d two roosters, and
let them go ahead and attend to business, in twenty years we would have
seventeen million nine hundred and sixty-one fowls, which at 10 cents a
pound about Thanksgiving time would amount to----"

"There, there, come off," said Uncle Ike, as he lit up the old pipe
again, and got his thinker a'thinking. "I know what you want. You want
to get me in on the ground floor, I have been in more things on the
ground floor than anybody, but there was always another fellow in the
cellar. You are figuring hens the way you do compound interest, but
you are away off. Life is too short to wait for compound interest on a
dollar to make a fellow rich, and cutting coupons off a hen is just the
same. I started a hen ranch fifty years ago, on the same theory, and
went broke. There is no way to make money on hens except to turn them
loose on a farm, and have a woman with an apron over her head hunt eggs,
and sell them as quick as they are laid, before a hen has a chance to
get the fever to set. You open a hen ranch in the back yard, and your
hens will lay like thunder, when eggs are four cents a dozen, but when
eggs are two shillings a dozen you might take a hen by the neck and
shake her and you couldn't get an egg. When eggs are high, hens just
wander around as though they did not care whether school kept or not,
and they kick up a dust and lallygag, and get some disease, and eat
all the stuff you can buy for them, and they will make such a noise the
neighbors will set dogs on them, and the roosters will get on strike and
send walking delegates around to keep hens from laying, and then when
eggs get so cheap they are not good enough to throw at jay actors, the
whole poultry yard will begin to work overtime, and you have eggs to
spare. If the hens increased as you predict in your prospectus to me,
it would take all the money in town to buy food for them, and if you
attempted to realize on your hens to keep from bankruptcy, everybody
would quit eating chicken and go to eating mutton, and there you are.
I decline to invest in a hen ranch right here now, and if you try to
inveigle me into it I shall have you arrested as a gold-brick swindler,"
and Uncle Ike patted the red-headed boy on the shoulder and ran a great
hard thumb into his ribs.

CHAPTER VI.

"Say, Uncle Ike, did you see this in the paper about fifty ambulances
being lost, on the way to Tampa, Florida, last year?" said the
red-headed boy, as Uncle Ike sat