chicken. The occupants of air, earth, and water lie in
wait for it. It is fair game for the hawk and the owl; the fox, the
weasel, the rat, the wood pussy, the cat, and the dog are its sworn
enemies. The horse steps on it, the wheel crushes it; it falls into the
cistern or the swill barrel; it is drenched by showers or stiffened by
frosts, and, as the English say, it has a "rather indifferent time of
it." If it survive the summer, and some chickens do, it will roost and
shiver on the limb of an apple tree. Its nest will be accessible only to
the mink and the rat; and, like Rachel, it will mourn for its children,
which are not.

No, the well-yarded hen has by all odds the best of it. The wonder is
that, with three-fourths of the poultry at large and making its own
living, hens still furnish a product, in this country alone,
$100,000,000 greater in value than the whole world's output of gold. Our
annual production of eggs and poultry foots up to $280,000,000,--$4
apiece for every man, woman, and child,--and yet people say that hens do
not pay!

Each flock of forty hens at Four Oaks has a house sixteen feet by
twenty, and a run twenty feet by one hundred. I hear no complaints of
close quarters or lack of freedom, but I do hear continually the song
of contentment, and I see results daily that are more satisfactory than
those of any oil well or mine in which I have ever been interested.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

SPRING OF '97

Sam began to make up his breeding pens in January. He selected 150 of
his favorites, divided them into 10 flocks of 15, added a fine cockerel
to each pen (we do not allow cocks or cockerels to run with the laying
hens), and then began to set the incubator house in order.

He filled the first incubator on Saturday, January 30, and from that day
until late in April he was able to start a fresh machine about every six
days. Sam reports the total hatch for the year as 1917 chicks, out of
which number he had, when he separated them in the early autumn, 678
pullets to put in the runs for laying hens, and 653 cockerels to go to
the fattening pens. These figures show that Sam was a first-class
chicken man.

We secured 300 tons of ice at the side of the lake for $98, having to
pay a little more that year than the last, on account of the heavy fall
of snow.

The wood-house was replenished, although there was still a good deal of
last year's cut on hand. We did not fell any trees, for there was still