“I have tried,” said the visitor, “but cannot do it.  My husband is very particular about the butter being good, so I was determined to see if I could not have some that he could eat; therefore I pored over Mrs. Rundle, and other books, for a whole day, but could not find how to begin.  None of them told me how to make the butter, though several gave directions for potting it down when it was made.  I made the boy churn for more than three hours yesterday morning, but got no butter after all. It would not come! The weather was very cold, and it occurred to the listener to ask the lady where the boy churned, and where the cream had been kept during the previous night.

“Why, in the dairy, to be sure,” was the answer; “and my feet became so chilled by standing there, that I can hardly put them to the ground since.  Cook could not succeed more than I did, and said, the last time she made it, it was between four and five hours before the butter came; and then, as I have told you, it was not eatable.”

The writer explained to her friend that the reason why she could not get the butter, as well as why cook’s was so bad, was on account of the low temperature of the cream when it was put into the churn.  She then gave her plain directions how to proceed for the future, and was gratified by receiving a note from her friend, in a couple of days, containing her thanks for the “very plain directions;” and adding, “I could not have thought it was so little trouble to procure good butter, and shall for the future be independent of a saucy dairymaid.”

I believe that a really clever servant will never give any one particulars respecting her work.  She wraps them up in an impenetrable mystery.  Like the farmers’ wives, who, to our queries, gave no other answer than, “Why, that depends,” they take care that no one shall be any the wiser for the questions asked.

The reader may safely follow the directions given in these pages; not one has been inserted that has not been tested by the writer.  To those who are already conversant with bread-making, churning, etc., they may appear needlessly minute; but we hope the novice may, with very little trouble, become mistress of the subjects to which they refer.

Even if a lady does keep a sufficient number of servants to perform every domestic duty efficiently, still it may prove useful to be able to give instructions to one who may, from some accidental circumstance, be called on to undertake a work to which she has been unaccustomed.

A friend of the writer’s, a lady of large fortune, and mistress of a very handsome establishment, said, when speaking of her dairy, “My neighborhood has the character of making very bad butter; mine is invariably good, and I always get a penny a pound more for it at the ‘shop’ than my neighbors.  If I have occasion to change the dairymaid, and the new one sends me up bad butter, I tell her of it.