"Pretty well," replied the farmer, "about two hundred head in all, counting cows and calves as one. But I am thinking of going westward, and want to sell them." "What, forsake your farm!" exclaimed the German, astonished. "Why? Is the land not good, or is the neighbourhood unhealthy?" "Oh, not for that; the land is capital, and we have no cause to complain much of sickness; a little ague, now and then; but that arises from the neighbourhood of the swamps, and it doesn't last long." "But why do you wish to remove, then?" "Well, I don't exactly know, but as I have heard the land hereabouts is to be surveyed----" "And that is your reason? I should have thought that would have been acceptable to you." "As you like to take it, pleasant or unpleasant; pleasant because one then gets to know whereabout to look for one's own land, and where one may, here and there, have the chance of buying good pieces to add to it; but unpleasant because I should have to pay for it now, and for the same money I could get just as good land further to the west, and much more of it, and perhaps also better cattle. Here I get at present a pretty good price for all that I have, and if a couple of years were only over one's head, and the settlements in this neighbourhood so thick as to impede a man in his free movements"---- "Good gracious!" Herbold interrupted him; "why, you haven't a single neighbour within nine miles' distance, as you yourself just now admitted." "Yet the time is not so very distant," continued Stevenson, without noticing the objection, "when we may have towns upon towns along the margin of the swamp, and I had rather go out of the way of the people; the air of towns doesn't agree with me." "Well, Heaven be praised!" said the other, laughing, "you haven't much to complain of on that score; the nearest town, as Wolfgang told me, is ten miles distant, and consists of five houses." "And I shouldn't like any nearer," said the farmer. "There is another thing which I wished to ask you; how, in the name of wonder, do you manage with the milch kine? You must place them at all events under shelter, and feed them, otherwise you can get no milk." "We can manage that much more simply," was the reply; "we drive home the calves when we find them in the woods, and the cows, of course, come with them. The cow is milked at the homestead, and afterwards driven out of the clearing. During the first night she does not like to go away, but she is driven by hunger to go at last, seeks her food, and comes home regularly to be milked, and to see her calf." "Certainly that is a convenient mode of keeping milking cows; and the calf remains all day long in a shed?" "Shed! we don't know such a word here. Whoever may happen to have a stallion may perhaps keep him in a log-house built on purpose, differing in nowise from our own ordinary dwellings, except that it has no boarded floor, nor chimney, but otherwise we don't require those kind of buildings."