e skilled in the arts of
sugar-boiling, candle and soap making, the making and baking of huge
loaves, cooked in the bake-kettle, unless she be the fortunate mistress
of a stone or clay oven. She must know how to manufacture _hop-rising_
or _salt-rising_ for leavening her bread; salting meat and fish,
knitting stockings and mittens and comforters, spinning yarn in the big
wheel (the French Canadian spinning-wheel), and dyeing the yarn when
spun to have manufactured into cloth and coloured flannels, to clothe
her husband and children, making clothes for herself, her husband and
children;--for there are no tailors nor mantua-makers in the bush.

The management of poultry and the dairy must not be omitted; for in this
country most persons adopt the Irish and Scotch method, that of churning
the _milk_, a practice that in our part of England was not known. For my
own part I am inclined to prefer the butter churned from cream, as being
most economical, unless you chance to have Irish or Scotch servants who
prefer buttermilk to new or sweet skimmed milk.

There is something to be said in favour of both plans, no doubt. The
management of the calves differs here very much. Some persons wean the
calf from the mother from its birth, never allowing it to suck at all:
the little creature is kept fasting the first twenty-four hours; it is
then fed with the finger with new milk, which it soon learns to take
readily. I have seen fine cattle thus reared, and am disposed to adopt
the plan as the least troublesome one.

The old settlers pursue an opposite mode of treatment, allowing the calf
to suck till it is neatly half a year old, under the idea that it
ensures the daily return of the cow; as, under ordinary circumstances,
she is apt to ramble sometimes for days together, when the herbage grows
scarce in the woods near the homesteads, and you not only lose the use
of the milk, but often, from distention of the udder, the cow is
materially injured, at least for the remainder of the milking season. I
am disposed to think that were care taken to give the cattle regular
supplies of salt, and a small portion of food, if ever so little, near
the milking-place, they would seldom stay long away. A few refuse
potatoes, the leaves of the garden vegetables daily in use, set aside
for them, with the green shoots of the Indian corn that are stripped off
to strengthen the plant, will ensure their attendance. In the fall and
winter, pumpkins, corn,