“The Sennerin is engaged through the summer with tubs and churns; she attends to the milking and the fodder. An Almbub, a little boy, is with her, and he has to look after the herds, drive the cattle to pasture, and bring them back at even. Both live on the boiled milk and some lard out of a pot. Then when darkness comes on they light the _kichspan_, a bit of firwood dipped in pitch that serves as a candle, and by its flare she mends his torn garments which must be made to last till they return in October; and the boy in turn takes between his knees her shoes which have been torn in the rocks, and sews the rents with waxed thread, and tells tales or sings songs. “For the most part the sennerin is not under twenty. She is generally over forty, one who has spent her life in making butter, and understands the cows. And every summer she is aloft since she became old enough to be trusted. Young women, the farmer knows well, do not answer on the Alpine pastures exposed to every sort of climate and weather. And yet—sometimes, a young one is there aloft, and then romance steps in.” These sennerins, old, withered, for the most part, in rusty and dark dresses, with storm and sun-tanned faces, wrinkled, eminently unpoetical objects, how can we consider them as of the same race as our recently extinct dairy-maids? I will end with a couple of verses of Martin Parker’s ballad on the Milk-maids, composed in the reign of James I. or Charles I. “The bravest lasses gay Live not so merry as they; In honest civil sort They make each other sport, As they trudge on their way. Come fair or foul weather, They’re fearful of neither— Their courages never quail: In wet and dry, though winds be high, And dark’s the sky, they ne’er deny To carry the milking pail. Their hearts are free from care, They never will despair; Whatever may befall, They bravely bear out all, And Fortune’s frowns out-dare. They pleasantly sing To welcome the spring— ’Gainst heaven they never rail; If grass will grow, their shanks they show; And, frost or snow, they merrily go Along with the milking pail.” THE BRIDE’S WELL THE BRIDE’S WELL On what is locally called a Ramp, that is to say the refuse thrown out of a quarry, and left to decay or become covered with mould, was, in our quiet parish, a long white-washed cottage thatched. It was planted in a peculiar position: its back was against a dense oak wood, out of which shot up Scotch firs, and the portion of ramp it occupied was of very old standing, and was a good way from that part of the quarry on which workmen were engaged. In front of the cottage was a garden, always well kept, and on the farther side of the garden, the inevitable pig-sty. But then—what would the garden have produced without the pig?