My Boyhood | Page 5

spurring him up with its score or more of sharp teeth when he
settled back to stop the machine. "Run and start the old sheep," was a
command we heard less often after that. He could not long hold out
against the pressure of that phalanx of sharp points upon his broad rear
end.
The churn dog was less obdurate and perverse, but he would sometimes
hide away as the hour of churning approached and we would have to
hustle around to find him. But we had one dog that seemed to take
pleasure in the task and would go quickly to the wheel when told to and
finish his task without being tied. In the absence of both dog and sheep,
I have a few times taken their place on the wheel. In winter and early
spring there was less cream to churn and we did it by hand, two of us
lifting the dasher together. Heavy work for even big boys, and when the
stuff was reluctant and the butter would not come sometimes until the
end of an hour, the task tried our mettle. Sometimes it would not gather
well after it had come, then some deft handling of the dasher was
necessary.
I never tired of seeing Mother lift the great masses of golden butter
from the churn with her ladle and pile them up in the big butter bowl,
with the drops of buttermilk standing upon them as if they were
sweating from the ordeal they had been put through. Then the working
and the washing of it to free it from the milk and the final packing into
tub or firkin, its fresh odour in the air--what a picture it was! How
much of the virtue of the farm went each year into those firkins!
Literally the cream of the land. Ah, the alchemy of Life, that in the bee
can transform one product of those wild rough fields into honey, and in
the cow can transform another product into milk!
The spring butter was packed into fifty-pound tubs to be shipped to
market as fast as made. The packing into one-hundred-pound firkins to
be held over till November did not begin till the cows were turned out
to pasture in May. To have made forty tubs by that time and sold them
for eighteen or twenty cents a pound was considered very satisfactory.
Then to make forty or fifty firkins during the summer and fall and to
get as good a price for it made the farmer's heart glad. When Father
first came on the farm, in 1827, butter brought only twelve or fourteen
cents per pound, but the price steadily crept up till in my time it sold
from seventeen to eighteen and a half. The firkin butter was usually

sold to a local butter buyer named Dowie. He usually appeared in early
fall, always on horseback, having notified Father in advance. At the
breakfast table Father would say, "Dowie is coming to try the butter
to-day."
"I hope he will not try that firkin I packed that hot week in July,"
Mother would say. But very likely that was the one among others he
would ask for. His long, half-round steel butter probe or tryer was
thrust down the centre of the firkin to the bottom, given a turn or two,
and withdrawn, its tapering cavity filled with a sample of every inch of
butter in the firkin. Dowie would pass it rapidly to and fro under his
nose, maybe sometimes tasting it, then push the tryer back into the hole,
then withdrawing it, leaving its core of butter where it found it. If the
butter suited him, and it rarely failed to do so, he would make his offer
and ride away to the next dairy.
The butter had always to be delivered at a date agreed upon, on the
Hudson River at Catskill. This usually took place in November. It was
the event of the fall: two loads of butter, of twenty or more firkins each,
to be transported fifty miles in a lumber wagon, each round trip taking
about four days. The firkins had to be headed up and gotten ready. This
job in my time usually fell to Hiram. He would begin the day before
Father was to start and have a load headed and placed in the wagon on
time, with straw between the firkins so they would not rub. How many
times I have heard those loads start off over the frozen ground in the
morning before it was light! Sometimes a neighbour's wagon would go
slowly jolting by just after or just before Father had started, but on the
same errand. Father usually took a bag of oats for his horses and a box
of