visit to the
Shaw Farm, saw his brother's cattle, but did not appear to admire them
much when compared with the English. A well-bred English cow has four
times the substance and breeding of her Zulu sister.

Attention may also be called to some magnificent red Spanish cattle, whose
noble heads and gigantic horns are in themselves a study for the artist.

It should be mentioned here that when Her Majesty drives through the
private road which leads from the Castle past the kennels and dairy to the
Shaw Farm, she likes to see the animals as they come up to the railings,
and is thus able to observe how former favourites bear the burden of their
years. The Queen names most of them herself, and never forgets an old
friend.

Before going on to the kennels, by permission of the courteous manageress,
we enter the beautiful Royal dairy, which was built under the direction of
His Royal Highness the late Prince Consort in the twenty-first year of Her
Majesty's reign. It is more like an apartment in fairyland than a dairy.
The walls and ceiling are composed of exquisitely shaded Minton tiles, the
dairy itself being about forty-five feet long and thirty wide. Long marble
tables run right round the sides and up the centre. On these tables are
some 90 white earthenware pans, each of which contains about seven quarts
of milk. The butter is sent to Osborne every day, and averages about
twenty pounds weight in winter and forty in summer. A small supply for the
Queen's own breakfast table is also made in a special churn every morning.

Around the walls of the dairy are medallions of the Royal family, with the
monogram V.R. between. At each end of the dairy stands a beautiful
fountain; there is also one at the side. All these fountains came from the
Exhibition of 1851; the design is a stork supporting a lily leaf into
which the water falls. The roof is supported by three pairs of arched
pillars, and the windows are double, the inner set being stained with
designs of Tudor roses, hawthorn, primroses, white marguerites, the rose,
shamrock, thistle, and Scotch harebell. The outer windows are plain glass.
Beyond the glass is another window of wire gauze, so minute that in hot
weather both windows can be thrown open to admit the air, and yet all
intrusive insects kept at a distance. The Royal herd generally consists of
about fifty cows when they are all in milk, principally shorthorns and
Jerseys, twenty-five of each. Last year there were fift