ss in coats and frocks. For the more we do
for our feathered friends, the more they will do for us. Now, you
can't say that of all the men and women and boys and girls that you
know. I wish most sincerely that you could.

The first family who calls upon us (and the head of this family makes
the very earliest calls that I know anything about) are too well known
to all of us to need the slightest introduction. You will see in an
instant that you have met them before.

And there is no doubt but that these are among the very best feathered
friends we have. Those hens are liberal with their eggs, and those
little chickens that are running around like two-legged puff-balls,
are so willing to grow up and be broiled and roasted and stewed, that
it would now be almost impossible for us to do without them. Eggs seem
to come into use on so many occasions that, if there was to be an
egg-famine, it would make itself felt in every family in the land. Not
only would we miss them when boiled, fried, and cooked in omelets for
breakfast; not only without them would ham seem lonely, puddings and
sponge-cakes go into decline, and pound-cake utterly die, but the arts
and manufactures of the whole country would feel the deprivation.
Merely in the photographic business hundreds of thousands of eggs are
needed every year, from which to procure the albumen used in the
preparation of photographic paper.

[Illustration]

Do without eggs? Impossible.

And to do without "chicken" for dinner would seem almost as impossible
for some folks. To be sure, we might live along very comfortably
without those delightful broils, and roasts, and fricassees, but it
would be a great pity. And, if we live in the country, there is no
meat which is so cheap and easily procured all the year round as
chicken. I wonder what country-people would do, especially in the
summer time, when they have little other fresh meat, without their
chickens. Very badly, I imagine.

Next to these good old friends comes the pigeon family. These are very
intimate with many of us.

[Illustration]

Pigeons are in one respect even more closely associated with man than
the domestic fowls, because they live with him as readily in cities as
in the country. City chickens always seem out of place, but city
pigeons are as much at home as anybody else. There are few houses so
small that there is not room somewhere for a pigeon-box, and there are
no roofs or yards so humble that the hand