“To my thinking,” said the dairyman, rising suddenly from a cow he had just finished off, snatching up his three-legged stool in one hand and the pail in the other, and moving on to the next hard-yielder in his vicinity, “to my thinking, the cows don’t gie down their milk today as usual. Upon my life, if Winker do begin keeping back like this, she’ll not be worth going under by midsummer.”
“ ’Tis because there’s a new hand come among us,” said Jonathan Kail. “I’ve noticed such things afore.”
“To be sure. It may be so. I didn’t think o’t.”
“I’ve been told that it goes up into their horns at such times,” said a dairymaid.
“Well, as to going up into their horns,” replied Dairyman Crick dubiously, as though even witchcraft might be limited by anatomical possibilities, “I couldn’t say; I certainly could not. But as nott cows will keep it back as well as the horned ones, I don’t quite agree to it. Do ye know that riddle about the nott cows, Jonathan? Why do nott cows give less milk in a year than horned?”
“I don’t!” interposed the milkmaid, “Why do they?”
“Because there bain’t so many of ’em,” said the dairyman. “Howsomever, these gam’sters do certainly keep back their milk today. Folks, we must lift up a stave or two—that’s the only cure for’t.”
Songs were often resorted to in dairies hereabout as an enticement to the cows when they showed signs of withholding their usual yield; and the band of milkers at this request burst into melody—in purely businesslike tones, it is true, and with no great spontaneity; the result, according to their own belief, being a decided improvement during the song’s continuance. When they had gone through fourteen or fifteen verses of a