The milkers formed quite a little battalion of men and maids, the men operating on the hard-teated animals, the maids on the kindlier natures.  It was a large dairy.  There were nearly a hundred milchers under Crick’s management, all told; and of the herd the master-dairyman milked six or eight with his own hands, unless away from home.  These were the cows that milked hardest of all; for his journey-milkmen being more or less casually hired, he would not entrust this half-dozen to their treatment, lest, from indifference, they should not milk them fully; nor to the maids, lest they should fail in the same way for lack of finger-grip; with the result that in course of time the cows would “go azew”—­that is, dry up.  It was not the loss for the moment that made slack milking so serious, but that with the decline of demand there came decline, and ultimately cessation, of supply.

After Tess had settled down to her cow there was for a time no talk in the barton, and not a sound interfered with the purr of the milk-jets into the numerous pails, except a momentary exclamation to one or other of the beasts requesting her to turn round or stand still.  The only movements were those of the milkers’ hands up and down, and the swing of the cows’ tails.  Thus they all worked on, encompassed by the vast flat mead which extended to either slope of the valley—­a level landscape compounded of old landscapes long forgotten, and, no doubt, differing in character very greatly from the landscape they composed now.

“To my thinking,” said the dairyman, rising suddenly from a cow he had just finished off, snatching up his three-legged stool in one hand and the pail in the other, and moving on to the next hard-yielder in his vicinity, “to my thinking, the cows don’t gie down their milk to-day as usual.  Upon my life, if Winker do begin keeping back like this, she’ll not be worth going under by midsummer.”

“’Tis because there’s a new hand come among us,” said Jonathan Kail.  “I’ve noticed such things afore.”

“To be sure.  It may be so.  I didn’t think o’t.”

“I’ve been told that it goes up into their horns at such times,” said a dairymaid.

“Well, as to going up into their horns,” replied Dairyman Crick dubiously, as though even witchcraft might be limited by anatomical possibilities, “I couldn’t say; I certainly could not.  But as nott cows will keep it back as well as the horned ones, I don’t quite agree to it.  Do ye know that riddle about the nott cows, Jonathan?  Why do nott cows give less milk in a year than horned?”

“I don’t!” interposed the milkmaid, “Why do they?”

“Because there bain’t so many of ’em,” said the dairyman.  “Howsomever, these gam’sters do certainly keep back their milk to-day.  Folks, we must lift up a stave or two—­that’s the only cure for’t.”