cow from the thefts of witches, he must follow
her in the first walk she takes from the
paddock or shed, and gather up the soft earth
marked by her four feet. If he does she is
safe for the season. If he leaves it for the
witch to do, the creature will be a dead loss
to him, for this season at least. These things
are troublesome to attend to, it is true; but
if a man wishes to conduct business with a
Cork butter-merchant, he had better clear
the ground thoroughly for the operations of
the summer. And here we are at the farm,
to see how he does it.

The farm consists of forty acres. One
acre is occupied by the house, dairy, yard,
and garden; twenty acres are under tillage,
and nineteen remain for grazing ground,
including bog to the extent of about half an
acre. There are ten cows, several pigs, and
ducks, chickens, and geese in plenty. Of the
twenty acres, a considerable portion is
devoted to the growth of green crops—swedes,
mangold wurzel, &c.—for the winter food of
the cows. The rest is grain—wheat, barley.
and oats—which all go to market, the family
being fed on the cheaper diet of Indian meal.
The bog is not the least useful part of the
ground. It yields all the fuel wanted—not
only in the shape of peat, but in abundance
of fire-wood of the finest quality. Heaps of
blackened, scraggy wood may be seen drying
in the sun, and when dry, they burn like
kennel coal. Moreover, of the logs of oak
found in the bog, the dairy utensils are all
made; and the people on the spot ascribe the
best qualities of their butter to the use of
this bog oak—a persuasion which is regarded
as a mistake by the butter-merchants of the
ports. The keelers, or shallow tubs, various
in size, in which the milk stands, are made
of inch-thick bog oak; and so is the churn.
It certainly appears to be completely secure
from warping, and from the attacks of insects.
Its seasoning has been rather long—some
thousands of years, probably; so that the
taste of the wood must have gone out of it
some time ago. The question is whether
that of the seasoning has not succeeded
to it?

The dairy is a large shed, with a flagged
floor. Along two sides stand the keelers,
with their " meals " of milk in order. They
stand strangely long before they are skimmed
—till the milk is sour and thick: and then
the cream stands from two days to a week
before it is churned. The people insist that
the sourness of the milk does not in the least
affect the butter, and that it is great waste
to use the milk before all the cream is got
out of it; on which point, as on every other
in the whole business, the people of Kerry
are flatly contradicted by the people of
Waterford; both being famous exporters of
butter. The milk is not sour enough for
the popular taste in winter. With the first
hot weather comes the delicacy; and then
the dairymaids clap their hands for joy,
and exclaim "Now we shall have thick
milk."  In the market-place is the same
jubilation; for the milk is sent there for sale,
after enough has been reserved for the pigs;
and the people relish it with their potatoes
far more than sweet—in like manner as they
prefer salt fish to fresh. Possibly it might
be the same with us, if either article were
the only animal food we ever tasted.

As soon as a keeler is emptied, it is scalded
with hot water, well laid on with a broom of
heather; and then with cold water, in the
open air. The churning seems an easy affair
enough—the butter coming in half-an-hour,
and never keeping the people waiting more
than an hour.  Little does that dairymaid
know her own bliss, unless she has known
what it is to stand churning three, four, five
hours, obtaining nothing but froth, fancying
she feels the thickening of the milk, and
finding, like Dr. Johnson, " nothing ensue,"
till she hopes that nobody will speak to her
because, hot, tired, worried as she is, she does
not think she could speak without crying.
Happy is the Kerry maiden, who, having no
dog-menial, like her Dutch sister, plays the
part of machine for no more than an hour at
furthest. The butter never fails to be good.
she says: a marvel full as great as the gliding
of a scarlet coat and a " three-cocked hat"
over the lake. It is washed three times.
Others say that it takes five washings to
leave the water perfectly clear. It is salted
in the proportion of half a stone (seven
pounds) of salt to fifty pounds of butter. The
Dutch exceed the Irish, and everybody else,
in the care they take to have good salt. They
use only that which is obtained by slow
evaporation, and perfectly crystallised. Other
people are not so particular. They use salt
which may have some mixture of inferior
qualities—bitter, or apt to melt; and they
must not wonder if their butter is inferior to
the Dutch. Our housewives say that the
Irish butter is not nearly so good as it used
to be. Whether the Kerry women of a former
generation were more despotic about their
requirements than now, we cannot say; but
it struck us that the doors of certain dairies
stood too wide open for the entrance of whatever
chose to come in, and that the pig's
home was somewhat too near at hand. Some
were secluded enough, and as fresh as running
water; and we should have liked to be able
to compare the produce of the two. When
"made," the butter is pressed down into a
firkin (still of bog-oak) salted over the top,
and covered close with a cloth. When more
is ready to be put into the firkin the salted
surface is scraped off, and the butter below
so broken up as that the new portion may
mix well with it. The ten cows yield a firkin
of butter—that is, half a hundredweight—per
week. We were told that the merchant pays
five guineas per hundredweight (the hundredweight
being about one hundred and twelve
pounds). We did not believe this at the