the world are so successful. Holland supplies
more butter to the rest of the world than any
country whatever; while, certainly, the
Dutch keep up their interior combustion, in
the midst of external damp, admirably, by
the quantity of butter they swallow. We
make the best butter in the world—at least
we are pleased to say so—we modest English.
We eat all we make, and then look round
for more—for the best we can get; and out of
every one hundred and thirty-four thousand
cwts. that we import, one hundred and seven
thousand cwts. are Dutch.

Certainly, if one condition of good butter is
that the dairies should be moist and cool, the
Dutch have the advantage of most nations.
Their dairies, which a breach in the dykes
would place at once at the bottom of the sea,
are moist and cool as a sea cave. They have
other advantages. Their water-meadows—
level cavities between green dykes—are as
soft as a Turkey carpet, with thick, juicy
grass; and their milch cows show their fine
feeding by being at once, unlike others, fat
and good milkers. And then, they are not
driven about to be milked, so that the cream
at the top of their udders is not half-churned
before it can be got at, as is the case in places
where the cows are driven home to a farmyard,
and milked immediately, and, moreover,
in the midst of dung-heaps and puddles and
bad smells. Far otherwise is it with the
Dutch kine. As soon as they begin to wish
for the relief of being milked, and raise their
patient heads to see whether anybody is
coming, they may be sure that somebody is
on the way. There they come—the milkmaid
and the boy. The boy is towing a little
boat along the canal, and the maid, with her
full blue petticoat and her pink jacket or
bed-gown, walks beside him. Now they stop:
she brings from the boat her copper
milk-pails, as bright as gold, and, with a cooing
greeting to her dear cows, sets down her little
stool on the grass, and begins to milk. The
boy, having moored his boat, stands beside
her with the special pail, which is to hold the
last pint from each cow; the creamy pint
which comes last because it has risen to the
top in the udder. Not a drop is left to turn
sour and fret the cow. The boy fetches and
carries the pails, and moves as if he trod on
eggs when conveying the full pails to the
boat. When afloat, there is no shaking at all.
Smoothly glides the cargo of pails up to the
very entrance of the dairy, where the deep
jars appropriate to this " meal " of milk are
ready—cooled with cold water, if it is summer,
and warmed with hot water if the weather
requires it. When the time for churning
comes, the Dutch woman takes matters as
quietly as hitherto. She softly tastes the
milk in the jars till she finds therein the due
degree of acidity; and then she leisurely
pours the whole—cream and milk together—
into a prodigiously stout and tall upright
churn. She must exert herself, however, if
she is to work that plunger. She work it!—
not she! She would as soon think of working
the mills on the dykes with her own plump
hands. No—she has a servant under her to
do it. She puts her dog into a wheel which
is connected with the plunger; and, as the
animal runs round, what a splashing, wolloping,
and frizzing is heard from the closed
churn! The quiet dairymaid knows by the
changes of the sound how the formation ot
the butter proceeds: when she is quite sure
that there are multitudes of flakes floating
within, she stops the wheel, releases the dog,
turns down the churn upon a large sieve,
which is laid over a tub, and obtains a
sieveful of butter, in the shape of yellow
kernels, while the buttermilk runs off, for
the benefit of the pigs, or of the household
cookery.

In the precisely opposite country— Switzerland,
which rises to the clouds, while Holland
squats below the sea level—the dairy people
go after the cows, like the Dutch, instead ot
bringing them home. They have much
further to go, however. Most of us who
have travelled in Switzerland have missed
one characteristic beauty of the Alps by
going too late. We are wont to say that the
awful stillness and steadfastness of the Alps are
broken by no motion but that of the torrents,
leaping or lapsing from the steeps. In spring
there is quite another kind of motion visible
to those who have good sight—the passage of
the wind, shown by the waving of the grass
on the upland slopes. The mower may be
invisible at such a height, unless he be
attended by a wife or daughter in a red petticoat,
making a speck of colour which may fix
the eye: but the silvery stoop of the tall
grass as the breeze passes over it is a beautiful
thing to see, and a charming alternation with
the leap of the waterfall. When these patches
of pasture are known, the cows are sent up
for the summer to graze and live under the
open sky: and the daily people, who go up
too and live in sheds and huts, follow the
kine, morning and evening, and milk them
wherever they may happen to be, whether in
a grassy hollow, or on a fearful shelf of rock,
or by some pool in a ravine. The cows would
come if called; they always do when the Alp
horn is blown to collect them; but the Alp
horn is blown after they are milked, and not
before, lest they should make more haste than
good speed, and leap down rocky places, and
prance homewards, shaking the milk in their
udders. If there is the slightest conceivable
curdling in the milk before the cream is
separated, the butter is spoiled, though the
fresh cream may taste very well. The way in
which the butter is brought down to the
valleys, when the party return for the winter,
is curious. All the butter of the season is
melted over the fire in large pans, which are
shifted the moment before their contents
would boil up. They are kept simmering till
the watery particles have all gone off in steam,