ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 



73 



dam, about twenty miles from the mouth. Here we made our first ac- 

 quaintance with the Dutch customs and with the chief product for which 

 Holland is noted — cheese. We paid a visit to the commission firm of 

 Leaming & Sons, which is one of the largest firms dealing in cheese in 

 Holland. They have a very fine building and shelving capacity for 

 storing 600 tons of Edam and G mda cheese. Mr. Leaming, although a 

 verj^ busy man, showed us every attention and gave us much valuable in- 

 formation about cheese. We were allowed to sample cheese of every 

 description; some were made to the queen's taste and others skims were 

 so hard and tough it was almost impossible to get the tryer into them. 

 He showed us Edams ranging in price from 7 cents to 20 cents per 

 pound. 



"Holland has been famed for her dairy cattle for centuries, and 

 indeed, deserves her reputation. Numerous as were the sheep on the 

 Cheviot hills of Scotland even more numerous seem the black and white 

 eows in the pastures of Holland. Herds of dairy cattle were on every 

 hand. There is little grain farming, or mixed husbandry, and almost no 

 stock of any kind excepting dairy cattle are to be seen in Holland. The 

 caring for the cows, gathering food for them, and the manufacture and 

 sale of the product occupy the attention of the people to a degree difiicult 

 to comprehend by one who has not been among them. 



"I cannot do better to show the esteem in which the Dutch hold their 

 cattle than to quote from the lady traveler, Eleanor H. Patterson: 'The 

 two lions represented upon the heraldic shield of the Netherlands might 

 well be replaced by two black and white Holstein-Priesian cows, for the 

 masses of the people worship cows. Cows they watch smetimes with 

 more care than they give their own children; cows they nurse through 

 sickness; cows they save their money to buy, and of cows they talk 

 while awake and dream of while asleep. Children are brought up with 

 the parental reverence for cows, and no member of the human family is 

 thought too good to sleep under the same roof with the beloved kine.' 



"Holland is a country usually ignored by tourists, yet full of dairy 

 interests, instructive sights and quaint old customs. 



