Take it into a large bowl, and beat or stir it steadily with a silver or wooden spoon. It will take you no longer than to churn in the regular manner, and you will secure a nice roll of sweet butter. But a better, because an easier and more convenient way, is to buy a tall one-gallon stone jar, and get a carpenter to turn you a handle; put on two cross-pieces at the bottom, full of holes; or a circle small enough to go into the jar; pierce this circle with holes as large as a thimble; another circle for a cover, just to fit the top of the jar, with a hole in the center that will slip over the handle, and you have a nice churn, dasher and all. Now put on your large apron, lay a book on the table before you, take your little churn in your lap or on a bench by your side, and read, churn, and rock the cradle if need be (reading and rocking the cradle are not essential, but are very pleasant additions). In fifteen minutes’ steady churning you will find the butter has come, and can be brought together in this tiny churn as nicely as you can desire. If you can’t get at a carpenter, ask your husband or son to do it; or, failing there, haven’t you mechanical skill sufficient to make a dasher and fit it to a stone jar yourself? A piece of a broom-stick, scoured and polished with sand-paper (or if you have no sand-paper scrape it clean and smooth with a bit of glass); two cross-pieces full of holes, screwed on to the bottom of the stick; a round piece fitted into the top of the jar for cover,--you can _whittle_ it smooth, can you not?--with a hole for the handle to pass through, and you have just as serviceable a churn as any carpenter could make you, only, perhaps, lacking a little in the finish a carpenter might have given. Now, as to the working of the butter: some say, wash it faithfully; others insist that no water should come in contact with the butter. If you have strength and skill enough to work out all the buttermilk with a ladle, or a hand cool and firm enough to toss it from one hand to the other, giving quick, skillful blows as it passes, so that every drop of buttermilk may be beaten out, then we say, _never wash the butter_. But although you do, and by washing must lose some of the rich flavor our mother’s butter used to have, before there were any “modern improvements,” still, better so than not secure entire freedom from buttermilk. If any remains, you cannot have butter that will keep sweet one week.