cold spring water. Next morning, or twenty-four hours later, the cans are skimmed by means of a long-handled conical ladle which, at a single dip, takes off all the cream. This then flows into a steam-jacketed vat, where its temperature is raised to 58° in summer, and 60° to 64° in winter, rendering it fit for churning. Oldfashioned "dasher" churns are employed, and are driven by a steam-engine which furnishes all the motive power required on the establishment, whether for dairying purposes or the cleansing of vessels. The butter, when formed, is "worked" on a machine consisting of a revolving table, which turns under a fluted wooden roller and thus mixes and consolidates the butter, while the buttermilk flows away by a peripheral channel. The butter is brought again and again to the roller by the attendant, using a pair of wooden "hands;" but, from first to last, it is untouched by the fingers. After working, it is placed in a mass within an icechamber, whence it is taken, as required, and made up into pats for the market. The pats are packed in boxes, shaped like a cake-tin, each of which holds fourteen pounds, and four of these boxes are then dropped, one above the other, into a deep tin cylinder. A fifth box, full of ice, tops them up, and when the cylinder has been closed with a locked cover, it is ready for despatch by rail.

Maple Farm receives milk from thirty farmers, who are paid for it at the rate of 6s. 6d. per hundred pounds,

and who subsequently buy back all the buttermilk: at a halfpenny per gallon, both of these being summer prices. No milk is received except of a certain spccific gravity, or at a higher temperature than eighty degrees. The skim-milk is sold to pedlars, who retail it in the neighbouring city of Hartford, and a small quantity of pure cream, put up in bottles and sent out ice-cold, is disposed of at high prices by the same means. This creamery only handles five thousand pounds of milk, and makes less than two hundred pounds of butter daily, and is therefore a very small concern, in comparison with the immense establishments of New York and other dairy States. Some of these handle twenty thousand pounds of milk, and make six or seven hundred pounds of butter daily, while they are like palaces in the beauty and refinement of their construction. Many of the American creameries were originally started, and almost all of them are now owned, by associations of farmers, who make large profits from these undertakings. It is even said that two well-known New York creamery owners, who at one time ran some twenty of these butter factories, were once offered, and refused, £10,000 for their profits of a single year.

In one important and interesting particular Maple Farm is behind the practice of the most advanced creameries. The separation of cream from milk, usually effected slowly by gravitation, is now instantaneously produced by means of centrifugal separators, one of whose

best examples, the Laval machine, was shown, for the first time in England, at the Royal Agricultural Society's meeting of 1879. Milk from the tank is allowed to run through a tap into a spheroidal vessel, about a foot in its larger diameter, which rotates at a speed of six or seven thousand revolutions a minute. The heavier milk is, at once, thrown out to the circumference, while the lighter cream remains nearer the centre of the rotating vessel, and each is drawn off from its respective zone by suitable discharge pipes. Cream is thus separated at the rate of sixty gallons an hour, and the action is continuous as long as milk flows into the machine. No time is lost in setting, and ten per cent. more cream is obtained from milk by this process than under the old system.

The question of creameries is of much greater importance than any person who has not looked closely into it would suppose. Twenty years ago, scarcely any foreign butter was imported into this country, but now not one-hundredth part of the butter eaten in London is of English origin. Great Britain, indeed, buys twelve million pounds worth of butter every year from foreigners, a sum equalling in value all her tea trade, or half her sugar trade, and being nearly one-fifth of her largest import, corn. Yet the climate, the soil, the price of cows, wages, and the cost of transport are all in favour of the native dairyman, who, within twenty years, has allowed this great trade to slip through his fingers. The British farmer makes his two or ten dozen

of butter weekly, and sends it, say, to the London market, where the retail butterman must go, very early every morning, to make a selection from many hundreds of "flats," each differing in quality from the other, and not very temptingly displayed in wrappings of cloth, or even old newspapers. Butter from Normandy and Holland, on the other hand, comes forward in a very different way. It is the produce of factories where, after being treated in the way already described, it is put up, nattily papered, in boxes holding a dozen two-pound rolls. The contents of every box, distinguished by a given brand, are alike in colour, taste and quality, so that the retailer can order from day to day with the certainty of getting just what he wants and without any expenditure of time and trouble. A trade of twelve millions per annum has already been lost to this country because English farmers do not associate for the purpose of butter-making as their American brethren have done. More and more of this business is being annually filched from English homesteads by the enterprising owners of French and Dutch butter factories, and it is high time that some of our bucolic Rip van Winkles should awake to a sense of what they have lost, and make an effort to recover it in the creamery.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE WILLIMANTIC THREAD COMPANY—“ BENEVOLENT”

MILL-OWNING.

"The leaders of industry, if industry is ever to be led, are virtually the captains of the world. If there be no nobleness in them, there will never be an aristocracy."-Carlyle.

THE reader is already aware that I am one of those who venture to hope for a future peace between capital and labour and a more equitable distribution of the fruits of the common toil, to be brought about by some, as yet perhaps, undetermined form of co-operative production. But, regarding human institutions, equally with the modifications of organic life, as products of evolution, I am not disposed to "hurry up" the slow growth of social changes, any more than to set my heart upon breeding tumblers from blue-rocks within some specified number of generations. The inflexible law"multiply, vary, let the fittest live and the unfittest die " -has the same application to the origin of ideas as to the origin of species, and the lists are not yet, and may not for many years be, set for an internecine struggle