three times a year: and
each one should be furnished with a coop about two and a half feet
square and bedded with straw: each of their eggs should be marked for
identification, for they will not hatch any eggs but their own. They
are usually set on nine or eleven eggs, never more than fifteen, nor
less than five. In cold weather they set for thirty days, in warm
weather twenty-five. When they are hatched the goslings are suffered
to remain with their mother for five days, and then daily, when the
weather is fine, they are driven out to the meadows or to the ponds
or some swampy place. The gosling houses may be built either above or
below ground, but never more than twenty should be housed together and
care must be taken lest the floor be damp and that they are bedded on
chaff or some thing of that kind, and that the house is so constructed
as to keep out weasels and other beasts which prey on goslings. Geese
are fed in wet places and it is the practice to sow especially for
their food supply, using for this purpose any kind of grain, but
particularly that salad plant called endive[188] which keeps green
wherever there is water, freshening at the mere contact of water
however dry it may be. This is gathered to be fed to them, for if they
have access to the place where it is growing they will destroy the
plant by trampling on it, or else kill themselves by eating too much
of it, for they are greedy by nature. For this reason they must be
watched, as often in feeding their greediness leads them to seize a
root and to break their own necks in attempting to pull it from the
ground: for the neck is weak, as the head is soft.

"If there is none of this plant they should be fed barley or some other
grain. When the farrago season is on, feed that to them, but in the
same manner as I have described in respect of endive. While they are
setting they may be fed ground barley soaked in water. The goslings
may be fed for the first two days on barley cake (_pollenta_) or raw
barley, and for the next three days fresh water cress chopped fine in
a dish. When they are of an age to be kept by themselves in flocks of
twenty, in the kind of house I have described, they are fed on barley
meal or farrago or some kind of young herbage cut up.

"For cramming, goslings are picked out when they are about six months
old, and are shut up in the fattening pen and there are fed three
times a day as much as they will eat, of crushed barley and flour