quiet pulse was beating; up in the angle 

 of the roof a cogged, wheel was spinning apace, out in 

 the yard a long band ran endlessly across the sunny 

 square of sky. 



We descended into a grey, stony place, lined with 

 grey stone shelves, where sat dim ranks of cheeses, 

 wholly occupied in decaying, one would have said at 

 the first gasp; "ripening," the manager explained, 

 with an appreciative ^niff. Whatever they were 

 doing, we can certify that compared with them the 

 pigs were, as Mark Twain puts it, " just heliotrope." 

 Eventually, by some process as inevitable and as 



