Observation and my factory books for a series of years, teach that persons of this class start out well in the spring, and have cows that maintain the flowing stream for awhile, so that the four-and-five-thousand pound yield would be obtained if they did not suffer it to come to grief, by not providing means to hedge against the immediate and consequent influences of the first serious check in the supply of palatable and easily digested food in the pastures. This is the great fatality of the whole business—a tolerated calamity as we may call it, for it endures a lapse that can not afterward be made good, the same season. It is to the paying yield of the cow what an untimely frost is to an unmatured corn crop. It is my firm belief that this is the great sin of the medium good dairyman of this and other dairy States,—the cause of the low average earnings of the cows; the reason why so many dairymen work so cheaply; the promoter of infidelity in the mind of the dairyman as to whether he has not made a mistake in entering upon the dairy business at all; in short, it is the chief “neglected opportunity” to get upon the highway to success. That opportunity, when interpreted, means that when the chief available supply of food fails, or lessens, or becomes unpalatable or undigestible, that a substitute previously provided should be immediately supplied. Let the substitute be early rye, clover, oats, millet, corn, or other fodder, grown for the purpose, according to the time in the season in which the pressing need comes; and if neither are in available time, then let the substitute take the form of ground grain in larger measures than should be given to every cow in milk, every day, even when feeding on the flushest and choicest of grasses. That is the way the 5,000-pound to the cow dairymen do; and they win in doing it. But the blighted class seem to look upon it as they would on an accidental fire, an untimely death, an early frost, an unavertable calamity; a kind of Providential dispensation, the superstitious regard it. The latter class betake themselves to prayer for rain, instead of taking the scoop-shovel to the provender, and distributing it to their famishing herds. Troops of them don’t know that they are suffering any but present loss in weight, and delude themselves into thinking a blessed rain will restore their cows to the position they fell from. They don’t seem to comprehend that they thus lose their grip on the $50 and $60 per annum prize, and their uncertainty of getting it. The result is, they have their big flow of milk at the season of the year in which dairy products are ever the cheapest; and their cows are crippled for good performance at the pail, when ever-returning good prices in the fall and early winter show them what golden opportunities they have lost.