Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

“ Searching for their animate or inanimate bodies, we “scoop” one from under the tool-house, chance upon two more who are being harried and pecked by the big geese in the lower meadow, and discover one sailing by himself in solitary splendour in the middle of the deserted pond, a look of evil triumph in his bead-like eye. Still we lack one young duckling, and he at length is found dead by the hedge. A rat has evidently seized him and choked him at a single throttle, but in such haste that he has not had time to carry away the tiny body. ”

“ To begin with, the others will not allow him to go into the pond. There is an organised cabal against it, and he sits solitary on the bank, calm and resigned, but, naturally, a trifle hurt. His favourite retreat is a tiny sort of island on the edge of the pool under the alders, where with his bent head, and red-rimmed philosophic eyes he regards his own breast and dreams of happier days. When the others walk into the country twenty-three of them keep together, and Burd Alane (as I have named him from the old ballad) walks by himself. ”

“ There can be no connubial jealousies, I judge, as geese are strictly monogamous, and having chosen a partner of their joys and sorrows they cleave to each other until death or some other inexorable circumstance does them part. If they are ever mistaken in their choice, and think they might have done better, the world is none the wiser. Burd Alane looks in good condition, but Phœbe thinks he is not quite himself, and that some day when he is in greater strength he will turn on his foes and rend them, regaining thus his lost prestige, for formerly he was king of the flock. ”

“ O the pathos of a poultry farm! Catherine of Aragon, the black Spanish hen that stole her nest, brought out nine chicks this morning, and the business-like and marble-hearted Phœbe has taken them away and given them to another hen who has only seven. Two mothers cannot be wasted on these small families—it would not be profitable; and the older mother, having been tried and found faithful over seven, has been given the other nine and accepted them. What of the bereft one? She is miserable and stands about moping and forlorn, but it is no use fighting against the inevitable ”

“ The Green is in the very centre of Barbury village, and all civic, political, family, and social life converges there, just at the public duck-pond—a wee, sleepy lake with a slope of grass-covered stones by which the ducks descend for their swim. ”

“ A laughing, crowing baby in a house, one cheerful woman singing about her work, a boy whistling at the plough, a romance just suspected, with its miracle of two hearts melting into one—the wind’s always in the west when you have any of these wonder-workers in your neighbourhood. ”

“ Heaven is right. A duck, a goose, or a hen in which I have developed a larger brain, implanted a sense of duty, or instilled an idea of self-government, is likely, on the whole, to be leaner, not fatter. There is nothing like obeying the voice of conscience for taking the flesh off one’s bones; and, speaking of conscience, Phœbe, whose metaphysics are of the farm farmy, says that hers “felt like a hunlaid hegg for dyes” after she had jilted the postman.
As to the eggs, I am sure the birds will go on laying one a day for ’tis their nature to. ”

“ The Belgian hares have their habitation in a corner fifty feet distant; one large enclosure for poultry lies just outside the sweetbrier hedge; the others, with all the houses and coops, are in the meadow at the back, where also our tumbler pigeons are kept.
Phœbe attends to the poultry; it is her department. Mr. Heaven has neither the force nor the finesse required, and the gentle reader who thinks these qualities unneeded in so humble a calling has only to spend a few days at Thornycroft to be convinced. ”

“ I must write and ask my dear Man of the North. The Man of the North, I sometimes think, had a Fairy Grandmother who was a robin; and perhaps she made a nest of fresh moss and put him in the green wood when he was a wee bairnie, so that he waxed wise in bird-lore without knowing it. At all events, describe to him the cock of a head, the glance of an eye, the tip-up of a tail, or the sheen of a feather, and he will name you the bird. Near-sighted he is, too, the Man of the North, but that is only for people.
The Square Baby and I have a new game. ”

“ One can always be a Goose Girl!
* * * * *
I wonder if the hen mother is quite, quite satisfied with her ducklings! Do you suppose the fact of hatching and brooding them breaks down all the sense of difference? Does she not sometimes reflect that if her children were the ordinary sort, and not these changelings, she would be enjoying certain pretty little attentions dear to a mother’s heart? The chicks would be pecking the food off her broad beak with their tiny ones, and jumping on her back to slide down her glossy feathers. ”

“ Heaven’s nerves are not strong, and at last he wanted a life of more quietude, more quietude was what he craved. The life of a retail butcher is a most exciting and wearying one. Nobody satisfied with their meat; as if it mattered in a world of change! Everybody complaining of too much bone or too little fat; nobody wishing tough chops or cutlets, but always seeking after fine joints, when it’s against reason and nature that all joints should be juicy and all cutlets tender ”

“ While this is going on Mother Blackwing goes modestly away for a bite, a sup, and a little exercise, returning to the kittens when the cat leaves them. It is pretty to see her settle down over the four, fat, furry dumplings, and they seem to know no difference in warmth or comfort, whichever mother is brooding them; while, as their eyes have been open for a week, it can no longer be called a blind error on their part.
When we have closed all our small hen-nurseries for the night, there is still the large house inhabited by the thirty-two full-grown chickens which Phœbe calls the broilers. ”

“ He has more pride of bearing, and less to be proud of, than any bird I know. He is indolent, though he struts pompously over the grass as if the day were all too short for his onerous duties. He calls the hens about him when I throw corn from the basket, but many a time I have seen him swallow hurriedly, and in private, some dainty titbit he has found unexpectedly. ”

“ There is nothing on earth so feminine as a hen—not womanly, simply feminine. Those men of insight who write the Woman’s Page in the Sunday newspapers study hens more than women, I sometimes think; at any rate, their favourite types are all present on this poultry farm.
Some families of White Leghorns spend most of their time in the rickyard, where they look extremely pretty, their slender white shapes and red combs and wattles well set off by the background of golden hayricks. ”

“ The variety of bird which Phœbe seems to have bred during the past year may be called the New Duck, with certain radical ideas about woman’s sphere. What will happen to Thornycroft if we develop a New Hen and a New Cow, my imagination fails to conceive. There does not seem to be the slightest danger for the moment, however, and our hens lay and sit and sit and lay as if laying and sitting were the twin purposes of life. ”

“ By the time the ducks and geese are incarcerated for the night, the reasonable, sensible, practical-minded hens—especially those whose mentality is increased and whose virtue is heightened by the responsibilities of motherhood—have gone into their own particular rat-proof boxes, where they are waiting in a semi-somnolent state to have the wire doors closed, the bricks set against them, and the bits of sacking flung over the tops to keep out the draught. We have a great many young families, both ducklings and chicks, but we have no duck mothers at present. ”

“ The geese turn to the right, cross the rickyard, and go to their pen; the May ducks turn to the left for their coops, the June ducks follow the hens to the top meadow, and even the idiot gosling has an inspiration now and then and stumbles on his own habitation.
Mrs. Heaven has no reverence for the principles of Comenius, Pestalozzi, or Herbert Spencer as applied to poultry, and when the ducks and geese came out of the pond badly the other night and went waddling and tumbling and hissing all over creation, did not approve of my sending them back into the pond to start afresh. ”

“ The weak ones get in with the strong and are in danger of being trampled; two May goslings that look almost full-grown have run into a house with a brood of ducklings a week old. There are twenty-seven crowded into one coop, five in another, nineteen in another; the gosling with one leg has to come out, and the duckling threatened with the gapes; their place is with the “invaleeds,” as Phœbe calls them, but they never learn the location of the hospital, nor have the slightest scruple about spreading contagious diseases. ”

“ True Love.—“I know it; she told me where to find you,—Thornycroft is the seventh poultry-farm I’ve visited,—but you could never leave Heaven, you can’t be happy without poultry, why that is a wish easily gratified. I’ll get you a farm to-morrow; no, it’s Saturday, and the real estate offices close at noon, but on Monday, without fail. Your ducks and geese, always carrying it along with you. All you would have to do is to admit me; Heaven is full of twos. If you shall swim on a crystal lake—Phœbe told me what a genius you have for getting them out of the muddy pond ”

“ It must be quite another to have one’s eggs abstracted day by day and eaten by a callous public, the nest filled with deceitful substitutes, and at the end of a dull and weary period of hatching to bring into the world another person’s children—children, too, of the wrong size, the wrong kind of bills and feet, and, still more subtle grievance, the wrong kind of instincts, leading them to a dangerous aquatic career, one which the mother may not enter to guide, guard, and teach ”

“ One learns to be modest by living on a poultry farm, for there are constant expositions of the most deplorable vanity among the cocks. We have a couple of pea-fowl who certainly are an addition to the landscape, as they step mincingly along the square of turf we dignify by the name of lawn. ”

“ One could believe that of the first few eggs, but a hen who has laid two or three hundred can hardly feel the same exuberant pride and joy daily. Can it be the excitement incident to successful achievement? Hardly, because the task is so extremely simple. Eggs are more or less alike; a little larger or smaller, a trifle whiter or browner; and almost sure to be quite right as to details; that is, the big end never gets confused with the little end, they are always ovoid and never spherical, and the yolk is always inside of the white. ”

“ I bought a doll’s table and china tea-set in Buffington. We put it under an apple-tree in the side garden, where the scarlet lightning grows so tall and the Madonna lilies stand so white against the flaming background. We built a little fence around it, and every afternoon at tea-time we sprinkle seeds and crumbs in the dishes, water in the tiny cups, drop a cherry in each of the fruit-plates, and have a thé chantant for the birdies. We sometimes invite an “invaleed” duckling, or one of the baby rabbits, or the peacock, in which case the cards read:—
Thornycroft Farm. ”

“ Having discovered an interesting disease called Scaly Leg in the July number, I took the magazine out into the poultry-yard and identified the malady on three hens and a cock. Phœbe joined me in the diagnosis and we treated the victims with a carbolic lotion and scrubbed them with vaseline.
As Phœbe and I grow wise in medical lore the case of Cannibal Ann assumes a different aspect. As the bibulous man quaffs more and more flagons of beer and wine when his daily food is ham, salt fish, and cabbage, so does the hen avenge her wrongs of diet and woes of environment. ”

“ These were the thoughts that had been coursing through my goose-girl mind while I had been selling dressed poultry, but in some way they had not prepared me for the appearance of the aforesaid true love.
To see the very person whom one has left civilisation to avoid is always more or less surprising, and to make the meeting less likely, Buffington is even farther from Oxenbridge than Barbury Green. ”

“ They grow used to this strange order of things after a bit, it is true, and are less anxious and excited. When the duck-brood returns safely again and again from what the hen-mother thinks will prove a watery grave, she becomes accustomed to the situation, I suppose. I find that at night she stands by the pond for what she considers a decent, self-respecting length of time, calling the ducklings out of the water; then, if they refuse to come, the mother goes off to bed and leaves them to Providence, or Phœbe. ”

“ All this time the hens at the foot of the ladder are criticising her methods and exclaiming at the length of time she requires in mounting; while the cocks stroll about the yard keeping one eye on the ladder, picking up a seed here and there, and giving a masculine sneer now and then at the too-familiar scene. They approach the party at intervals, but only to remark that it always makes a man laugh to see a woman go up a ladder. ”

“ The pole was not long enough to reach the ducks, and Phœbe’s method lacked spirit and adroitness, so that it was natural, perhaps, that they refused to leave the water, the evening being warm, with an uncommon fine sunset.
I saw the situation at once and ran to meet it with a glow of interest and anticipation. If there is anything in the world I enjoy, it is making somebody do something that he doesn’t want to do ”