very direction like a fractured
looking-glass by my last sneeze, you never would have written that
disgraceful question. Conchology is a science which has nothing to do
with mathematics; it relates only to shells. At the same time, however,
a man who opens oysters for a hotel, or shells a fortified town, or sucks
eggs, is not, strictly speaking, a conchologist-a fine stroke of sarcasm
that, but it will be lost on such an unintellectual clam as you. Now
compare conchology and geometry together, and you will see what the
difference is, and your question will be answered. But don't torture me
with any more arithmetical horrors until you know I am rid of my cold. I
feel the bitterest animosity toward you at this moment-bothering me in
this way, when I can do nothing but sneeze and rage and snort
pocket-handkerchiefs to atoms. If I had you in range of my nose now
I would blow your brains out.

TO RAISE POULTRY

--[Being a letter written to a Poultry Society that had conferred a
complimentary membership upon the author. Written about 1870.]

Seriously, from early youth I have taken an especial interest in the
subject of poultry-raising, and so this membership touches a ready
sympathy in my breast. Even as a schoolboy, poultry-raising was a study
with me, and I may say without egotism that as early as the age of
seventeen I was acquainted with all the best and speediest methods of
raising chickens, from raising them off a roost by burning lucifer
matches under their noses, down to lifting them off a fence on a frosty
night by insinuating the end of a warm board under their heels. By the
time I was twenty years old, I really suppose I had raised more poultry
than any one individual in all the section round about there. The very
chickens came to know my talent by and by. The youth of both sexes
ceased to paw the earth for worms, and old roosters that came to crow,
"remained to pray," when I passed by.

I have had so much experience in the raising of fowls that I cannot but
think that a few hints from me might be useful to the society. The two
methods I have already touched upon are very simple, and are only used in
the raising of the commonest class of fowls; one is for summer, the other
for winter. In the one case you start out with a friend along about
eleven o'clock' on a summer's night (not later, because in some states
--especially in California and Oregon--chickens always rouse up just at
midnigh