trancy, they none of
them turn up in the right place and have to be sorted out. We uncover
the top of the little house, or the enclosure as it may be, or reach in
at the door, and, seizing the struggling victim, drag him forth and take
him where he should have had the wit to go in the first instance. The
weak ones get in with the strong and are in danger of being trampled; two
May goslings that look almost full-grown have run into a house with a
brood of ducklings a week old. There are twenty-seven crowded into one
coop, five in another, nineteen in another; the gosling with one leg has
to come out, and the duckling threatened with the gapes; their place is
with the "invaleeds," as Phoebe calls them, but they never learn the
location of the hospital, nor have the slightest scruple about spreading
contagious diseases.

{In solitary splendour: p25.jpg}

Finally, when we have separated and sorted exhaustively, an operation in
which Phoebe shows a delicacy of discrimination and a fearlessness of
attack amounting to genius, we count the entire number and find several
missing. Searching for their animate or inanimate bodies, we "scoop" one
from under the tool-house, chance upon two more who are being harried and
pecked by the big geese in the lower meadow, and discover one sailing by
himself in solitary splendour in the middle of the deserted pond, a look
of evil triumph in his bead-like eye. Still we lack one young duckling,
and he at length is found dead by the hedge. A rat has evidently seized
him and choked him at a single throttle, but in such haste that he has
not had time to carry away the tiny body.

"Poor think!" says Phoebe tearfully; "it looks as if it was 'it with some
kind of a wepping. I don't know whatever to do with the rats, they're
gettin' that fearocious!"

Before I was admitted into daily contact with the living goose (my
previous intercourse with him having been carried on when gravy and
stuffing obscured his true personality), I thought him a very Dreyfus
among fowls, a sorely slandered bird, to whom justice had never been
done; for even the gentle Darwin is hard upon him. My opinion is
undergoing some slight modifications, but I withhold judgment at present,
hoping that some of the follies, faults, vagaries, and limitations that I
observe in Phoebe's geese may be due to Phoebe's educational methods,
which were, before my advent, those of the darkest ages.

CHAPTER IV

{Dryshod war