He put the cream he had gotten in a cream can and placed it in the trough. He opened the icehouse door and put some more ice around the cans.
"How'd you happen to get the old ice in the new dairy, Bob?" asked the banker.
"Well, we figured if we left it in the old icehouse, over half of it would melt during the summer and we wouldn't lose anything like that much by transferring it, so we put it on the wagon and hauled it over. Of course, when this ice was cut, the cakes were made all kinds of sizes, which gave us some trouble in piling it up. Next year we're going to cut the ice in twenty-two by twenty-two-inch sizes. I don't know whether I told you or not, Mr. White, but the floor of the icehouse slopes toward the center, so each cake helps to support the other as we take them out."
"Just listen to that, Ida. See how Bob has figured out all these things. Who would have thought of that?"
"I didn't," confessed Bob. "That was in one of the farm bulletins on icehouse construction."
"Somebody else worked it out, but you used the idea," said the banker. "Often a man who can utilize another's idea can develop it to greater profit than the one who first created it. It's my opinion, Bob, that it's the little things in life that are carefully managed that make a success of the big things."
"What do you do with your skim milk, Bob?" asked Mrs. White. "We feed that to the calves, and what's left over to the pigs, and some of it occasionally to the chickens."
"Do you make butter, Bob?" asked Mr. White.
"We used to," said Bob, "but now we sell all our cream to the creamery and buy our butter." "What, buy your own butter?"
"Yes, Aunt Bettie says it pays better to buy butter from those who make it in a big way than try to make it ourselves. We get the butter when we deliver the cream and in that way we don't have the extra work to do. Of course, we could make our own butter, and would do so if there was no creamery, but the money that goes for a pound of butter is less than we get for a pound of butter fat, and we save the time Aunt Betty would have to devote to it."