“It seems to me that if the dairy farm¬ 
er hadn’t always been a right persevering 
and never-give-up sort of chap, he’d have 
been exterminated long before this,’ be¬ 
gan the retired farmer reflectively, “for 
ever since I can remember we’ve been at 
the mercy of the buyer. 
“Now take it along back in the latter 
eighties. My father was a fairly success¬ 
ful farmer for those days, and he calcu¬ 
lated to get all that was possible out of a 
dollar. Ours was a big family—four boys 
and three girls, and it wasn’t the fashion 
in those days to leave the old folks in the 
lurch and hit it for foreign parts unless 
the farm couldn’t find work for so many. 
At any rate, I lived at home until I was 
married, and, thanks to father s business 
abilities, we fared pretty well on the 
whole* 
“But, as I was saying, you had to use 
your head to keep afloat and to keep the 
mortgage away from' the door. We didn’t 
use to ship our raw milk to a city market 
then—not unless we lived near to one. 
Instead, every farm was sufficient unto 
itself until it came time to sell our butter 
or cheese; then we could count on getting' 
the littlest end of the horn as a matt:: 
of course. 
“There wasn’t any Winter dairying ~i 
the good old times, and it was simply 
unheard-of to buy stock feed at the store. 
We raised plenty of corn and oats and hay 
to take care of the dry stuff through the 
Winter months—but the dry stock didn’t 
get anything but hay until they freshened 
in April. 
“Then, commencing with freshening 
time, our folks made butter. We would 
put it down in tubs and firkins—at flush 
pasture in firkins—and .by late Fall w e d 
have^ two tons or so of A No. 1 butter to 
dispoke of. 
“The local butter buyers would call 
around in the Fall of the year and make 
us an offer for our lot. Prices ranged in 
those days from seven to lt> cents a pound 
to us—the dairyman having no more to 
say about the price than if he lived in 
Timbuctoo and never heard of butter. 
“But you could be plenty sure that the 
buyer would offer you just as little as he'd 
think you’d take—your circumstances 
having (juite a little to do with it. Of 
course quality was supposed to command 
better prices,’ too, and with the shrewd 
farmer it did, but the dealers were past 
masters at bullying and bartering, and 
sometimes a man had to sell at most anj 
price they set. 
, “Right here in this town today are 
‘some of our leading families’ who got 
their position and influence through some 
grandfather’s having made a comfortable 
fortune in his day from buying butter 
and cheese of the home farmers and then 
peddling it down to New York or some 
such market at double or triple prices— 
even. then. Maybe it was a fair and hon¬ 
orable way of making a livelihood, but not 
to my mind. The two richest families in 
this town descended from old Eli Cun¬ 
ningham, and a better buyer of butter at 
his own figure never lived—or such a 
mean one. His descendants don’t like to 
recall that the old man dealt in such ple¬ 
beian things as butter and cheese, yet 
they have his inflated profits to thank for 
their present stop on Easy Street. For it 
was a highly profitable business, this deal¬ 
ing in dairy produce, same as today. But 
of course we never heard or thought of 
organizing to protect our own inteiests, 
and every farmer made a little world of 
his own. 
“It’s surprising, too, that so many of 
our fathers and later ourselves did as 
well as we did in paying for the farm 
and maybe laying a little by. It took a 
regular he-man and financier to do it, 
though, and a pile of ’em fell by the way- 
side. Of course, we didn’t gad much in 
those days, though most folks seemed bet¬ 
ter acquainted and sociable than today. 
“We did our work by hand mostly and 
weren’t obliged to keep a small fortune 
tied up in labor-saving machinery. We 
grew our own wheat and most everything 
else we ate, and we lived forty times bet¬ 
ter than the average farmer does today. 
“It was a sight, sir, to peep into ma's 
cellar after pickling and preserving time 
was over. You’d swea'r she had put up 
enough winey-red strawberries and rasp¬ 
berries and blackberries and huckleberries 
—not to mention ginger pears, currants, 
Pound and Tolman sweets, cherries—that 
ain’t half the list—to swamp a hotel. 
And great sides of beef and mutton and 
pork always curing around to whet a 
man’s appetite—I say we would have 
thought it would mean plain starvation to 
Hooverize in those days. 
“But I started out' to tell you about 
the time pa got disgusted at the prices 
old Cunningham offered him for butter 
in the Fall of ’S7, as I remember. Pa 
kept a hired man at $15 a month, and 
then Joel and I were both at home, too. 
So he thought he’d take a vacation and 
run down to New York to see the sights. 
“Pa meanwhile had been doing some 
quiet scouting around and making friends 
with several big grocers uncle had intro¬ 
duced him to. Pa was a smart-appearing, 
likeable old chap for a farmer, and I sup¬ 
pose they thought he was harmless. Any¬ 
way, he hung around for three or four 
days, seeming to be much interested in the 
selling methods of country produce, and 
particularly butter and cheese. It seems 
that they sold butter over the counter 
differently than we do now. The gro- 
ceryman would merely strip a tub of but¬ 
ter clean of all wood and display the 
whole on big slabs. From these enormous 
molds the clerk would cut his customer a 
pound or any amount called for, and there 
were usually half a dozen such molds of 
various qualities of butter on display. 
The poorest grades would show the differ¬ 
ent churnings down through, pa said, and, 
of course, sold accordingly. 
“Well, pa was on hand the day his but- 
that he never handled anything but tubs, 
as they stripped to the size and shape he 
could use best. I’a wasn’t discouraged, 
however, and made the grocer stick in his 
fryer. Events repeated themselves. The 
sweet, Juney taste of our clean butter 
tickled the sensitive palate of the true but¬ 
ter critic, and he seemed real disappointed 
he couldn’t handle the half-ton in firkin 
shape. So pa says, ‘You send down after 
one of them firkins and I’ll demonstrate 
to you that you can handle them as easy 
as a tub. If you don’t agree, the firkin is 
yours, free. If you are convinced, we'll 
bargain for the rest.’ 
“So they went back to the store and 
pretty soon the sample firkin was brought 
in by a delivery team. 1’a set to work to 
strip that firkin same as if it had heen a 
tub; then, the immense mound, hard as 
rock, tipped over on its side, he ordered a 
wire and sawed the thing right in two so 
that two big solids were left the shape of 
a tub mound. The grocer was pleased as 
Punch and told pa on the spot he’d give 
him 20 cents a pound for the lot as it 
was mostly cracker-jack June hutter 
and pa took him up, as you can quickly 
figure out. Next day pa was back, having 
spent a week under the gay white lights, 
for which ♦••cubic lie figured lie had been 
well reimbursed. 
“And after that, old Cunningham never 
got any more <>f our butter t his own 
price Wc kept these fir' customers . 
our outter got a ni : -ittle reputation 
down .hero for qu. .'ey. As long as our 
folks nr;D butt • at home they got top 
prices and cl ared a comfortable prof.,, 
each year. But by.and by the farmers 
got tired of the work connected with home 
butter-making; the milk shipping stations 
came into favor, and in a very few years 
we were all selling our milk direct to the 
trusts for starvation prices. And until 
the last two years we dairymen were 
living examples of the peace-at-any-priee 
platform. We knew we were slaves and 
fools, to be led around by the nose, but 
we didn’t want to start a rebellion to 
eradicate our wrongs. But we, or rather 
you younger fry. came to see the error of 
your ways and you have showed the pow¬ 
erful combines a pretty fight. 
“Yes, sir, you’ve showed ’em a pretty 
fight, and secretly they know they’re beat¬ 
en for all time. As I said on the start, 
the dairyman is a regular bulldog to hang 
on, either to a losing proposition or to a 
costs-and-profit principle like the present 
one. Bulldogs and dairy farmers are a 
mean lot to exterminate,” the retired 
Farmer : ncluded drily, “and their ene¬ 
mies had best •:atch out when their dan¬ 
der is up.” n. s. K. w. 
The Other Side of Dogs and Children 
The writer likes both children and 
dogs. When he goes to the village he 
sometimes has quite a procession of both 
at his heels. However, they may be out 
of place when away from home. 
Four years ago I had a valuable litter 
of eight pigs, all registered, killed by a 
village cur incited by a band of village 
children. I was where I could witness 
the whole affair, but I could not get to 
the spot in time to save the pigs. The 
children scampered out of sight, and it 
was several weeks before I found who 
owned the dog; a widow who was draw¬ 
ing money from the poor fund. 
I hired a man to work a day with the 
team, drawing manure. With him came 
four children, whose ages ranged from 
two to eight, lie would put the children 
in one end of the box, and as he filled 
the box stop and move the youngsters 
along, lie hauled two loads during the 
afternoon. The children came to the 
house half a dozen times for a drink of 
water. One of them swung upon the 
pump handle and broke it. During tin* 
afternoon the two that could travel alone 
broke up half a dozen sitting hens and 
destroyed some of tin* eggs. Then they 
had a fight, and their father had to leave 
(Continued on page 237) 
“Ordered a Wire and Sawed the Thing Right in Two” 
3 one day early in November he started 
it, calculating to make his brother there 
visit if he felt inclined. 
“Our butter was all nicely packed in 
le tubs and firkins and was as tasty and 
veet as any you ever sampled. Old 
unningham had offered us 14 cents a 
aund for the two tons, this being his 
mit, but pa had got a letter from Uncle 
harley in the city that best butter was 
ringing 35 cents a pound at retail—as 
mg ago as this—and pa decided he was 
ntitled to a little bigger share of the 
msumer’s dollar than Cunningham 
•ould give—only of course he didn’t put 
; that way, as we didn’t talk about the 
onsumer’s dollar in those days. 
“So he made it his business upon bit¬ 
ing Broadway to inquire into the prices 
ip butter was bringing at wholesale and 
etail. He soon found out that good but- 
er was as high, accordingly, as it is to- 
ay, although not because the makers had 
eceived too much for it. He found out 
hat the retailers were paying 27 cents a 
lound for high-class butter and were re- 
ailing it at eight and 10 cents more a 
iound, just as uncle had said. So the 
cry next morning pa wrote me a letter 
living full directions for shipping him all 
,ur butter. It cost IS cents a hundred 
rom our station to New York—not very 
iad, as it panned out. 
“So we boys and Jim, the hired man. 
vent right to work to brand the tubs and 
irkins and direct them. We got them off 
is soon as possible, and in three days 
rom shipping they landed at their des- 
inn Hon. 
ter got there with a retail grocer from 
uptown who he had somehow beguiled 
into coming down to try some extra tine 
country butter. The m«fn was pretty 
surprised to see .so many tubs and firkins, 
and he told pa he didn’t believe there was 
much use of his looking at it. But pa per¬ 
suaded him to put in the tryer several 
time, and you could see in a minute, he 
said, that his man was very favorably 
impressed. So in a few minutes they were 
dickering, and the grocer asked pa what 
he’d take for the tubs. Pa side-stepped 
this and asked casually what he offered. 
So, sizing pa up, the grocer suddenly says 
‘I’ll give you 2G cents a pound for your 
tub butter and if the quality is always 
uniform and excellent like this, 1 d like a 
chance at buying your butter myself here¬ 
after.’ Well, na sold him the butter all 
right, and he felt pretty good over it; 
still, he had to dispose of that firkin but¬ 
ter, in order to show a clean slate and 
prove that a little headwork will biing 
home the bacon most always. 
“So he called around that very day on 
another of the new friends he’d been mak¬ 
ing against a rainy time—this being an¬ 
other proprietor of a grocery business who 
had seemed a decent and human sort of 
fellow to pa. even if he did manage one of 
the finest stores in the big city. Pa got 
him interested, too, by dwelling on the 
qualities of the butter he was offering at a 
right price down at the freight house, and 
it finally didn’t require much urging to 
lead his victim to the goods. 
“But when the prospective customer 
v*i<r firkins be immediately reg- 
