Within a few weeks of our starting business, Cooper convinced me that a model dairy building on the farm would be a desirable improvement; it would save labour in various ways; it was built. The farm belonged to his mother, not to him; he kept the building when our collapse followed. Next, his sister really must have someone to help her, and that someone was provided at high wages. Business was good, so good in fact that we could not supply orders. Extra milk must therefore be bought from neighbouring farmers. This was done, the contracts being made by Cooper. I never asked to see them. The bills were paid every month without question on my part. More grazing fields, with enough artificial food to feed at least a hundred cows in addition, these too had to be paid for. As for the appetites of our forty animals, I marvelled at them long before I became suspicious. Yet when, after much insisting, I saw one of the farmer’s bills for extra milk, it left me, naturally, no wiser than before, and certainly not a whit more comforted, for the less our trade became, the more milk, apparently, those farmers sold us! Six months later the firm of Cooper and Blackwood dissolved partnership, Blackwood having got the experience and Cooper having got--something quite as useful, but more marketable. Cooper’s I.O.U. for five hundred dollars, now stuck in an old scrap-book somewhere, made me realize a little later how lucky it was that I had only a limited amount to lose. Yet, though it seemed the end of the world to me, my capital lost, my enterprise a failure, I recall the curious sense of relief with which I saw the last cow knocked down to some bidder from up-country. From the very beginning I had hated the entire business. I did not know a Jersey from a Shorthorn, so to speak. I knew nothing about farming, still less about dairy-farming. The year spent at Edinburgh University to learn the agricultural trade had been wasted, for, instead, I attended what interested me far more--the post-mortems, operations, lectures on pathology, and the dissecting room. My notebooks of Professor Wallace’s lectures, crammed as they were, with entries about soil, rotation of crops, and drainage, represented no genuine practical knowledge. I knew nothing. My father sent me out to Canada to farm. I went. I farmed. Cooper and Blackwood is carved upon the gravestone. But the gravestone cost £2,000, my share of the forced sale being about £600. My Canadian experience, anyhow, can be summed up in advice, which is, of course, a bromide now: let any emigrant young Englishman earn his own living for at least five years in any colony before a penny of capital is given him to invest.