But let us return to the cow. On the morning of June twenty-ninth, we began giving her a fair feed of green corn, adding to it wheat bran, and cotton-seed meal. July second we fed her all the corn stalks she would eat, continuing to add bran and cotton meal, giving four quarts of the former and two of the latter; and this was her daily food, including the German Millet, treated in the same way, until September. The green food was given three times a day, but the bran and cotton meal added only morning and night. Occasionally a day’s supply was cut early in the morning, and allowed to wilt before feeding, but in this, as well as in many other matters, my man-of-all-work did as circumstances permitted. His various duties about the place gave him but little time to reduce to an exact system the care and feed of a cow. She had a good stable, and plenty to eat, received daily a good brushing, and was treated kindly. Yet, she was our servant (and a most faithful one she was), and we were not her’s, or slaves to any arbitrary clock-work regularity. She was fed and milked at regular intervals, but beyond this it was not always convenient to have regular hours at her stable. We did not keep her as an exhibition of a model cow in a model stable, and to exemplify a model system of care and keep. Like thousands all over the land, we kept her simply for the profit she yielded, in the way of milk and butter. It has often struck me, in reading the many suggestions and hints about how to keep a cow, to be found in some agricultural and live-stock journals, that were they all carried into practical operation, it would take the entire time of two able-bodied men to attend one animal—one to be always on hand during the day, the other to serve at night. Now common sense is a good thing, even when applied to the management of cows, and my experience convinces me that the average man wishes only to know the cheapest and easiest way to have an abundant supply of rich, wholesome, and clean milk, and with pride enough in the possession of a good cow to furnish a good shelter and comfortable quarters. Beyond these, breeders of fancy and high-priced stock may go to any extreme, and find a paying business in doing so, but the village or city owner of one or two cows, kept solely for his own use, can not afford to indulge in any of this “upper-tendom” style of cow life; it won’t pay him. As a row of corn was cut and fed, the land was plowed, manured, and more corn (common field) drilled in thick, so that the ground for the whole summer presented the appearance of an experimental corn field, with corn at every stage of its growth.