Cheeses were not packed, as now, each in its own neat box, but four or five together in a cask made especially for the purpose, whose manufacture kept the cooper busy many days in the year. His wayside shop, with its resonant clangor of driven hoops and heaps of fresh shavings piled about it, distilling the wholesome odor of fresh wood, was a frequent wayside landmark, now not often seen. Cheese was the chief product of the dairy, and was always home-made, while now it is almost entirely made in factories, to which the milk of neighboring dairies is brought, but by far the larger part of the milk goes to creameries for the making of butter. As the carding, spinning, and cloth-making went from the household in the day of a former generation, and the title of "spinster" became only the designation of unmarried women, so the final labor of the dairy is being withdrawn from the farm to the creamery and cheese factory, to make an even product, better than the worst, if never so good as the best, of that of the old system, and the buxom dairymaid will exist for coming generations only in song and story. The enormous mineral wealth of the State lay for years hidden or unheeded, copper and copperas in the hills of Vershire and Strafford, granite in the bald peaks of Barre, slate in long lines of shelving ledges here and there, and marble cropping out in blotches of dull white among the mulleins and scrubby evergreens of barren sheep pastures. Some of these resources developed slowly to their present importance, others have flourished and languished and flourished again, and others sprang from respectable existence into sudden importance.