We accordingly devoted the remainder of the day to consulting the various books on domestic and rural economy we had collected together previous to leaving London.  Greatly puzzled we were by them.  On referring to the subject ob butter-making, one authority said, “you must never was the butter, but only knock it on a board, in order to get the buttermilk from it.”  Another only told us to “well cleanse the buttermilk from it,” without giving us an idea how the process was to be accomplished; while the far-famed Mrs. Rundle, in an article headed “Dairy,” tells the dairy-maid to “keep a book in which to enter the amount of butter she makes,” and gives butt little idea how the said butter is to be procured.  Another authority said, “after the butter is come, cut it in pieces to take out cow-hairs;” this appeared to us the oddest direction of all, for surely it was possible to remove them from the cream before it was put into the churn.  We were very much dissatisfied with the amount of practical knowledge we gleaned from our books; they seemed to us written for the benefit of those who already were well acquainted with the management of a dairy, and consequently of very little service to those who wished to acquire the rudiments of the art of butter-making.

The next morning we proceeded to make a trial, and the first thing we did was to strain the cream through a loose fine cloth into the churn, then taking the handle we began to turn it vigorously;* [Ninety times in a minute is the proper speed with which the handle should be turned.] the weather was hot, and after churning for more than an hour, there seemed as little prospect of butter as when we commenced.  We stared at each other in blank amazement.  Must we give it up?  No; that was not to be thought of.  H. suddenly remembered, that somewhere she had heard that in warm weather you should put the churn in cold water.  As ours was a box one, we did not see how we could manage this; but the bright idea entered her head, that if we could not put the water outside the churn we might in:  so we pumped a quart of spring-water into it and churned away with fresh hopes:  nor were we disappointed; in about a quarter of an hour we heard quite a different sound as we turned the handle, which assured us that the cream had undergone a change, and taking off the lid—­(how many times had we taken it off before!)—­we saw what at that moment appeared the most welcome sight in the world—­some lumps of rich yellow butter.  It was but a small quantity, but there it was:  the difficulty was overcome so far.  But now there arose the question of what we were to do with it in order to clean if from the butter milk, for all our authorities insisted on the necessity of this being done, though they did not agree in the mode of doing it.  One said, that “if it was washed, it would not keep good, because water soon became putrid, and so would the butter.”  We were told by another book, “that if it was