nings which are never heeded: p27.jpg}

July 9th.

By the time the ducks and geese are incarcerated for the night, the
reasonable, sensible, practical-minded hens--especially those whose
mentality is increased and whose virtue is heightened by the
responsibilities of motherhood--have gone into their own particular rat-
proof boxes, where they are waiting in a semi-somnolent state to have the
wire doors closed, the bricks set against them, and the bits of sacking
flung over the tops to keep out the draught. We have a great many young
families, both ducklings and chicks, but we have no duck mothers at
present. The variety of bird which Phoebe seems to have bred during the
past year may be called the New Duck, with certain radical ideas about
woman's sphere. What will happen to Thornycroft if we develop a New Hen
and a New Cow, my imagination fails to conceive. There does not seem to
be the slightest danger for the moment, however, and our hens lay and sit
and sit and lay as if laying and sitting were the twin purposes of life.

{The mother goes off to bed: p28.jpg}

The nature of the hen seems to broaden with the duties of maternity, but
I think myself that we presume a little upon her amiability and natural
motherliness. It is one thing to desire a family of one's own, to lay
eggs with that idea in view, to sit upon them three long weeks and hatch
out and bring up a nice brood of chicks. It must be quite another to
have one's eggs abstracted day by day and eaten by a callous public, the
nest filled with deceitful substitutes, and at the end of a dull and
weary period of hatching to bring into the world another person's
children--children, too, of the wrong size, the wrong kind of bills and
feet, and, still more subtle grievance, the wrong kind of instincts,
leading them to a dangerous aquatic career, one which the mother may not
enter to guide, guard, and teach; one on the brink of which she must ever
stand, uttering dryshod warnings which are never heeded. They grow used
to this strange order of things after a bit, it is true, and are less
anxious and excited. When the duck-brood returns safely again and again
from what the hen-mother thinks will prove a watery grave, she becomes
accustomed to the situation, I suppose. I find that at night she stands
by the pond for what she considers a decent, self-respecting length of
time, calling the ducklings out of the water; then, if they refuse to
come, the mother go