Poulterer

“ Our pigs and our poultry throve very well, so that we had to enlarge their dwellings; and I will say here, in case I forget it, that by devoting some part of our time to hunting, we came very near to exterminating both the wild pigs and the dogs; and we found that as they grew less, the wild fowls increased mightily, because of their greater security. We did not put ourselves to any trouble to molest them, both because they were still difficult to approach, and because we had enough of our domestic poultry to supply our own wants. ”

“ Many and many a pleasant stroll they had among the poultry markets, where ducks and fowls, with necks unnaturally long, lay stretched out in pairs, ready for cooking; where there were speckled eggs in mossy baskets; white country sausages beyond impeachment by surviving cat or dog, or horse or donkey; new cheeses to any wild extent; live birds in coops and cages, looking much too big to be natural, in consequence of those receptacles being much too little; rabbits, alive and dead, innumerable. ”

“ The very week that a mass of poultry—say three to five hundred fowls—is put together upon one spot, they begin to suffer, and fail, and retrograde, and die. No amount of care, cleanliness or watching, can evade this result. In a body (over a dozen to twenty together) , they cannot thrive; nor can the owner coax or force them to lay eggs, by any known process. [17] [Pg 304]
To succeed with the breeding of poultry, the stock must be colonized (if a large number of fowls be kept) , or else only a few must find shelter in any one place, about the farm or country residence. ”

“ It has now been taught all over the country, by lecturers under the county council technical instruction committees, that poultry pay best of any branch upon a farm. It has become generally known that, provided they can be run over the farm by using detached houses, and not huddled together, a dozen hens per acre can be kept upon a holding without interfering with any other stock; indeed, the curious fact is observed that horses and cattle prefer to graze over grass that might be thought soiled by the fowls. ”

“ As poultry is an indispensable appendage to the farm, in all cases, the poultry-house is equally indispensable, for their accommodation, and for the most profitable management of the fowls themselves, and most convenient for the production of their eggs and young. Indeed, without well-arranged quarters for the fowls of the farm, they are exceedingly troublesome, and of doubtful profit; but with the proper buildings devoted to them exclusively, they become one of the most interesting and agreeable objects with which either the farm or the country house is associated. ”

“ The fields had been left uncultivated, weeds and gaudy flowers sprung up,—or where a few wheat-fields shewed signs of the living hopes of the husbandman, the work had been left halfway, the ploughman had died beside the plough; the horses had deserted the furrow, and no seedsman had approached the dead; the cattle unattended wandered over the fields and through the lanes; the tame inhabitants of the poultry yard, baulked of their daily food, had become wild—young lambs were dropt in flower-gardens, and the cow stalled in the hall of pleasure. ”

“ After the stables and coachhouses came the piggery, the rabbit hutches, and finally an immense poultry-yard divided into a thousand compartments, and sheltering a whole horde of poultry of all sorts; fowls of all kinds and of all breeds, geese, guineafowl, pigeons, ducks, and what all besides. What wasn't there in that prodigious poultry-yard? 7
Mother Etienne spent most of her time there, for the smaller and more delicate the creatures the more interest and care she gave them.
"The weak need so much protection," this excellent woman would say, and she was right. ”

“ What the farmers should do is this—they should produce their poultry of the finest quality, poultry of the stamp of the old Dorking—plump birds, thick-skinned birds, small-boned birds, and birds with little offal—fat them well, truss them well, and send them to market. The white-legged beauties would take the highest price, and, if well seen to, would very soon drive the foreign fowls from our markets, and English gold would gladden the home of the English henwife. ”

“ The coops or pens employed by the poultry feeders are made of laths, stand raised from the ground, and are usually placed in sheds. They who have no fattening pens should confine the fowls in a small run, feed them three times a day on ground oats, barley-meal, and maize-meal mixed with potatoes. When a certain stage is reached the birds begin to go back, and should be killed at once, first letting them fast twenty-four hours to empty the crop. ”

“ Hares, rabbits, and wild-fowl were plentiful on moors and the great extent of uncultivated land, and hunting was pursued—less as a pastime than a matter of necessity—to procure a little change of diet, now and then, from the almost constant peas-porridge, fish, and other salt provisions.
Women, old and young, passed much time in spinning, and in almost every farm-house one found weaving-machines, as we call hand-looms, so that when there was little else to do, [196] farmers, or some of their men, worked the treadles, and wove the yarn into blanketing, or other household cloth. ”

“ The cottager or peasant-proprietor has, I believe, an advantage in poultry of all kinds. When poultry are kept in very large numbers they are more liable to disease, and the diseases are more disastrous—sweeping off the whole large stock. Fowl and egg farming is one of the most successful, perhaps the most successful point with the French peasant-proprietors. ”

“ The land, fenced in for privacy, would produce in abundance holeus-millet, rice, and lucern for beasts. There would be a breeding-ground for black cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs, and a poultry-yard protected against wild cats. ”

“ Americans have strangely neglected its cultivation with the method and precision of foreigners. We can raise food more cheaply than they, while none of them can boast of possessing our incomparable Indian corn.
There are several of my neighbors who are highly skilled in the art of raising poultry. One of them is quite a poultry-fancier, and, by keeping only choice breeds, he realizes fancy prices for them. Another confines his fowls in a plum-orchard, and thus secures an annual crop of plums without being stung by the curculio. ”

“ They breed cattle, a few sheep, and pigs, although the sheep thrive but indifferently for some reason or another. Poultry they have in large numbers, so that, could they commend a market, they would do very well. ”

“ In the poultry-yard the greedy bird swallows ducklings and chickens as if they were oysters; it dismantles walls to fill its gizzard with the loose mortar; in short, it will eat anything which is not a fixture. In proportion to the amount of food which it requires—and that is not out of proportion to its size and activity—so is its thirst. ”

“ The young people on a big ranch or estate with its up-to-date poultry plant, raising not only plain and fancy chickens, but pigeons, ducks, geese, turkeys, and guinea fowl, all attended by men hired for the purpose, may look about in vain for a chance to try their hands at raising anything with feathers. To such boys and girls I say, "Did you ever see any pheasants?" ”

“ Poultry ply their ceaseless search for food, among the knee-deep straw; and the Cattle, all their summer frolics forgotten, stand ruminating beside the half-empty Hay-rack, or lean with inquiring faces over the gate that looks down into the Village, or away towards the distant Pastures. ”

“ The poultry, pigs, and cattle he possesses, wander about the door, at once front and rear, or, unobstructed by any serviceable fence, trespass upon the newly planted field or unmown meadows, getting such living as fortune places in their way. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nearly always the gobbler is forced to capitulate. I leave you to imagine what sort of harmony must prevail in a poultry-yard harboring such disturbers of the peace.
“Third, its wanderlust. The narrow limits of the poultry-yard are irksome to guinea-fowls. They are glad enough to be on hand at feeding time, but, their crops once full, they must have a long walk across [90] country. Off they go, always by themselves, without ever admitting the common poultry to their ranks. To the music of its harsh chatter the flock goes on from one hedge to another, one bush to the next, snapping up insects. ”

“ THE NEW NESTS AND THE NEST EGGS As might have been expected, the new poultry-house was no sooner finished than the fowls began to discuss who should live in the different parts. They could see no reason why they should not all run together, as they always had done. “Perhaps,” the Black Hen had said, “the Man may put us all together and let the table’s Chickens have pens to themselves.”
“What?” said the Barred Plymouth Rock Hen, “put me in one pen and my Chickens in another? ”

“ At length, however, they grew weary of watching the operations going on in the stable-yard, and wandered forth to feast their eyes on the apples clustering on the trees of an unguarded orchard—to roll among the lambs that nibbled on the sunny sward—to gaze on the brindled cows reclining under the shady trees or cooling their hoofs in the pond—and to throw pebbles at the white pigeons cooing on the roofs of the brewhouses or winging their way over the stable-yard to settle and bask on the barn-tops ”

“ In the early days of the poultry fancy in this country the tendency was for each fancier to keep as many different varieties as he could find room for or could afford to buy. Most of these fanciers were city people who thought that, as they kept their fowls in small flocks anyway, they might just as well have as many different kinds of poultry as they had separate compartments in their poultry yards. When rich men with large estates became interested in fancy poultry, they usually built large houses containing many small pens, each with its small yard, and bought a few of each known variety. ”

“ She stood up carefully and took a long look at her family. “I couldn’t have hatched out a better brood myself,” she said. “It is a queer thing for tables to take to hatching Chickens, but if that is the way it is to be [Pg 45] done on this farm, it will save me a great deal of time and be a good thing for my legs. It is lucky that this Man came here. The Farmer who left would never have thought of making a table sit on eggs and hatch them.”
[Pg 46]
THE MAN BUILDS A POULTRY-HOUSE It would be wrong to say that all the poultry on the farm really liked the Man. ”

“ Poultry is largely retailed alive although we saw much of it dressed and cooked to a uniform rich brown, apparently roasted, hanging exposed in the markets of the very narrow streets in Canton, shaded from the hot sun under awnings admitting light overhead through translucent oyster-shell latticework. ”

“ The most dreaded visitor on a poultry-farm is roup, for it not only affects the bird during the period of immediate illness, but it leaves behind it all sorts of constitutional weaknesses to the bird’s progeny. 88 Every poultry-keeper should cultivate the habit of scrutinising his or her flock at feed-times. ”

“ Young stock in cornfield on a fancier's farm
While farmers usually care more for horses, cattle, sheep, and hogs, many [Pg 122] become interested in poultry, and if they are natural fanciers and good business men, it often happens that the growing of fancy poultry becomes one of the most important industries on the farm. ”

“ Nor need we discuss the many varieties of poultry which, at the present time, so arrest the attention of many of our good country people; and we will leave so important a subject to the meditations of the "New England Poultry Society," who have taken the gallinaceous, and other tribes under their special cognizance, and will, doubtless, in due time, illumine the world with various knowledge in this department of rural economy, not yet "dreamt of in our philosophy." ”

“ They have also poultry, on which they set a high value, and which can only be bought for gunpowder, tobacco, salt, or glass-wares. They take especial care of their young fowls, collecting them every night in a sort of round basket, and carrying them into their huts to protect them from cold, and soon after sun-rise every morning, they are again set at liberty to run about round the house; they are seldom fed with grain of any kind, but live upon insects, herbs, and the grains of rice or millet, which fly out of the mortars while pounding. ”

“ Ah! in those times if the planter wished to live well he had to raise everything himself, and the poultry yard and the dairy were something curious to see. Dozens of slaves were kept busy in them constantly. When my mother had raised two thousand chickens, besides turkeys, ducks, geese, guinea-fowls, and pea-fowls, she said she had lost her crop. ”

“ In some villages the people also run across the sown fields and shake the ashes of the torches on the ground; also they put some of the ashes in the fowls' nests, in order that the hens may lay plenty of eggs throughout the year. When all these ceremonies have been performed, everybody goes home and feasts; the special dishes of the evening are fritters and pancakes.275 Here the application of the fire to the fruit-trees, to the sown fields, and to the nests of the poultry is clearly a charm intended to ensure fertility ”

“ As the brisk little figure moves across the farm-yard, it is instantly surrounded by a flock of poultry that seem intuitively to expect an alms at her hand, as do the poor Irish who haunt her dwelling. ”