ce.
Geese were plenty, dull, and weak. Old cocks,--why don't they say
roosters?--declined to threepence ha'penny on Thursday in sympathy with
fowls,--and who shall say that chivalry is dead? Turkeys were a trifle
steadier, and there was a speculative movement in limed eggs. All this
was illuminating, and I only wished I were quite certain whether the
sympathetic old roosters were threepence ha'penny apiece, or a pound.

{The gadabout hen: p105.jpg}

Everything happened as it should, on this first business journey of my
life, which is equivalent to saying that nothing happened at all.
Songhurst's Tea Rooms took five dozen eggs and told me to bring six dozen
the next week. Argent's Dining Parlours purchased three pairs of
chickens and four rabbits. The Six Bells found the last poultry somewhat
tough and tasteless; whereupon I said that our orders were more than we
could possibly fill, still I hoped we could go on "selling them," as we
never liked to part with old customers, no matter how many new ones there
were. Privately, I understood the complaint only too well, for I knew
the fowls in question very intimately. Two of them were the runaway
rooster and the gadabout hen that never wanted to go to bed with the
others. The third was Cannibal Ann. I should have expected them to be
tough, but I cannot believe they were lacking in flavour.

The only troublesome feature of the trip was that Mrs. Sowerbutt's
lodgers had suddenly left for London and she was unable to take the four
rabbits as she had hoped; but as an offset to that piece of ill-fortune
the Coke and Coal Yard and the Bicycle Repairing Rooms came out into the
street, and, stepping up to the trap, requested regular weekly deliveries
of eggs and chickens, and hoped that I would be able to bring them
myself. And so, in a happy frame of mind, I turned out of the Buffington
main street, and was jogging along homeward, when a very startling thing
happened; namely, a whole verse of the Bailiff's Daughter of Islington:--

"And as she went along the high road,
The weather being hot and dry,
She sat her down upon a green bank,
And her true love came riding by."

That true lovers are given to riding by, in ballads, I know very well,
but I hardly supposed they did so in real life, especially when every
precaution had been taken to avert such a catastrophe. I had told the
Barbury Green postmistress, on the morning of my arrival, not to give the
Thor