28 ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 



The average cow in my township produced for sale $11 worth of milk, 

 and I live within three hours' ride of Elgin, perhaps the greatest butter mar- 

 ket in the United States. We have creameries all around us, but not one in 

 my township. You may wonder why this is. It is very easily explained. 

 The township is largely Pennsylvan ia Dutch, and the average Pennsylvania 

 Dutchman won't milk. When the average Pennsylvania Dutchman's wife 

 sees that there is enough for her to do without milking she won't milk eith- 

 er, so that the milking is left to the boys and hired man, with the above re- 

 sult. 



Now, I am Pennsylvania Dutch myself, and you may wonder how I came 

 to be a dairyman. Well, I married a Yankee girl from New York state from 

 the dairy district, and when she saw me shoveling corn and oats, and sowing 

 wheat, and getting five to six bushels to the acre, and borrowing money on 

 the prospect of next year's crop, and being obliged to live on pork, beans, 

 and potatoes, and that I had no time to cut wood for her, and no money to 

 pay any one else to cut it, she concluded that there was something wrong. 

 She told me the cows ought to be milked, instead of letting the calves suck. 

 She said her father always had a wo od house full of cut wood, and they had 

 soda biscuit and maple syrup three times a day. Well, I didn't know of any- 

 thing much better than biscuit and maple syrup, so I fixed up my cow stable, 

 and tied in thirteen cows, and sent the calves to the butcher . When milk- 

 ing time came I told my wife that everything was ready for her to go and do 

 the milking. She was dumbf ounde d, and said that she had never milked a 

 cow, and had never even tried to milk one, and what was more, she never 

 intended to milk one; that the Yankee man did the milking, and that milk- 

 ing was a man's work, anyway. "It was a case of ground hog." I took the 

 pail and went to work, and I have been milking those thirteen cows and 

 their descendants ever since, and that was almost twenty years ago. 



We soon had a wood house, and there has never been a day but there has 

 been cut wood enough in it to last a month, and we have biscuit and maple 

 syrup whenever we want them. 



Now, the strange part of this matter was that I happened to start 

 with ;"ust the average number of cows that my farm should have, thirteen 



