hundreds a week, hundreds! I'm in touch with all the big
places,--Whiteley's, Harrod's, all the nibs. Here I am, I said to them,
with a large chicken farm with all the modern improvements. You want
eggs, old horses, I said: I supply them. I will let you have so many
hundred eggs a week, I said; what will you give for them? Well, I'll
admit their terms did not come up to my expectations altogether, but we
must not sneer at small prices at first.

"When we get a connection, we shall be able to name our terms. It
stands to reason, laddie. Have you ever seen a man, woman, or child who
wasn't eating an egg or just going to eat an egg or just coming away
from eating an egg? I tell you, the good old egg is the foundation of
daily life. Stop the first man you meet in the street and ask him which
he'd sooner lose, his egg or his wife, and see what he says! We're on
to a good thing, Garny, my boy. Pass the whisky!"

The upshot of it was that the firms mentioned supplied us with a
quantity of goods, agreeing to receive phantom eggs in exchange. This
satisfied Ukridge. He had a faith in the laying power of his hens which
would have flattered them if they could have known it. It might also
have stimulated their efforts in that direction, which up to date were
feeble.

It was now, as I have said, Thursday, the twenty-second of July,--a
glorious, sunny morning, of the kind which Providence sends
occasionally, simply in order to allow the honest smoker to take his
after-breakfast pipe under ideal conditions. These are the pipes to
which a man looks back in after years with a feeling of wistful
reverence, pipes smoked in perfect tranquillity, mind and body alike at
rest. It is over pipes like these that we dream our dreams, and fashion
our masterpieces.

My pipe was behaving like the ideal pipe; and, as I strolled spaciously
about the lawn, my novel was growing nobly. I had neglected my literary
work for the past week, owing to the insistent claims of the fowls. I
am not one of those men whose minds work in placid independence of the
conditions of life. But I was making up for lost time now. With each
blue cloud that left my lips and hung in the still air above me,
striking scenes and freshets of sparkling dialogue rushed through my
brain. Another uninterrupted half hour, and I have no doubt that I
should have completed the framework of a novel which would have placed
me in that select band of authors who have no christian names. A