The Montgomery advertiser., 1903-03-08

keep the cows clean. Every COW Is well bedded, and it has, in addition, a rope the size of a clothes line with a strap loop at Its end to hold up It's tail. One end of the rope is fastened to the rafters just over the COW. so raising the tail that there is no danger of it being nirted through the milk or into the eye of the milker.
 In a room adjoining his was the cheese room with hundred balls of fresh Edam cheese on the racks. The cheese was of a rich yellow color and mo-e delicious than any We have in the United States. I was shown the cheese presses, and as l ex~ amined them 1 noticed some American oil stoves on the shelves nearby, an evl- dence that the American invasion has evidently found its place in this out of the way factory. The old lady who own ed the establishment explained the pro- cesses of cheese making. bobbing the gold horns over her eyes to and fro as she did so.
 Among the Dutch Farmers.
 I like the Dutch country people, They are the quaintest of all the characters of the Netherlands, and they remind you of the pictures of Holland you see in the galleries. The people of the towns dress about the same as We do, but in the back districts are girls with lace caps and helmets of gold, silver and brass, and also corkscrew gold horns sticking out on each side of the eyes. The women working .n the fields wear black hats and wide linen skirts, and it Is not un- common to find young man with a thick mop of hair cut straight off at the neck, richly embroidered shirt a roundabout with enormous silver buttons and trous- CTS of velveteen which look like enormous bags tied in at the kne..
 The Dutch are plain and simple in their ways. They are sober looking, but they can laugh upon occasions, and many of them are hospitable.
 A Land of Small Farms.
 More than half the farmers of Holland own the lands which they farm, but the holdings are comparatively small. There are not in the whole country 200 farms each containing more than 250 acres, and S0,Oc0 of the farms have each less than fifteen acres. Indeed a large part of Holland is tracts of heath or of swamp and water. which are good for nothing. 1 There are two and one-half million acres Tin pasture, and more than six hundred thousand acres in forests, so that the 1 land actually cultivated does not com | prise more than one-third of the country. The people are more devoted to stock farming and dairying than to tilling the 1 soil The country raises excellent grass l and there are now here something like Q million and a half cattle. chiefly Hol- steins. There are a million and quarter | hogs, more than half a million horses and seven hundred and fifty thousand | sheep.
 | Alkmar and its Dutch Cheeses.
 Some of the chief dairy regions are 1T | the north, and at Alkmar is a famou: cheese market, to which the people iron seventy or eighty villages bring in theil cheese for sale. Each cheese is marked with the initials of its maker. The stock is spread out on waxed cloths. and il bought by wholesale merchants. who ship 1t to all parts of the world. Hol land exported about $5,OOO,OO0 worth o cheese in 1900, the bulk of the product | going to England, Belgium, Germany anc | France.
 Thousands of tons of this are sold al Alkmar, the stuff being brought in 1T wagons over the road, on barges up tht canals, and by the small farmers in dog carts. The price of cheese makes gooC or bad times in the dairy regions, anC by the rise or fall of a cent or so pound the farmer is happy or miserable.
 In Dutch Dairy Land.
 I am surprised to see how well tn Dutch care for their cattle. They Urea them like children. and are careful tha
 nothing is done to excite or disturb them
 On cold day if in the fields they ar
 blanketed, and when hot the blanket