_Skimming_ should be attended to when the milk has soured just enough to have a little of it curdle on the bottom of the pan. If it should nearly all curdle, it would not be a serious injury, unless it should become old. If you have not conveniences for keeping milk sufficiently warm in cold weather, place it over the stove at once, when drawn, and give it a scalding heat, and the cream will rise in a much shorter space of time, and more plentifully. Milk should be strained and set as soon as possible after being drawn from the cow, and with the least possible agitation. The unpleasant flavor imparted to milk from the food of the cows, such as turnips or leeks, may be at once removed by adding to the milk, before straining, one eighth of its quantity of boiling water; or two ounces of nitre boiled in one quart of water and bottled, and a small teacupful put in twelve quarts of milk, will answer the same purpose. _Milking_ should be performed with great care. Experiments have demonstrated that the last drawn from a cow yields from six to sixteen times as large a quantity of better cream than that first drawn. Careless milking will make the quantity of butter less, and the quality inferior, while it dries up the cows. There are probably millions of cows now in the United States that are indifferent milkers from this very cause. Quick and clean milking, from the time they first came in, would have made them worth twice as much, for butter and milk, as they are now. Always milk as quickly as possible, and without stopping, after you commence, and as nearly as possible at the same hour of the day. Leaving a teacupful, or even half that quantity, in milking each cow, will very materially lessen the products of the dairy, and seriously injure the cows for future use. Great milkers will yield considerable more by having it drawn three times per day. The quantity of milk given by a cow will never injure her, provided she be well fed. As it takes food to make meat, so it does also to make milk; you can never get something for nothing. The best breeds of swine, cattle, or fowls, can not be fattened without being well fed: so the best cows will never give large messes of milk unless they are largely fed. _Churning._--This is entirely a mechanical process. The agitation of the cream dashes the oily globules in the cream against each other, and they remain together and grow larger, until the butter is, what the dairy woman calls, gathered. The butter in the milk, when drawn from the cow, is the same as when on the table, only it is in the milk in the form of very small globes: churning brings them together. The object then to be secured, by any form of a churn, is agitation, or dashing and beating together. _Temperature of the Cream_ should be from sixty to sixty-five degrees--perhaps sixty-two is best. This had better always be determined by a thermometer immersed in it.