"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."
"Well, thus much I can see," Herbold now expressed his opinion; "there is no great art in raising cattle here; one has only to drive them out, and scarcely trouble oneself further about them."
"There," said Wolfgang, who had now joined them, and had heard the last remark, "you fall into an error common with emigrants from Europe. They go from one extreme to the other, and believe that, because in their own country they have so much trouble with stall feeding, and are obliged to conduct everything with so much care, therefore that here they have nothing further to do, for instance, than to drive out a breeding sow into the woods, in order to have a drove of some hundred hogs arrive some three or four years after. No, no; one must not neglect cattle here either, but must look after it, else they get wild, and become worse than deer or rabbits."