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