My Boyhood | Page 4

automobile and the daily newspaper. The roads are better,
communication quicker, and the houses and barns more showy, but the
men and the women, and especially the children, are not there. The
towns and the cities are now colouring and dominating the country
which they have depleted of its men, and the rural districts are
becoming a faded replica of town life.
The farm work to which I was early called upon to lend a hand, as I
have said, revolved around the dairy cow. Her paths were in the fields
and woods, her sonorous voice was upon the hills, her fragrant breath
was upon every breeze. She was the centre of our industries. To keep
her in good condition, well pastured in summer and well housed and
fed in winter, and the whole dairy up to its highest point of
efficiency--to this end the farmer directed his efforts. It was an exacting
occupation. In summer the day began with the milking and ended with
the milking; and in winter it began with the foddering and ended with
the foddering, and the major part of the work between and during both
seasons had for its object, directly or indirectly, the well-being of the
herd. Getting the cows and turning away the cows in summer was
usually the work of the younger boys; turning them out of the stable
and putting them back in winter was usually the work of the older. The
foddering them from the stack in the field in winter also fell to the lot
of the older members of the family.
In milking we all took a hand when we had reached the age of about ten
years, Mother and my sisters usually doing their share. At first we
milked the cows in the road in front of the house, setting the pails of

milk on the stone work; later we milked them in a yard in the orchard
behind the house, and of late years the milking is done in the stable.
Mother said that when they first came upon the farm, as she sat milking
a cow in the road one evening, she saw a large black animal come out
of the woods out where the clover meadow now is, and cross the road
and disappear in the woods on the other side. Bears sometimes carried
off the farmers' hogs in those days, boldly invading the pens to do so.
My father kept about thirty cows of the Durham breed; now the dairy
herds are made up of Jerseys or Holsteins. Then the product that went
to market was butter, now it is milk. Then the butter was made on the
farm by the farmer's wife or the hired girl, now it is made in the
creameries by men. My mother made most of the butter for nearly forty
years, packing thousands of tubs and firkins of it in that time. The milk
was set in tin pans on a rack in the milk house for the cream to rise, and
as soon as the milk clabbered it was skimmed.
About three o'clock in the afternoon during the warm weather Mother
would begin skimming the milk, carrying it pan by pan to the big cream
pan, where with a quick movement of a case knife the cream was
separated from the sides of the pan, the pan tilted on the edge of the
cream pan and the heavy mantle of cream, in folds or flakes, slid off
into the receptacle and the thick milk emptied into pails to be carried to
the swill barrel for the hogs. I used to help Mother at times by handing
her the pans of milk from the rack and emptying the pails. Then came
the washing of the pans at the trough, at which I also often aided her by
standing the pans up to dry and sun on the big bench. Rows of drying
tin pans were always a noticeable feature about farmhouses in those
days, also the churning machine attached to the milk house and the
sound of the wheel, propelled by the "old churner"--either a big dog or
a wether sheep. Every summer morning by eight o'clock the old sheep
or the old dog was brought and tied to his task upon the big wheel.
Sheep were usually more unwilling churners than were the dogs. They
rarely acquired any sense of duty or obedience as a dog did. This
endless walking and getting nowhere very soon called forth vigorous
protests. The churner would pull back, brace himself, choke, and stop
the machine: one churner threw himself off and was choked to death
before he was discovered. I remember when the old hetchel from the
day of flax dressing, fastened to a board, did duty behind the old

churner,