in others, quarrying flagging-stone.  I recently visited a section of Ulster County, where everybody seemed getting out hoop-poles and making hoops.  The only talk was of hoops, hoops!  Every team that went by had a load or was going for a load of hoops.  The principal fuel was hoop-shavings or discarded hoop-poles.  No man had any money until he sold his hoops.  When a farmer went to town to get some grain, or a pair of boots, or a dress for his wife, he took a load of hoops.  People stole hoops and poached for hoops, and bought, and sold, and speculated in hoops.  If there was a corner, it was in hoops; big hoops, little hoops, hoops for kegs, and firkins, and barrels, and hogsheads, and pipes; hickory hoops, birch hoops, ash hoops, chestnut hoops, hoops enough to go around the world.  Another place it was shingle, shingle; everybody was shaving hemlock shingle.

In most of the eastern counties of the State, the interest and profit of the farm revolve about the cow.  The dairy is the one great matter,—­for milk, when milk can be shipped to the New York market, and for butter when it cannot.  Great barns and stables and milking-sheds, and immense meadows and cattle on a thousand hills, are the prominent agricultural features of these sections of the country.  Good grass and good water are the two indispensables to successful dairying.  And the two generally go together.  Where there are plenty of copious cold springs, there is no dearth of grass.  When the cattle are compelled to browse upon weeds and various wild growths, the milk and butter will betray it in the flavor.  Tender, juicy grass, the ruddy blossoming clover, or the fragrant, well-cured hay, make the delicious milk and the sweet butter.  Then there is a charm about a natural pastoral country that belongs to no other.  Go through Orange County in May and see the vivid emerald of the smooth fields and hills.  It is a new experience of the beauty and effectiveness of simple grass.  And this grass has rare virtues, too, and imparts a flavor to the milk and butter that has made them famous.

Along all the sources of the Delaware the land flows with milk, if not with honey.  The grass is excellent, except in times of protracted drought, and then the browsings in the beech and birch woods are a good substitute.  Butter is the staple product.  Every housewife is or wants to be a famous butter-maker, and Delaware County butter rivals that of Orange in market.  Delaware is a high, cool grazing country.  The farms lie tilted up against the sides of the mountain or lapping over the hills, striped or checked with stone walls, and presenting to the eye long stretches of pasture and meadow land, alternating with plowed fields and patches of waving grain.  Few of their features are picturesque; they are bare, broad, and simple.  The farmhouse gets itself a coat of white paint, and green blinds to the windows, and the barn and wagon-house a coat of red paint with white trimmings,