Transcribed from the 1902 Gay and Bird edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

THE DIARY OF A GOOSE GIRL

by
KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN

with
illustrations by
CLAUDE A. SHEPPERSON

GAY AND BIRD
22 bedford street, strand
LONDON
1902

TO THE HENS, DUCKS, AND GEESE
WHO SO KINDLY GAVE ME
SITTINGS FOR THESE
SKETCHES THE BOOK
IS GRATEFULLY
INSCRIBED

CHAPTER I.

Thornycroft
Farm, near Barbury Green, July 1, 190-.

In alluding to myself as a Goose Girl, I am using only the
most modest of my titles; for I am also a poultry-maid, a tender
of Belgian hares and rabbits, and a shepherdess; but I
particularly fancy the rôle of Goose Girl, because it
recalls the German fairy tales of my early youth, when I always
yearned, but never hoped, to be precisely what I now am.

As I was jolting along these charming Sussex roads the other
day, a fat buff pony and a tippy cart being my manner of
progression, I chanced upon the village of Barbury Green.

One glance was enough for any woman, who, having eyes to see,
could see with them; but I made assurance doubly sure by driving
about a little, struggling to conceal my new-born passion from
the stable-boy who was my escort.  Then, it being high noon
of a cloudless day, I descended from the trap and said to the
astonished yokel: “You may go back to the Hydropathic; I am
spending a month or two here.  Wait a
moment—I’ll send a message, please!”

I then scribbled a word or two to those having me in
custody.

“I am very tired of people,” the note ran,
“and want to rest myself by living a while with
things.  Address me (if you must) at Barbury Green
post-office, or at all events send me a box of simple clothing
there—nothing but shirts and skirts, please.  I cannot
forget that I am only twenty miles from Oxenbridge (though it
might be one hundred and twenty, which is the reason I adore it),
but I rely upon you to keep an honourable distance yourselves,
and not to divulge my place of retreat to others, especially
to—you know whom!  Do not pursue me.  I will
never be taken alive!”

Having cut, thus, the cable that bound me to civilisation, and
having seen the buff pony and the dazed yokel disappear in a
cloud of dust, I looked about me with what Stevenson calls a
“fine, dizzy, muddle-headed joy,” the joy of a
successful rebel or a liberated serf.  Plenty of money in my
purse—that was unromantic, of course, but it simplified
matters—and nine hours of daylight remaining in which to
find a lodging.

The village is one of the oldest, and I am sure it must be one
of the quaintest, in England.  It is too small to be printed
on the map (an honour that has spoiled more than one Arcadia), so
pray do not look there, but just believe in it, and some day you
may be rewarded by driving into it by chance, as I did, and feel
the same Columbus thrill running, like an electric current,
through your veins.  I withhold specific geographical
information in order that you may not miss that Columbus thrill,
which comes too seldom in a world of railroads.

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.

The houses are set about the Green like those in a toy
village.  They are of old brick, with crumpled, up-and-down
roofs of deep-toned red, and tufts of stonecrop growing from the
eaves.  Diamond-paned windows, half open, admit the sweet
summer air; and as for the gardens in front, it would seem as if
the inhabitants had nothing to do but work in them, there is such
a riotous profusion of colour and bloom.  To add to the
effect, there are always pots of flowers hanging from the trees,
blue flax and yellow myrtle; and cages of Java sparrows and
canaries singing joyously, as well they may in such a
paradise.

The shops are idyllic, too, as if Nature had seized even the
man of trade and made him subservient to her designs.  The
general draper’s, where I fitted myself out for a day or
two quite easily, is set back in a tangle of poppies and sweet
peas, Madonna lilies and Canterbury bells.  The shop itself
has a gay awning, and what do you think the draper has suspended
from it, just as a picturesque suggestion to the passer-by? 
Suggestion I call it, because I should blush to use the word
advertisement in describing anything so dainty and
decorative.  Well, then, garlands of shoes, if you
please!  Baby bootlets of bronze; tiny ankle-ties in yellow,
blue, and scarlet kid; glossy patent-leather pumps shining in the
sun, with festoons of slippers at the corners, flowery slippers
in imitation Berlin wool-work.  If you make this picture in
your mind’s-eye, just add a window above the awning, and
over the fringe of marigolds in the window-box put the
draper’s wife dancing a rosy-cheeked baby.  Alas! my
words are only black and white, I fear, and this picture needs a
palette drenched in primary colours.

Along the street, a short distance, is the old
watchmaker’s.  Set in the hedge at the gate is a glass
case with Multum in Parvo painted on the woodwork. 
Within, a little stand of trinkets revolves slowly; as slowly, I
imagine, as the current of business in that quiet street. 
The house stands a trifle back and is covered thickly with ivy,
while over the entrance-door of the shop is a great round clock
set in a green frame of clustering vine.  The hands pointed
to one when I passed the watchmaker’s garden with its
thicket of fragrant lavender and its murmuring bees; so I went in
to the sign of the “Strong i’ the Arm” for some
cold luncheon, determining to patronise “The Running
Footman” at the very next opportunity.  Neither of
these inns is starred by Baedeker, and this fact adds the last
touch of enchantment to the picture.

The landlady at the “Strong i’ the Arm”
stabbed me in the heart by telling me that there were no
apartments to let in the village, and that she had no private
sitting-room in the inn; but she speedily healed the wound by
saying that I might be accommodated at one of the farm-houses in
the vicinity.  Did I object to a farm-’ouse? 
Then she could cheerfully recommend the Evan’s farm, only
’alf a mile away.  She ’ad understood from Miss
Phœbe Evan, who sold her poultry, that they would take one
lady lodger if she didn’t wish much waiting upon.

In my present mood I was in search of the strenuous life, and
eager to wait, rather than to be waited upon; so I walked along
the edge of the Green, wishing that some mentally unbalanced
householder would take a sudden fancy to me and ask me to come in
and lodge awhile.  I suppose these families live under their
roofs of peach-blow tiles, in the midst of their blooming
gardens, for a guinea a week or thereabouts; yet if they
“undertook” me (to use their own phrase), the bill
for my humble meals and bed would be at least double that. 
I don’t know that I blame them; one should have proper
compensation for admitting a world-stained lodger into such an
Eden.

When I was searching for rooms a week ago, I chanced upon a
pretty cottage where the woman had sometimes let
apartments.  She showed me the premises and asked me if I
would mind taking my meals in her own dining-room, where I could
be served privately at certain hours: and, since she had but the
one sitting-room, would I allow her to go on using it
occasionally? also, if I had no special preference, would I take
the second-sized bedroom and leave her in possession of the
largest one, which permitted her to have the baby’s crib by
her bedside?  She thought I should be quite as comfortable,
and it was her opinion that in making arrangements with lodgers,
it was a good plan not to “bryke up the ’ome any more
than was necessary.”

“Bryke up the ’ome!”  That is seemingly
the malignant purpose with which I entered Barbury Green.

CHAPTER II

July 4th.

Enter the family of Thornycroft Farm, of which I am already a
member in good and regular standing.

I introduce Mrs. Heaven first, for she is a self-saturated
person who would never forgive the insult should she receive any
lower place.

She welcomed me with the statement: “We do not take
lodgers here, nor boarders; no lodgers, nor boarders, but we do
occasionally admit paying guests, those who look as if they would
appreciate the quietude of the plyce and be willing as you might
say to remunerate according.”

I did not mind at this particular juncture what I was called,
so long as the epithet was comparatively unobjectionable, so I am
a paying guest, therefore, and I expect to pay handsomely for the
handsome appellation.  Mrs. Heaven is short and fat; she
fills her dress as a pin-cushion fills its cover; she wears a cap
and apron, and she is so full of platitudes that she would have
burst had I not appeared as a providential outlet for them. 
Her accent is not of the farm, but of the town, and smacks wholly
of the marts of trade.  She is repetitious, too, as well as
platitudinous.  “I ’ope if there’s
anythink you require you will let us know, let us know,”
she says several times each day; and whenever she enters my
sitting-room she prefaces her conversation with the remark:
“I trust you are finding it quiet here, miss? 
It’s the quietude of the plyce that is its charm, yes, the
quietude.  And yet” (she dribbles on) “it wears
on a body after a while, miss.  I often go into Woodmucket
to visit one of my sons just for the noise, simply for the noise,
miss, for nothink else in the world but the noise. 
There’s nothink like noise for soothing nerves that is worn
threadbare with the quietude, miss, or at least that’s my
experience; and yet to a strynger the quietude of the plyce is
its charm, undoubtedly its chief charm; and that is what our
paying guests always say, although our charges are somewhat
higher than other plyces.  If there’s anythink you
require, miss, I ’ope you’ll mention it.  There
is not a commodious assortment in Barbury Green, but we can
always send the pony to Woodmucket in case of urgency.  Our
paying guest last summer was a Mrs. Pollock, and she was by way
of having sudden fancies.  Young and unmarried though you
are, miss, I think you will tyke my meaning without my speaking
plyner?  Well, at six o’clock of a rainy afternoon,
she was seized with an unaccountable desire for vegetable
marrows, and Mr. ’Eaven put the pony in the cart and went
to Woodmucket for them, which is a great advantage to be so near
a town and yet ’ave the quietude.”

Mr. Heaven is merged, like Mr. Jellyby, in the more shining
qualities of his wife.  A line of description is too long
for him.  Indeed, I can think of no single word brief
enough, at least in English.  The Latin “nil”
will do, since no language is rich in words of less than three
letters.  He is nice, kind, bald, timid, thin, and so
colourless that he can scarcely be discerned save in a strong
light.  When Mrs. Heaven goes out into the orchard in search
of him, I can hardly help calling from my window, “Bear a
trifle to the right, Mrs. Heaven—now to the left—just
in front of you now—if you put out your hands you will
touch him.”

Phœbe, aged seventeen, is the daughter of the
house.  She is virtuous, industrious, conscientious, and
singularly destitute of physical charm.  She is more than
plain; she looks as if she had been planned without any definite
purpose in view, made of the wrong materials, been badly put
together, and never properly finished off; but
“plain” after all is a relative word.  Many a
plain girl has been married for her beauty; and now and then a
beauty, falling under a cold eye, has been thought plain.

Phœbe has her compensations, for she is beloved by, and
reciprocates the passion of, the Woodmancote carrier, Woodmucket
being the English manner of pronouncing the place of his
abode.  If he “carries” as energetically for the
great public as he fetches for Phœbe, then he must be a
rising and a prosperous man.  He brings her daily, wild
strawberries, cherries, birds’ nests, peacock feathers,
sea-shells, green hazel-nuts, samples of hens’ food, or
bouquets of wilted field flowers tied together tightly and held
with a large, moist, loving hand.  He has fine curly hair of
sandy hue, which forms an aureole on his brow, and a reddish
beard, which makes another inverted aureole to match, round his
chin.  One cannot look at him, especially when the sun
shines through him, without thinking how lovely he would be if
stuffed and set on wheels, with a little string to drag him
about.

Phœbe confided to me that she was on the eve of loving
the postman when the carrier came across her horizon.

“It doesn’t do to be too hysty, does it,
miss?” she asked me as we were weeding the onion bed. 
“I was to give the postman his answer on the Monday night,
and it was on the Monday morning that Mr. Gladwish made his first
trip here as carrier.  I may say I never wyvered from that
moment, and no more did he.  When I think how near I came to
promising the postman it gives me a turn.”  (I can
understand that, for I once met the man I nearly promised years
before to marry, and we both experienced such a sense of relief
at being free instead of bound that we came near falling in love
for sheer joy.)

The last and most important member of the household is the
Square Baby.  His name is Albert Edward, and he is really
five years old and no baby at all; but his appearance on this
planet was in the nature of a complete surprise to all parties
concerned, and he is spoiled accordingly.  He has a square
head and jaw, square shoulders, square hands and feet.  He
is red and white and solid and stolid and slow-witted, as the
young of his class commonly are, and will make a bulwark of the
nation in course of time, I should think; for England has to
produce a few thousand such square babies every year for use in
the colonies and in the standing army.  Albert Edward has
already a military gait, and when he has acquired a habit of
obedience at all comparable with his power of command, he will be
able to take up the white man’s burden with distinguished
success.  Meantime I can never look at him without
marvelling how the English climate can transmute bacon and eggs,
tea and the solid household loaf into such radiant roses and
lilies as bloom upon his cheeks and lips.

CHAPTER III

July 8th.

Thornycroft is by way of being a small poultry farm.

In reaching it from Barbury Green, you take the first
left-hand road, go till you drop, and there you are.

It reminds me of my “grandmother’s farm at
Older.”  Did you know the song when you were a
child?—

My grandmother had a very fine farm
   ‘Way down in the fields of Older.
      With a cluck-cluck here,
      And a cluck-cluck there,
      Here and there a cluck-cluck,
      Cluck-cluck here and there,
   Down in the fields at Older.

It goes on for ever by the simple subterfuge of changing a few
words in each verse.

My grandmother had a very fine farm
   ‘Way down in the fields of Older.
      With a quack-quack here,
      And a quack-quack there,
      Here and there a quack-quack,
      Quack-quack here and there,
   Down in the fields at Older.

This is followed by the gobble-gobble, moo-moo, baa-baa, etc.,
as long as the laureate’s imagination and the
infant’s breath hold good.  The tune is pretty, and I
do not know, or did not, when I was young, a more fascinating
lyric.

Thornycroft House must have belonged to a country gentleman
once upon a time, or to more than one; men who built on a bit
here and there once in a hundred years, until finally we have
this charmingly irregular and dilapidated whole.  You go up
three steps into Mrs. Heaven’s room, down two into mine,
while Phœbe’s is up in a sort of turret with long,
narrow lattices opening into the creepers.  There are
crooked little stair-cases, passages that branch off into other
passages and lead nowhere in particular; I can’t think of a
better house in which to play hide and seek on a wet day. 
In front, what was once, doubtless, a green, is cut up into
greens; to wit, a vegetable garden, where the onions, turnips,
and potatoes grow cosily up to the very door-sill; the
utilitarian aspect of it all being varied by some scarlet-runners
and a scattering of poppies on either side of the path.

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.  Mrs. Heaven would be
of use, but she is dressing the Square Baby in the morning and
putting him to bed at night just at the hours when the feathered
young things are undergoing the same operation.

A Goose Girl, like a poet, is sometimes born, sometimes
otherwise.  I am of the born variety.  No training was
necessary; I put my head on my pillow as a complicated product of
modern civilisation on a Tuesday night, and on a Wednesday
morning I awoke as a Goose Girl.

My destiny slumbered during the day, but at eight
o’clock I heard a terrific squawking in the direction of
the duck-ponds, and, aimlessly drifting in that direction, I came
upon Phœbe trying to induce ducks and drakes, geese and
ganders, to retire for the night.  They have to be driven
into enclosures behind fences of wire netting, fastened into
little rat-proof boxes, or shut into separate coops, so as to be
safe from their natural enemies, the rats and foxes; which,
obeying, I suppose, the law of supply and demand, abound in this
neighbourhood.  The old ganders are allowed their liberty,
being of such age, discretion, sagacity, and pugnacity that they
can be trusted to fight their own battles.

The intelligence of hens, though modest, is of such an order
that it prompts them to go to bed at a virtuous hour of their own
accord; but ducks and geese have to be materially assisted, or I
believe they would roam till morning.  Never did small boy
detest and resist being carried off to his nursery as these
dullards, young and old, detest and resist being driven to
theirs.  Whether they suffer from insomnia, or nightmare, or
whether they simply prefer the sweet air of liberty (and death)
to the odour of captivity and the coop, I have no means of
knowing.

Phœbe stood by one of the duck-ponds, a long pole in her
hand, and a helpless expression in that doughlike countenance of
hers, where aimless contours and features unite to make a kind of
facial blur.  (What does the carrier see in it?)  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; and if, when victory perches upon my
banner, the somebody can be brought to say that he ought to have
done it without my making him, that adds the unforgettable touch
to pleasure, though seldom, alas! does it happen.  Then
ensued the delightful and stimulating hour that has now become a
feature of the day; an hour in which the remembrance of the
table-d’hôte dinner at the Hydro, going on at
identically the same time, only stirs me to a keener joy and
gratitude.

The ducks swim round in circles, hide under the willows, and
attempt to creep into the rat-holes in the banks, a stupidity so
crass that it merits instant death, which it somehow always
escapes.  Then they come out in couples and waddle under the
wrong fence into the lower meadow, fly madly under the
tool-house, pitch blindly in with the sitting hens, and out again
in short order, all the time quacking and squawking, honking and
hissing like a bewildered orchestra.  By dint of splashing
the water with poles, throwing pebbles, beating the shrubs at the
pond’s edges, “shooing” frantically with our
skirts, crawling beneath bars to head them off, and prodding them
from under bushes to urge them on, we finally get the older ones
out of the water and the younger ones into some sort of relation
to their various retreats; but, owing to their lack of geography,
hatred of home, and general recalcitrancy, they none of them turn
up in the right place and have to be sorted out.  We uncover
the top of the little house, or the enclosure as it may be, or
reach in at the door, and, seizing the struggling victim, drag
him forth and take him where he should have had the wit to go in
the first instance.  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.

Finally, when we have separated and sorted exhaustively, an
operation in which Phœbe shows a delicacy of discrimination
and a fearlessness of attack amounting to genius, we count the
entire number and find several missing.  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.

“Poor think!” says Phœbe tearfully;
“it looks as if it was ’it with some kind of a
wepping.  I don’t know whatever to do with the rats,
they’re gettin’ that fearocious!”

Before I was admitted into daily contact with the living goose
(my previous intercourse with him having been carried on when
gravy and stuffing obscured his true personality), I thought him
a very Dreyfus among fowls, a sorely slandered bird, to whom
justice had never been done; for even the gentle Darwin is hard
upon him.  My opinion is undergoing some slight
modifications, but I withhold judgment at present, hoping that
some of the follies, faults, vagaries, and limitations that I
observe in Phœbe’s geese may be due to
Phœbe’s educational methods, which were, before my
advent, those of the darkest ages.

CHAPTER IV

July 9th.

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 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.

The nature of the hen seems to broaden with the duties of
maternity, but I think myself that we presume a little upon her
amiability and natural motherliness.  It is one thing to
desire a family of one’s own, to lay eggs with that idea in
view, to sit upon them three long weeks and hatch out and bring
up a nice brood of chicks.  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 on the brink of which she must ever
stand, uttering dryshod warnings which are never heeded. 
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.

The brown hen that we have named Cornelia is the best mother,
the one who waits longest and most patiently for the web-footed
Gracchi to finish their swim.

When a chick is taken out of the incubytor (as Phœbe
calls it) and refused by all the other hens, Cornelia generally
accepts it, though she had twelve of her own when we began using
her as an orphan asylum.  “Wings are made to
stretch,” she seems to say cheerfully, and with a kind
glance of her round eye she welcomes the wanderer and the
outcast.  She even tended for a time the offspring of an
absent-minded, light-headed pheasant who flew over a four-foot
wall and left her young behind her to starve; it was not a New
Pheasant, either; for the most conservative and old-fashioned of
her tribe occasionally commits domestic solecisms of this
sort.

There is no telling when, where, or how the maternal instinct
will assert itself.  Among our Thornycroft cats is a certain
Mrs. Greyskin.  She had not been seen for many days, and
Mrs. Heaven concluded that she had hidden herself somewhere with
a family of kittens; but as the supply of that article with us
more than equals the demand, we had not searched for her with
especial zeal.

The other day Mrs. Greyskin appeared at the dairy door, and
when she had been fed Phœbe and I followed her stealthily,
from a distance.  She walked slowly about as if her mind
were quite free from harassing care, and finally approached a
deserted cow-house where there was a great mound of straw. 
At this moment she caught sight of us and turned in another
direction to throw us off the scent.  We persevered in our
intention of going into her probable retreat, and were cautiously
looking for some sign of life in the haymow, when we heard a soft
cackle and a ruffling of plumage.  Coming closer to the
sound we saw a black hen brooding a nest, her bright bead eyes
turning nervously from side to side; and, coaxed out from her
protecting wings by youthful curiosity, came four kittens, eyes
wide open, warm, happy, ready for sport!

The sight was irresistible, and Phœbe ran for Mr. and
Mrs. Heaven and the Square Baby.  Mother Hen was not to be
embarrassed or daunted, even if her most sacred feelings were
regarded in the light of a cheap entertainment.  She held
her ground while one of the kits slid up and down her glossy
back, and two others, more timid, crept underneath her breast,
only daring to put out their pink noses!  We retired then
for very shame and met Mrs. Greyskin in the doorway.  This
should have thickened the plot, but there is apparently no
rivalry nor animosity between the co-mothers.  We watch them
every day now, through a window in the roof.  Mother
Greyskin visits the kittens frequently, lies down beside the home
nest, and gives them their dinner.  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.  I
cannot endure the term, and will not use it.  “Now for
the April chicks,” I say every evening.

“Do you mean the broilers?” asks Phœbe.

“I mean the big April chicks,” say I.

“Yes, them are the broilers,” says she.

But is it not disagreeable enough to be a broiler when
one’s time comes, without having the gridiron waved in
one’s face for weeks beforehand?

The April chicks are all lively and desirous of seeing the
world as thoroughly as possible before going to roost or
broil.  As a general thing, we find in the large house
sixteen young fowls of the contemplative, flavourless,
resigned-to-the-inevitable variety; three more (the same three
every night) perch on the roof and are driven down; four (always
the same four) cling to the edge of the open door, waiting to fly
off, but not in, when you attempt to close it; nine huddle
together on a place in the grass about forty feet distant, where
a small coop formerly stood in the prehistoric ages.  This
small coop was one in which they lodged for a fortnight when they
were younger, and when those absolutely indelible impressions are
formed of which we read in educational maxims.  It was taken
away long since, but the nine loyal (or stupid) Casabiancas cling
to the sacred spot where its foundations rested; they accordingly
have to be caught and deposited bodily in the house, and this
requires strategy, as they note our approach from a considerable
distance.

Finally all are housed but two, the little white cock and the
black pullet, who are still impish and of a wandering mind. 
Though headed off in every direction, they fly into the hedges
and hide in the underbrush.  We beat the hedge on the other
side, but with no avail.  We dive into the thicket of wild
roses, sweetbrier, and thistles on our hands and knees, coming
out with tangled hair, scratched noses, and no hens.  Then,
when all has been done that human ingenuity can suggest,
Phœbe goes to her late supper and I do sentry-work.  I
stroll to a safe distance, and, sitting on one of the rat-proof
boxes, watch the bushes with an eagle eye.  Five minutes go
by, ten, fifteen; and then out steps the white cock, stealthily
tiptoeing toward the home into which he refused to go at our
instigation.  In a moment out creeps the obstinate little
beast of a black pullet from the opposite clump.  The
wayward pair meet at their own door, which I have left open a few
inches.  When all is still I walk gently down the field,
and, warned by previous experiences, approach the house from
behind.  I draw the door to softly and quickly; but not so
quickly that the evil-minded and suspicious black pullet
hasn’t time to spring out, with a make-believe squawk of
fright—that induces three other blameless chickens to fly
down from their perches and set the whole flock in a
flutter.  Then I fall from grace and call her a Broiler; and
when, after some minutes of hot pursuit, I catch her by falling
over her in the corner by the goose-pen, I address her as a fat,
juicy Broiler with parsley butter and a bit of bacon.

CHAPTER V

July 10th.

At ten thirty or so in the morning the cackling begins. 
I wonder exactly what it means!  Have the forest-lovers who
listen so respectfully to, and interpret so exquisitely, the
notes of birds—have none of them made psychological
investigations of the hen cackle?  Can it be simple
elation?  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.  As for a soft-shelled egg, it is so rare an
occurrence that the fear of laying one could not set the whole
race of hens in a panic; so there really cannot be any
intellectual or emotional agitation in producing a thing that
might be made by a machine.  Can it be simply
“fussiness”; since the people who have the least to
do commonly make the most flutter about doing it?

Perhaps it is merely conversation. 
“Cut-cut-cut-cut-cut-DAHcut! . . . I have
finished my strictly fresh egg, have you laid yours?  Make
haste, then, for the cock has found a gap in the wire-fence and
wants us to wander in the strawberry-bed. . . .
Cut-cut-cut-cut-cut-DAHcut . . . Every moment is precious,
for the Goose Girl will find us, when she gathers the
strawberries for her luncheon . . . Cut-cut-cut-cut!  On the
way out we can find sweet places to steal nests . . .
Cut-cut-cut! . . . I am so glad I am not sitting this heavenly
morning; it is a dull life.”

A Lancashire poultryman drifted into Barbury Green
yesterday.  He is an old acquaintance of Mr. Heaven, and
spent the night and part of the next day at Thornycroft
Farm.  He possessed a deal of fowl philosophy, and tells
many a good hen story, which, like fish stories, draw rather
largely on the credulity of the audience.  We were sitting
in the rickyard talking comfortably about laying and cackling and
kindred matters when he took his pipe from his mouth and told us
the following tale—not a bad one if you can translate the
dialect:—

‘Aw were once towd as, if yo’ could only get
th’ hen’s egg away afooar she hed sin it, th’
hen ’ud think it hed med a mistek an’ sit deawn
ageean an’ lay another.

“An’ it seemed to me it were a varra sensible way
o’ lukkin’ at it.  Sooa aw set to wark to mek a
nest as ’ud tek a rise eawt o’ th’ hens. 
An’ aw dud it too.  Aw med a nest wi’ a fause
bottom, th’ idea bein’ as when a hen hed laid,
th’ egg ’ud drop through into a box underneyth.

“Aw felt varra preawd o’ that nest, too, aw con
tell yo’, an’ aw remember aw felt quite excited when
aw see an awd black Minorca, th’ best layer as aw hed, gooa
an’ settle hersel deawn i’ th’ nest an’
get ready for wark.  Th’ hen seemed quite comfortable
enough, aw were glad to see, an’ geet through th’
operation beawt ony seemin’ trouble.

“Well, aw darsay yo’ know heaw a hen carries on as
soon as it’s laid a egg.  It starts
“chuckin’” away like a showman’s racket,
an’ after tekkin’ a good Ink at th’ egg to see
whether it’s a big ’un or a little ’un, gooas
eawt an’ tells all t’other hens abeawt it.

“Neaw, this black Minorca, as aw sed, were a owdish
bird, an’ maybe knew mooar than aw thowt.  Happen it
hed laid on a nest wi’ a fause bottom afooar, an’
were up to th’ trick, but whether or not, aw never see a
hen luk mooar disgusted i’ mi life when it lukked i’
th’ nest an’ see as it hed hed all that trouble fer
nowt.

“It woked reawnd th’ nest as if it couldn’t
believe its own eyes.

“But it dudn’t do as aw expected.  Aw
expected as it ’ud sit deawn ageean an’ lay
another.

“But it just gi’e one wonderin’ sooart
o’ chuck, an then, after a long stare reawnd th’
hen-coyt, it woked eawt, as mad a hen as aw’ve ever
sin.  Aw fun’ eawt after, what th’ long stare
meant.  It were tekkin’ farewell!  For if
yo’ll believe me that hen never laid another egg i’
ony o’ my nests.

“Varra like it laid away in a spot wheear it could hev
summat to luk at when it hed done wark for th’ day.

“Sooa aw lost mi best layer through mi actin’,
an’ aw’ve never invented owt sen.”

CHAPTER VI

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.  The head of
the house has a most languid and self-conscious strut, and his
microscopic mind is fixed entirely on his splendid trailing
tail.  If I could only master his language sufficiently to
tell him how hideously ugly the back view of this gorgeous fan
is, when he spreads it for the edification of the observer in
front of him, he would of course retort that there is a
“congregation side” to everything, but I should at
least force him into a defence of his tail and a confession of
its limitations.  This would be new and unpleasant, I fancy;
and if it produced no perceptible effect upon his super-arrogant
demeanour, I might remind him that he is likely to be used,
eventually, for a feather duster, unless, indeed, the Heavens are
superstitious and prefer to throw his tail away, rather than
bring ill luck and the evil eye into the house.

The longer I study the cock, whether Black Spanish, White
Leghorn, Dorking, or the common barnyard fowl, the more
intimately I am acquainted with him, the less I am impressed with
his character.  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.  He has no particular chivalry.  He
gives no special encouragement to his hen when he becomes a
prospective father, and renders little assistance when the
responsibilities become actualities.  His only personal
message or contribution to the world is his raucous
cock-a-doodle-doo, which, being uttered most frequently at dawn,
is the most ill-timed and offensive of all musical notes. 
It is so unnecessary too, as if the day didn’t come soon
enough without his warning; but I suppose he is anxious to waken
his hens and get them at their daily task, and so he disturbs the
entire community.  In short, I dislike him; his swagger, his
autocratic strut, his greed, his irritating self-consciousness,
his endless parading of himself up and down in a procession of
one.

Of course his character is largely the result of
polygamy.  His weaknesses are only what might be expected;
and as for the hens, I have considerable respect for the
patience, sobriety, and dignity with which they endure an
institution particularly offensive to all women.  In their
case they do not even have the sustaining thought of its being an
article of religion, so they are to be complimented the more.

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.  There is a great oak-tree in
one corner, with a tall ladder leaning against its trunk, and a
capital roosting-place on a long branch running at right angles
with the ladder.  I try to spend a quarter of an hour there
every night before supper, just for the pleasure of seeing the
feathered “women-folks” mount that ladder.

A dozen of them surround the foot, waiting restlessly for
their turn.  One little white lady flutters up on the lowest
round and perches there until she reviews the past, faces the
present, and forecasts the future; during which time she is
gathering courage for the next jump.  She cackles, takes up
one foot and then the other, tilts back and forth, holds up her
skirts and drops them again, cocks her head nervously to see
whether they are all staring at her below, gives half a dozen
preliminary springs which mean nothing, declares she can’t
and won’t go up any faster, unties her bonnet strings and
pushes back her hair, pulls down her dress to cover her toes, and
finally alights on the next round, swaying to and fro until she
gains her equilibrium, when she proceeds to enact the same scene
over again.

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 next hen, stirred to the depths by this speech,
flies up entirely too fast, loses her head, tumbles off the top
round, and has to make the ascent over again.  Thus it goes
on and on, this petite comédie humaine, and I could
enjoy it with my whole heart if Mr. Heaven did not insist on
sharing the spectacle with me.  He is so inexpressibly dull,
so destitute of humour, that I did not think it likely he would
see in the performance anything more than a flock of hens going
up a ladder to roost.  But he did; for there is no man so
blind that he cannot see the follies of women; and, when he
forgot himself so far as to utter a few genial, silly, well-worn
reflections upon femininity at large, I turned upon him and
revealed to him some of the characteristics of his own sex,
gained from an exhaustive study of the barnyard fowl of the
masculine gender.  He went into the house discomfited,
though chuckling a little at my vehemence; but at least I have
made it for ever impossible for him to watch his hens without an
occasional glance at the cocks.

CHAPTER VII

July 12th.

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; hens’
hearts must obey the same laws that govern the rotation of
crops.  Catherine of Aragon feels her lot a bitter one just
now, but in time she will succumb, and lay, which is more to the
point.

We have had a very busy evening, beginning with the
rats’ supper—delicate sandwiches of bread-and-butter
spread with Paris green.

We have a new brood of seventeen ducklings just hatched this
afternoon.  When we came to the nest the yellow and brown
bunches of down and fluff were peeping out from under the
hen’s wings in the prettiest fashion in the world.

“It’s a noble hen!” I said to
Phœbe.

“She ain’t so nowble as she looks,”
Phœbe answered grimly.  “It was another
’en that brooded these eggs for near on three weeks and
then this big one come along with a fancy she’d like a
family ’erself if she could steal one without too much
trouble; so she drove the rightful ’en off the nest,
finished up the last few days, and ’ere she is in
possession of the ducklings!”

“Why don’t you take them away from her and give
them back to the first hen, who did most of the work?” I
asked, with some spirit.

“Like as not she wouldn’t tyke them now,”
said Phœbe, as she lifted the hen off the broken egg-shells
and moved her gently into a clean box, on a bed of fresh
hay.  We put food and drink within reach of the family, and
very proud and handsome that highway robber of a hen looked, as
she stretched her wings over the seventeen easily-earned
ducklings.

Going back to the old nesting-box, I found one egg forgotten
among the shells.  It was still warm, and I took it up to
run across the field with it to Phœbe.  It was heavy,
and the carrying of it was a queer sensation, inasmuch as it
squirmed and “yipped” vociferously in transit,
threatening so unmistakably to hatch in my hand that I was
decidedly nervous.  The intrepid little youngster burst his
shell as he touched Phœbe’s apron, and has become the
strongest and handsomest of the brood.

All this tending of downy young things, this feeding and
putting to bed, this petting and nursing and rearing, is such
pretty, comforting woman’s work.  I am sure
Phœbe will make a better wife to the carrier for having
been a poultry-maid, and though good enough for most practical
purposes when I came here, I am an infinitely better woman
now.  I am afraid I was not particularly nice the last few
days at the Hydro.  Such a lot of dull, prosy, inquisitive,
bothering old tabbies!  Aunt Margaret furnishing imaginary
symptoms enough to keep a fond husband and two trained nurses
distracted; a man I had never encouraged in my life coming to
stay in the neighbourhood and turning up daily for rejection;
another man taking rooms at the very hotel with the avowed
purpose of making my life a burden; and on the heels of both, a
widow of thirty-five in full chase!  Small wonder I thought
it more dignified to retire than to compete, and so I did.

I need not, however, have cut the threads that bound me to
Oxenbridge with such particularly sharp scissors, nor given them
such a vicious snap; for, so far as I can observe, the little
world of which I imagined myself the sun continues to revolve,
and, probably, about some other centre.  I can well imagine
who has taken up that delightful but somewhat exposed and
responsible position—it would be just like her!

I am perfectly happy where I am; it is not that; but it seems
so strange that they can be perfectly happy without me, after all
that they—after all that was said on the subject not many
days ago.  Nothing turns out as one expects.  There
have been no hot pursuits, no rewards offered, no bills posted,
no printed placards issued describing the beauty and charms of a
young person who supposed herself the cynosure of every
eye.  Heigh-ho!  What does it matter, after all? 
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.  They would be far nicer to cuddle, too, so small
and graceful and light; the changelings are a trifle solid and
brawny.  And personally, just as a matter of taste, would
she not prefer wee, round, glancing heads, and pointed beaks,
peeping from under her wings, to these teaspoon-shaped things
larger than her own?  I wonder!

We are training fourteen large young chickens to sit on the
perches in their new house, instead of huddling together on the
floor as has been their habit, because we discover rat-holes
under the wire flooring occasionally, and fear that toes may be
bitten.  At nine o’clock Phœbe and I lift the
chickens one by one, and, as it were, glue them to their perches,
squawking.  Three nights have we gone patiently through with
this performance, but they have not learned the lesson.  The
ducks and geese are, however, greatly improved by the application
of advanced educational methods, and the régime of
perfect order and system instituted by Me begins to show
results.

There is no more violent splashing and pebbling, racing,
chasing, separating.  The pole, indeed, still has to be
produced, but at the first majestic wave of my hand they scuttle
toward the shore.  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.

“I consider it a great waste of time, of good time,
miss,” she said; “and, after all, do you consider
that educated poultry will be any better eating, or that it will
lay more than one egg a day, miss?”

I have given the matter some attention, and I fear Mrs. 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.  Whether the product of
the intelligent, conscious, logical fowl, will be as rich in
quality as that of the uneducated and barbaric bird, I cannot
say; but it ought at least to be equal to the Denmark egg eaten
now by all Londoners; and if, perchance, left uneaten, it is
certain to be a very superior wife and mother.

While we are discussing the subject of educating poultry, I
confess that the case of Cannibal Ann gives me much
anxiety.  Twice in her short career has she been under
suspicion of eating her own eggs, but Phœbe has never
succeeded in catching her in flagrante delicto.  That
eminent detective service was reserved for me, and I have been
haunted by the picture ever since.  It is an awful sight to
witness a hen gulp her own newly-laid fresh egg, yolk, white,
shell, and all; to realise that you have fed, sheltered, chased,
and occasionally run in, a being possessed of no moral sense, a
being likely to set a bad example, inculcate vicious habits among
her innocent sisters, and lower the standard of an entire
poultry-yard.  The Young Poultry Keeper’s
Friend gives us no advice on this topic, and we do not know
whether to treat Cannibal Ann as the victim of a disease, or as a
confirmed criminal; whether to administer remedies or cut her off
in the flower of her youth.

We have had a sad scene to-night.  A chick has been
ailing all day, and when we shut up the brood we found him dead
in a corner.

Phœbe put him on the ground while she busied herself
about the coop.  The other chicks came out and walked about
the dead one again and again, eyeing him curiously.

“Poor little chap!” said Phœbe. 
“’E’s never ’ad a mother!  ’E
was an incubytor chicken, and wherever I took ’im ’e
was picked at.  There was somethink wrong with ’im;
’e never was a fyvorite!”

I put the fluffy body into a hole in the turf, and strewed a
handful of grass over him.  “Sad little
epitaph!” I thought.  “He never was a
fyvorite!”

CHAPTER VIII

July 13th.

I like to watch the Belgian hares eating their trifolium or
pea-pods or grass; graceful, gentle things they are, crowding
about Mr. Heaven, and standing prettily, not greedily, on their
hind legs, to reach for the clover, their delicate nostrils and
whiskers all a-quiver with excitement.

As I look out of my window in the dusk I can see one of the
mothers galloping across the enclosure, the soft white lining of
her tail acting as a beacon-light to the eight infant hares
following her, a quaint procession of eight white spots in it
glancing line.  In the darkest night those baby creatures
could follow their mother through grass or hedge or thicket, and
she would need no warning note to show them where to flee in case
of danger.  “All you have to do is to follow the white
night-light that I keep in the lining of my tail,” she
says, when she is giving her first maternal lectures; and it
seems a beneficent provision of Nature.  To be sure, Mr.
Heaven took his gun and went out to shoot wild rabbits to-day,
and I noted that he marked them by those same self-betraying
tails, as they scuttled toward their holes or leaped toward the
protecting cover of the hedge; so it does not appear whether
Nature is on the side of the farmer or the rabbit . . .

There is as much comedy and as much tragedy in poultry life as
anywhere, and already I see rifts within lutes.  We have in
a cage a French gentleman partridge married to a Hungarian lady
of defective sight.  He paces back and forth in the pen
restlessly, anything but content with the domestic
fireside.  One can see plainly that he is devoted to the
Boulevards, and that if left to his own inclinations he would
never have chosen any spouse but a thorough Parisienne.

The Hungarian lady is blind of one eye, from some stray shot,
I suppose.  She is melancholy at all times, and occasionally
goes so far as to beat her head against the wire netting. 
If liberated, Mr. Heaven says that her blindness would only
expose her to death at the hands of the first sportsman, and it
always seems to me as if she knows this, and is ever trying to
decide whether a loveless marriage is any better than the
tomb.

Then, again, the great, grey gander is, for some mysterious
reason, out of favour with the entire family.  He is a noble
and amiable bird, by far the best all-round character in the
flock, for dignity of mien and large-minded common-sense. 
What is the treatment vouchsafed to this blameless husband and
father?  One that puts anybody out of sorts with virtue and
its scant rewards.  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.  The lack of harmony is so evident here, and the
slight so intentional and direct, that it almost moves me to
tears.  The others walk soberly, always in couples, but even
Burd Alane’s rightful spouse is on the side of the
majority, and avoids her consort.

What is the nature of his offence?  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.

* * * * *

Phœbe has not a vestige of sentiment.  She just
asked me if I would have a duckling or a gosling for dinner; that
there were two quite ready—the brown and yellow duckling,
that is the last to leave the water at night, and the white
gosling that never knows his own ’ouse.  Which would I
’ave, and would I ’ave it with sage and onion?

Now, had I found a duckling on the table at dinner I should
have eaten it without thinking at all, or with the thought that
it had come from Barbury Green.  But eat a duckling that I
have stoned out of the pond, pursued up the bank, chased behind
the wire netting, caught, screaming, in a corner, and carried
struggling to his bed?  Feed upon an idiot gosling that I
have found in nine different coops on nine successive
nights—in with the newly-hatched chicks, the half-grown
pullets, the setting hen, the “invaleed goose,” the
drake with the gapes, the old ducks in the pen?—Eat a
gosling that I have caught and put in with his brothers and
sisters (whom he never recognises) so frequently and regularly
that I am familiar with every joint in his body?

In the first place, with my own small bump of locality and
lack of geography, I would never willingly consume a creature who
might, by some strange process of assimilation, make me worse in
this respect; in the second place, I should have to be ravenous
indeed to sit down deliberately and make a meal of an intimate
friend, no matter if I had not a high opinion of his
intelligence.  I should as soon think of eating the Square
Baby, stuffed with sage and onion and garnished with green
apple-sauce, as the yellow duckling or the idiot gosling.

Mrs. Heaven has just called me into her sitting-room,
ostensibly to ask me to order breakfast, but really for the
pleasure of conversation.  Why she should inquire whether I
would relish some gammon of bacon with eggs, when she knows that
there has not been, is not now, and never will be, anything but
gammon of bacon with eggs, is more than I can explain.

“Would you like to see my flowers, miss?” she
asks, folding her plump hands over her white apron. 
“They are looking beautiful this morning.  I am so
fond of potted plants, of plants in pots.  Look at these
geraniums!  Now, I consider that pink one a perfect bloom;
yes, a perfect bloom.  This is a fine red one, is it not,
miss?  Especially fine, don’t you think?  The
trouble with the red variety is that they’re apt to get
“bobby” and have to be washed regularly; quite bobby
they do get indeed, I assure you.  That white one has just
gone out of blossom, and it was really wonderful.  You could
’ardly have told it from a paper flower, miss, not from a
white paper flower.  My plants are my children nowadays,
since Albert Edward is my only care.  I have been the mother
of eleven children, miss, all of them living, so far as I know; I
know nothing to the contrary.  I ’ope you are not
wearying of this solitary place, miss?  It will grow upon
you, I am sure, as it did upon Mrs. Pollock, with all her
peculiar fancies, and as it ’as grown upon us.—We
formerly had a butcher’s shop in Buffington, and it was
naturally a great responsibility.  Mr. 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;
always complaining if livers are not sent with every fowl, always
asking you to remember the trimmin’s, always wanting their
beef well ’ung, and then if you ’ang it a minute too
long, it’s left on your ’ands!  I often used to
say to Mr. Heaven, yes many’s the time I’ve said it,
that if people would think more of the great ’ereafter and
less about their own little stomachs, it would be a deal better
for them, yes, a deal better, and make it much more comfortable
for the butchers!”

* * * * *

Burd Alane has had a good quarter of an hour to-day.

His spouse took a brief promenade with him.  To be sure,
it was during an absence of the flock on the other side of the
hedge so that the moral effect of her spasm of wifely loyalty was
quite lost upon them.  I strongly suspect that she would not
have granted anything but a secret interview.  What a petty,
weak, ignoble character!  I really don’t like to think
so badly of any fellow-creature as I am forced to think of that
politic, time-serving, pusillanimous goose.  I believe she
laid the egg that produced the idiot gosling!

CHAPTER IX

Here follows the true story of Sir Muscovy Drake, the Lady
Blanche, and Miss Malardina Crippletoes.

Phœbe’s flock consisted at first mostly of Brown
Mallards, but a friend gave her a sitting of eggs warranted to
produce a most beautiful variety of white ducks.  They were
hatched in due time, but proved hard to raise, till at length
there was only one survivor, of such uncommon grace and beauty
that we called her the Lady Blanche.  Presently a neighbour
sold Phœbe his favourite Muscovy drake, and these two
splendid creatures by “natural selection” disdained
to notice the rest of the flock, but forming a close friendship,
wandered in the pleasant paths of duckdom together, swimming and
eating quite apart from the others.

In the brown flock there was one unfortunate, misshapen from
the egg, quite lame, and with no smoothness of plumage; but on
that very account, apparently, or because she was too weak to
resist them, the others treated her cruelly, biting her and
pushing her away from the food.

One day it happened that the two ducks—Sir Muscovy and
Lady Blanche—had come up from the water before the others,
and having taken their repast were sitting together under the
shade of a flowering currant-bush, when they chanced to see poor
Miss Crippletoes very badly used and crowded away from the
dish.  Sir Muscovy rose to his feet; a few rapid words
seemed to pass between him and his mate, and then he fell upon
the other drake and the heartless minions who had persecuted the
helpless one, drove them far away out of sight, and, returning,
went to the corner where the victim was cowering, her face to the
wall.  He seemed to whisper to her, or in some way to convey
to her a sense of protection; for after a few moments she
tremblingly went with him to the dish, and hurriedly ate her
dinner while he stood by, repulsing the advances of the few brown
ducks who remained near and seemed inclined to attack her.

When she had eaten enough Lady Blanche joined them, and they
went down the hill together to their favourite
swimming-place.  After that Miss Crippletoes always followed
a little behind her protectors, and thus shielded and fed she
grew stronger and well-feathered, though she was always smaller
than she should have been and had a lowly manner, keeping a few
steps in the rear of her superiors and sitting at some distance
from their noon resting-place.

Phœbe noticed after a while that Lady Blanche was seldom
to be seen, and Sir Muscovy and Miss Crippletoes often came to
their meals without her.  The would-be mother refused to
inhabit the house Phœbe had given her, and for a long time
the place she had chosen for her sitting could not be
found.  At length the Square Baby discovered her in a most
ideal spot.  A large boulder had dropped years ago into the
brook that fills our duck-pond; dropped and split in halves with
the two smooth walls leaning away from each other.  A grassy
bank towered behind, and on either side of the opening, tall
bushes made a miniature forest where the romantic mother could
brood her treasures while her two guardians enjoyed the water
close by her retreat.

All this happened before my coming to Thornycroft Farm, but it
was I who named the hero and heroines of the romance when
Phœbe had told me all the particulars.  Yesterday
morning I was sitting by my open window.  It was warm,
sunny, and still, but in the country sounds travel far, and I
could hear fowl conversation in various parts of the poultry-yard
as well as in all the outlying bits of territory occupied by our
feathered friends.  Hens have only three words and a scream
in their language, but ducks, having more thoughts to express,
converse quite fluently, so fluently, in fact, that it reminds me
of dinner at the Hydropathic Hotel.  I fancy I have learned
to distinguish seven separate sounds, each varied by degrees of
intensity, and with upward or downward inflections like the
Chinese tongue.

In the distance, then, I heard the faint voice of a duck
calling as if breathless and excited.  While I wondered what
was happening, I saw Miss Crippletoes struggling up the steep
bank above the duck-pond.  It was the quickest way from the
water to the house, but difficult for the little lame webbed
feet.  When she reached the level grass sward she sank down
a moment, exhausted; but when she could speak again she cried
out, a sharp staccato call, and ran forward.

Instantly she was answered from a distant knoll, where for
some reason Sir Muscovy loved to retire for meditation.  The
cries grew lower and softer as the birds approached each other,
and they met at the corner just under my window.  Instantly
they put their two bills together and the loud cries changed to
confiding murmurs.  Evidently some hurried questions and
answers passed between them, and then Sir Muscovy waddled rapidly
by the quickest path, Miss Crippletoes following him at a slower
pace, and both passed out of sight, using their wings to help
their feet down the steep declivity.  The next morning, when
I wakened early, my first thought was to look out, and there on
the sunny greensward where they were accustomed to be fed, Sir
Muscovy, Lady Blanche, and their humble maid, Malardina
Crippletoes, were scattering their own breakfast before the bills
of twelve beautiful golden balls of ducklings.  The little
creatures could never have climbed the bank, but must have
started from their nest at dawn, coming round by the brook to the
level at the foot of the garden, and so by slow degrees up to the
house.

Judging from what I heard and knew of their habits, I am sure
the excitement of the previous morning was occasioned by the
hatching of the eggs, and that Lady Blanche had hastily sent her
friend to call Sir Muscovy, the family remaining together until
they could bring the babies with them and display their beauty to
Phœbe and me.

CHAPTER X

July 14th.

We are not wholly without the pleasures of the town in Barbury
Green.  Once or twice in a summer, late on a Saturday
afternoon, a procession of red and yellow vans drives into a
field near the centre of the village.  By the time the vans
are unpacked all the children in the community are surrounding
the gate of entrance.  There is rifle-shooting, there is
fortune-telling, there are games of pitch and toss, and swings,
and French bagatelle; and, to crown all, a wonderful orchestrion
that goes by steam.  The water is boiled for the
public’s tea, and at the same time thrilling strains of
melody are flung into the air.  There is at present only one
tune in the orchestrion’s repertory, but it is a very good
tune; though after hearing it three hundred and seven times in a
single afternoon, it pursues one, sleeping and waking, for the
next week.  Phœbe and I took the Square Baby and went
in to this diversified entertainment.  There was a small
crowd of children at the entrance, but as none of them seemed to
be provided with pennies, and I felt in a fairy godmother mood, I
offered them the freedom of the place at my expense.

I never purchased more radiant good-will for less money, but
the combined effect of the well-boiled tea and the boiling
orchestrion produced many village nightmares, so the mothers told
me at chapel next morning.

* * * * *

I have many friends in Barbury Green, and often have a
pleasant chat with the draper, and the watchmaker, and the
chemist.

The last house on the principal street is rather an ugly one,
with especially nice window curtains.  As I was taking my
daily walk to the post-office (an entirely unfruitful expedition
thus far, as nobody has taken the pains to write to me) I saw a
nursemaid coming out of the gate, wheeling a baby in a
perambulator.  She was going placidly away from the Green
when, far in the distance, she espied a man walking rapidly
toward us, a heavy Gladstone bag in one hand.  She gazed
fixedly for a moment, her eyes brightening and her cheeks
flushing with pleasure,—whoever it was, it was an
unexpected arrival;—then she retraced her steps and,
running up the garden-path, opened the front door and held an
excited colloquy with somebody; a slender somebody in a nice
print gown and neatly-dressed hair, who came to the gate and
peeped beyond the hedge several times, drawing back between peeps
with smiles and heightened colour.  She did not run down the
road, even when she had satisfied herself of the identity of the
traveller; perhaps that would not have been good form in an
English village, for there were houses on the opposite side of
the way.  She waited until he opened the gate, the nursemaid
took the bag and looked discreetly into the hedge, then the
mistress slipped her hand through the traveller’s arm and
walked up the path as if she had nothing else in the world to
wish for.  The nurse had a part in the joy, for she lifted
the baby out of the perambulator and showed proudly how much he
had grown.

It was a dear little scene, and I, a passer-by, had shared in
it and felt better for it.  I think their content was no
less because part of it had enriched my life, for happiness, like
mercy, is twice blessed; it blesses those who are most intimately
associated in it, and it blesses all those who see it, hear it,
feel it, touch it, or breathe the same atmosphere.  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.

I have talks too, sometimes, with the old parson, who lives in
a quaint house with “Parva Domus Magna Quies”
cut into the stone over the doorway.  He is not a preaching
parson, but a retired one, almost the nicest kind, I often
think.

He has been married thirty years, he tells me; thirty years,
spent in the one little house with the bricks painted red and
grey alternately, and the scarlet holly-hocks growing under the
windows.  I am sure they have been sweet, true, kind years,
and that his heart must be a quiet, peaceful place just like his
house and garden.

“I was only eleven years old when I fell in love with my
wife,” he told me as we sat on the seat under the
lime-tree; he puffing cosily at his pipe, I plaiting grasses for
a hatband.

“It was just before Sunday-school.  Her mother had
dressed her all in white muslin like a fairy, but she had stepped
on the edge of a puddle, and some of the muddy water had
bespattered her frock.  A circle of children had surrounded
her, and some of the motherly little girls were on their knees
rubbing at the spots anxiously, while one of them wiped away the
tears that were running down her pretty cheeks.  I
looked!  It was fatal!  I did not look again, but I was
smitten to the very heart!  I did not speak to her for six
years, but when I did, it was all right with both of us, thank
God! and I’ve been in love with her ever since, when she
behaves herself!”

That is the way they speak of love in Barbury Green, and oh!
how much sweeter and more wholesome it is than the language of
the town!  Who would not be a Goose Girl, “to win the
secret of the weed’s plain heart”?  It seems to
me that in society we are always gazing at magic-lantern shows,
but here we rest our tired eyes with looking at the stars.

CHAPTER XI

July 16th.

Phœbe and I have been to a Hen Conference at
Buffington.  It was for the purpose of raising the standard
of the British Hen, and our local Countess, who is much
interested in poultry, was in the chair.

It was a very learned body, but Phœbe had coached me so
well that at the noon recess I could talk confidently with the
members, discussing the various advantages of True and Crossed
Minorcas, Feverels, Andalusians, Cochin Chinas, Shanghais, and
the White Leghorn.  (Phœbe, when she pronounces this
word, leaves out the “h” and bears down heavily on
the last syllable, so that it rhymes with begone!)

As I was sitting under the trees waiting for Phœbe to
finish some shopping in the village, a travelling poultry-dealer
came along and offered to sell me a silver Wyandotte pullet and
cockerel.  This was a new breed to me and I asked the price,
which proved to be more than I should pay for a hat in Bond
Street.  I hesitated, thinking meantime what a delightful
parting gift they would be for Phœbe; I mean if we ever
should part, which seems more and more unlikely, as I shall never
leave Thornycroft until somebody comes properly to fetch me;
indeed, unless the “fetching” is done somewhat
speedily I may decline to go under any circumstances.  My
indecision as to the purchase was finally banished when the
poultryman asserted that the fowls had clear open centres all
over, black lacing entirely round the white centres, were free
from white edging, and each had a cherry-red eye.  This
catalogue of charms inflamed my imagination, though it gave me no
mental picture of a silver Wyandotte fowl, and I paid the money
while the dealer crammed the chicks, squawking into my
five-o’clock tea-basket.

The afternoon session of the conference was most exciting, for
we reached the subject of imported eggs, an industry that is
assuming terrifying proportions.  The London hotel egg comes
from Denmark, it seems,—I should think by sailing vessel,
not steamer, but I may be wrong.  After we had settled that
the British Hen should be protected and encouraged, and agreed
solemnly to abstain from Danish eggs in any form, and made a
resolution stating that our loyalty to Queen Alexandra would
remain undiminished, we argued the subject of hen diet. 
There was a great difference of opinion here and the discussion
was heated; the honorary treasurer standing for pulped mangold
and flint grit, the chair insisting on barley meal and randans,
while one eloquent young woman declared, to loud cries of
“’Ear, ’ear!” that rice pudding and bone
chips produce more eggs to the square hen than any other sort of
food.  Impassioned orators arose here and there in the
audience demanding recognition for beef scraps, charcoal, round
corn or buckwheat.  Foods were regarded from various
standpoints: as general invigorators, growth assisters, and egg
producers.  A very handsome young farmer carried off final
honours, and proved to the satisfaction of all the feminine
poultry-raisers that green young hog bones fresh cut in the
Banner Bone Breaker (of which he was the agent) possessed a
nutritive value not to be expressed in human language.

Phœbe was distinctly nervous when I rose to say a few
words on poultry breeding, announcing as my topic “Mothers,
Stepmothers, Foster-Mothers, and Incubators.” 
Protected by the consciousness that no one in the assemblage
could possibly know me, I made a distinct success in my maiden
speech; indeed, I somewhat overshot the mark, for the Countess in
the chair sent me a note asking me to dine with her that
evening.  I suppressed the note and took Phœbe away
before the proceedings were finished, vanishing from the scene of
my triumphs like a veiled prophet.

Just as we were passing out the door we paused to hear the
report of a special committee whose chairman read the following
resolutions:—

Whereas,—It has pleased the Almighty to remove
from our midst our greatest Rose Comb Buff Orpington fancier and
esteemed friend, Albert Edward Sheridain; therefore be it

Resolved,—That the next edition of our catalogue
contain an illustrated memorial page in his honour and

Resolved,—That the Rose Comb Buff Orpington Club
extend to the bereaved family their heartfelt sympathy.

The handsome young farmer followed us out to our trap, invited
us to attend the next meeting of the R. C. B. O. Club, of which
he was the secretary, and asked if I were intending to
“show.”  I introduced Phœbe as the senior
partner, and she concealed the fact that we possessed but one
Buff Orpington, and he was a sad “invaleed” not
suitable for exhibition.  The farmer’s expression as
he looked at me was almost lover-like, and when he pressed a bit
of paper into my hand I was sure it must be an offer of
marriage.  It was in fact only a circular describing the
Banner Bone Breaker.  It closed with an appeal to Buff
Orpington breeders to raise and ever raise the standard, bidding
them remember, in the midst of a low-minded and sordid
civilisation, that the rose comb should be small and neat, firmly
set on, with good working, a nice spike at the back lying well
down to head, and never, under any circumstances, never sticking
up.  This adjuration somewhat alarmed us as Phœbe and
I had been giving our Buff Orpington cockerel the most drastic
remedies for his languid and prostrate comb.

Coming home we alighted from the trap to gather hogweed for
the rabbits.  I sat by the wayside lazily and let
Phœbe gather the appetising weed, which grows along the
thorniest hedges in close proximity to nettles and thistles.

Workmen were trudging along with their luncheon-baskets of
woven bulrushes slung over their shoulders.  Fields of
ripening grain lay on either hand, the sun shining on their every
shade of green and yellow, bronze and orange, while the breeze
stirred the bearded barley into a rippling golden sea.

Phœbe asked me if the people I had left behind at the
Hydropathic were my relatives.

“Some of them are of remote consanguinity,” I
responded evasively, and the next question was hushed upon her
awe-stricken tongue, as I intended.

“They are obeying my wish to be let alone, there’s
no doubt of that,” I was thinking.  “For my
part, I like a little more spirit, and a little less
‘letter’!”

As the word “letter” flitted through my thoughts,
I pulled one from my pocket and glanced through it
carelessly.  It arrived, somewhat tardily, only last night,
or I should not have had it with me.  I wore the same dress
to the post-office yesterday that I wore to the Hen Conference
to-day, and so it chanced to be still in the pocket.  If it
had been anything I valued, of course I should have lost or
destroyed it by mistake; it is only silly, worthless little
things like this that keep turning up and turning up after one
has forgotten their existence.

“You are a mystery!” [it ran.] 
“I can apprehend, but not comprehend you.  I know you
in part.  I understand various bits of your nature; but my
knowledge is always fragmentary and disconnected, and when I
attempt to make a whole of the mosaics I merely get a
kaleidoscopic effect.  Do you know those geographical
dissected puzzles that they give to children?  You remind me
of one of them.

“I have spent many charming (and dangerous) hours trying
to ‘put you together’; but I find, when I examine my
picture closely, that after all I’ve made a purple mountain
grow out of a green tree; that my river is running up a steep
hillside; and that the pretty milkmaid, who should be wandering
in the forest, is standing on her head with her pail in the
air

“Do you understand yourself clearly?  Or is it just
possible that when you dive to the depths of your own
consciousness, you sometimes find the pretty milkmaid standing on
her head?  I wonder!” . . .

Ah, well, it is no wonder that he wonders!   So do
I, for that matter!

CHAPTER XII

July 17th.

Thornycroft Farm seems to be the musical centre of the
universe.

When I wake very early in the morning I lie in a drowsy sort
of dream, trying to disentangle, one from the other, the various
bird notes, trills, coos, croons, chirps, chirrups, and
warbles.  Suddenly there falls on the air a delicious,
liquid, finished song; so pure, so mellow, so joyous, that I go
to the window and look out at the morning world, half awakened,
like myself.

There is I know not what charm in a window that does not push
up, but opens its lattices out into the greenness.  And mine
is like a little jewelled door, for the sun is shining from
behind the chimneys and lighting the tiny diamond panes with
amber flashes.

A faint delicate haze lies over the meadow, and rising out of
it, and soaring toward the blue is the lark, flinging out that
matchless matin song, so rich, so thrilling, so lavish!  As
the blithe melody fades away, I hear the plaintive
ballad-fragments of the robin on a curtsying branch near my
window; and there is always the liquid pipe of the thrush, who
must quaff a fairy goblet of dew between his songs, I should
think, so fresh and eternally young is his note.

There is another beautiful song that I follow whenever I hear
it, straining my eyes to the treetops, yet never finding a bird
that I can identify as the singer.  Can it be the—

“Ousel-cock so black of hue,
With orange-tawny bill”?

He is called the poet-laureate of the primrose time, but I
don’t know whether he sings in midsummer, and I have not
seen him hereabouts.  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.

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.
The pleasure of your company is requested
at a
Thé Chantant
Under the Apple Tree.
Music at five.

It is a charming game, as I say, but I’d far rather play
it with the Man of the North; he is so much younger than the
Square Baby, and so much more responsive, too.

Thornycroft Farm is a sweet place, too, of odours as well as
sounds.  The scent of the hay is for ever in the nostrils,
the hedges are thick with wild honeysuckle, so deliciously
fragrant, the last of the June roses are lingering to do their
share, and blackberry blossoms and ripening fruit as well.

I have never known a place in which it is so easy to be
good.  I have not said a word, nor scarcely harboured a
thought, that was not lovely and virtuous since I entered these
gates, and yet there are those who think me fantastic, difficult,
hard to please, unreasonable!

I believe the saints must have lived in the country mostly (I
am certain they never tried Hydropathic hotels), and why anybody
with a black heart and natural love of wickedness should not
simply buy a poultry farm and become an angel, I cannot
understand.

Living with animals is really a very improving and wholesome
kind of life, to the person who will allow himself to be
influenced by their sensible and high-minded ideals.  When
you come to think about it, man is really the only animal that
ever makes a fool of himself; the others are highly civilised,
and never make mistakes.  I am going to mention this when I
write to somebody, sometime; I mean if I ever do.  To be
sure, our human life is much more complicated than theirs, and I
believe when the other animals notice our errors of judgment they
make allowances.  The bee is as busy as a bee, and the
beaver works like a beaver, but there their responsibility
ends.  The bee doesn’t have to go about seeing that
other bees are not crowded into unsanitary tenements or
victimised by the sweating system.  When the beaver’s
day of toil is over he doesn’t have to discuss the sphere,
the rights, or the voting privileges of beaveresses; all he has
to do is to work like a beaver, and that is comparatively
simple.

CHAPTER XIII

I have been studying The Young Poultry Keeper’s
Friend of late.  If there is anything I dislike and
deplore, it is the possession of knowledge which I cannot put to
practical use.  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.  Cannibal Ann,
herself, has, so far as we know, been raised in a Christian
manner and enjoyed all the advantages of modern methods; but her
maternal parent may have lived in some heathen poultry-yard which
was asphalted or bricked or flagged, so that she was debarred
from scratching in Mother Earth and was forced to eat her own
shells in self-defence.

* * * * *

The Square Baby is not particularly attracted by the poultry
as a whole, save when it is boiled with bacon or roasted with
bread-sauce; but he is much interested in the
“invaleeds.”  Whenever Phœbe and I start
for the hospital with the tobacco-pills, the tin of paraffin, and
the bottle of oil, he is very much in evidence.  Perhaps he
has a natural leaning toward the medical profession; at any rate,
when pain and anguish wring the brow, he is in close attendance
upon the ministering angels.

Now it is necessary for the physician to have practice as well
as theory, so the Square Baby, being left to himself this
afternoon, proceeded to perfect himself in some of the healing
arts used by country practitioners.

When discovered, he was seated in front of the wire-covered
“run” attached to a coop occupied by the youngest
goslings.  A couple of bottles and a box stood by his side,
and I should think he had administered a cup of sweet oil, a pint
of paraffin, and a quarter of a pound of tobacco during his
clinic.  He had used the remedies impartially, sometimes
giving the paraffin internally and rubbing the patient’s
head with tobacco or oil, sometimes the reverse.

Several goslings leaned languidly against the netting, or
supported themselves by the edge of the water-dish, while others
staggered and reeled about with eyes half closed.

It was Mrs. Heaven who caught her son red-handed, so to
speak.  She was dressed in her best, and just driving off to
Woodmucket to spend a day or two with her married daughter, and
soothe her nerves with the uproar incident to a town of six
hundred inhabitants.  She delayed her journey a
half-hour—long enough, in fact, to change her black silk
waist for a loose sacque which would give her arms full and
comfortable play.  The joy and astonishment that greeted the
Square Baby on his advent, five years ago, was forgotten for the
first time in his brief life, and he was treated precisely as any
ordinary wrongdoer would have been treated under the same
circumstances, summarily and smartly; the “wepping,”
as Phœbe would say, being Mrs. Heaven’s hand.

All but one of the goslings lived, like thousands of others
who recover in spite of the doctors, but the Square Baby’s
interest in the healing art is now perceptibly lessened.

CHAPTER XIV

July 18th.

The day was Friday; Phœbe’s day to go to
Buffington with eggs and chickens and rabbits; her day to solicit
orders for ducklings and goslings.  The village cart was
ready in the stable; Mr. and Mrs. Heaven were in Woodmucket; I
was eating my breakfast (which I remember was an egg and a
rasher) when Phœbe came in, a figure of woe.

The Square Baby was ill, very ill, and would not permit her to
leave him and go to market.  Would I look at him?  For
he must have dowsed ’imself as well as the goslings
yesterday; anyways he was strong of paraffin and tobacco, though
he ’ad ’ad a good barth.

I prescribed for Albert Edward, who was as uncomfortable and
feverish as any little sinner in the county of Sussex, and I then
promptly proposed going to Buffington in Phœbe’s
place.

She did not think it at all proper, and said that,
notwithstanding my cotton gown and sailor hat, I looked quite,
quite the lydy, and it would never do.

“I cannot get any new orders,” said I, “but
I can certainly leave the rabbits and eggs at the customary
places.  I know Argent’s Dining Parlours, and
Songhurst’s Tea Rooms, and the Six Bells Inn, as well as
you do.”

So, donning a pair of Phœbe’s large white cotton
gloves with open-work wrists (than which I always fancy there is
no one article that so disguises the perfect lydy), I set out
upon my travels, upborne by a lively sense of amusement that was
at least equal to my feeling that I was doing Phœbe Heaven
a good turn.

Prices in dressed poultry were fluctuating, but I had a copy
of The Trade Review, issued that very day, and was able to
get some idea of values and the state of the market as I jogged
along.  The general movement, I learned, was moderate and of
a “selective” character.  Choice large capons
and ducks were in steady demand, but I blushed for my profession
when I read that roasting chickens were running coarse, staggy,
and of irregular value.  Old hens were held firmly at
sixpence, and it is my experience that they always have to be, at
whatever price.  Geese were plenty, dull, and weak. 
Old cocks,—why don’t they say
roosters?—declined to threepence ha’penny on Thursday
in sympathy with fowls,—and who shall say that chivalry is
dead?  Turkeys were a trifle steadier, and there was a
speculative movement in limed eggs.  All this was
illuminating, and I only wished I were quite certain whether the
sympathetic old roosters were threepence ha’penny apiece,
or a pound.

Everything happened as it should, on this first business
journey of my life, which is equivalent to saying that nothing
happened at all.  Songhurst’s Tea Rooms took five
dozen eggs and told me to bring six dozen the next week. 
Argent’s Dining Parlours purchased three pairs of chickens
and four rabbits.  The Six Bells found the last poultry
somewhat tough and tasteless; whereupon I said that our orders
were more than we could possibly fill, still I hoped we could go
on “selling them,” as we never liked to part with old
customers, no matter how many new ones there were. 
Privately, I understood the complaint only too well, for I knew
the fowls in question very intimately.  Two of them were the
runaway rooster and the gadabout hen that never wanted to go to
bed with the others.  The third was Cannibal Ann.  I
should have expected them to be tough, but I cannot believe they
were lacking in flavour.

The only troublesome feature of the trip was that Mrs.
Sowerbutt’s lodgers had suddenly left for London and she
was unable to take the four rabbits as she had hoped; but as an
offset to that piece of ill-fortune the Coke and Coal Yard and
the Bicycle Repairing Rooms came out into the street, and,
stepping up to the trap, requested regular weekly deliveries of
eggs and chickens, and hoped that I would be able to bring them
myself.  And so, in a happy frame of mind, I turned out of
the Buffington main street, and was jogging along homeward, when
a very startling thing happened; namely, a whole verse of the
Bailiff’s Daughter of Islington:—

“And as she went along the high road,
The weather being hot and dry,
She sat her down upon a green bank,
And her true love came riding by.”

That true lovers are given to riding by, in ballads, I know
very well, but I hardly supposed they did so in real life,
especially when every precaution had been taken to avert such a
catastrophe.  I had told the Barbury Green postmistress, on
the morning of my arrival, not to give the Thornycroft address to
anybody whatsoever, but finding, as the days passed, that no one
was bold enough or sensible enough to ask for it, I haughtily
withdrew my prohibition.  About this time I began sending
envelopes, carefully addressed in a feigned hand, to a certain
person at the Oxenbridge Hydro.  These envelopes contained
no word of writing, but held, on one day, only a bit of down from
a hen’s breast, on another, a goose-quill, on another, a
glossy tail-feather, on another, a grain of corn, and so
on.  These trifles were regarded by me not as degrading or
unmaidenly hints and suggestions, but simply as tests of
intelligence.  Could a man receive tokens of this sort and
fail to put two and two together?  I feel that I might
possibly support life with a domineering and autocratic
husband,—and there is every prospect that I shall be called
upon to do so,—but not with a stupid one.  Suppose one
were linked for ever to a man capable of asking,—“Did
you send those feathers? . . . How was I to guess? . . .
How was a fellow to know they came from you? . . . What on earth
could I suppose they meant? . . . What clue did they offer me as
to your whereabouts? . . . Am I a Sherlock
Holmes?”—No, better eternal celibacy than marriage
with such a being!

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.  The creature was well mounted (ominous, when he came
to override my caprice!) and he looked bigger, and, yes,
handsomer, though that doesn’t signify, and still more
determined than when I saw him last; although goodness knows that
timidity and feebleness of purpose were not in striking evidence
on that memorable occasion.  I had drawn up under the shade
of a tree ostensibly to eat some cherries, thinking that if I
turned my face away I might pass unrecognised.  It was a
stupid plan, for if I had whipped up the mare and driven on, he
of course, would have had to follow, and he has too much dignity
and self-respect to shriek recriminations into a woman’s
ear from a distance.

He approached with deliberation, reined in his horse, and
lifted his hat ceremoniously.  He has an extremely shapely
head, but I did not show that the sight of it melted in the least
the ice of my resolve; whereupon we talked, not very freely at
first,—men are so stiff when they consider themselves
injured.  However, silence is even more embarrassing than
conversation, so at length I begin:—

Bailiff’s Daughter.—“It is a lovely
day.”

True Love.—“Yes, but the drought is getting
rather oppressive, don’t you think?”

Bailiff’s Daughter.—“The crops
certainly need rain, and the feed is becoming scarce.”

True Love.—“Are you a farmer’s
wife?”

Bailiff’s Daughter.—“Oh no! that is a
promotion to look forward to; I am now only a Goose
Girl.”

True Love.—“Indeed!  If I wished to be
severe I might remark: that I am sure you have found at last your
true vocation!”

Bailiff’s Daughter.—“It was certainly
through no desire to please you that I chose
it.”

True Love.—“I am quite sure of that! 
Are you staying in this part?”

Bailiff’s Daughter.—“Oh no!  I
live many miles distant, over an extremely rough road.  And
you?”

True Love.—“I am still at the Hydropathic;
or at least my luggage is there.”

Bailiff’s Daughter.—“It must be very
pleasant to attract you so long.”

True Love.—“Not so pleasant as it
was.”

Bailiff’s Daughter.—“No?  A new
proprietor, I suppose.”

True Love.—“No; same proprietor; but the
house is empty.”

Bailiff’s Daughter (yawning
purposely).—“That is strange; the hotels are usually
so full at this season.  Why did so many leave?”

True Love.—“As a matter of fact, only one
left.  ‘Full’ and ‘empty’ are purely
relative terms.  I call a hotel full when it has you in it,
empty when it hasn’t.”

Bailiff’s Daughter (dying to laugh, but
concealing her feelings).—“I trust my bulk does not
make the same impression on the general public!  Well, I
won’t detain you longer; good afternoon; I must go home to
my evening work.”

True Love.—“I will accompany
you.”

Bailiff’s Daughter.—“If you are a
gentleman you will remain where you are.”

True Love.—“In the road?  Perhaps; but
if I am a man I shall follow you; they always do, I notice. 
What are those foolish bundles in the back of that silly
cart?”

Bailiff’s Daughter.—“Feed for the
pony, please, sir; fish for dinner; randans and barley meal for
the poultry; and four unsold rabbits.  Wouldn’t you
like them?  Only one and sixpence apiece.  Shot at
three o’clock this morning.”

True Love.—“Thanks; I don’t like mine
shot so early.”

Bailiff’s Daughter.—“Oh, well!
doubtless I shall be able to dispose of them on my way home,
though times is ’ard!”

True Love.—“Do you mean that you will
“peddle” them along the road?”

Bailiff’s Daughter.—“You understand
me better than usual,—in fact to perfection.”

He dismounts and strides to the back of the cart, lifts the
covers, seizes the rabbits, flings some silver contemptuously
into the basket, and looks about him for a place to bury his
bargain.  A small boy approaching in the far distance will
probably bag the game.

Bailiff’s Daughter
(modestly).—“Thanks for your trade, sir, rather
ungraciously bestowed, and we ’opes for a continuance of
your past fyvors.”

True Love (leaning on the wheel of the
trap).—“Let us stop this nonsense.  What did you
hope to gain by running away?”

Bailiff’s Daughter.—“Distance and
absence.”

True Love.—“You knew you couldn’t
prevent my offering myself to you sometime or other.”

Bailiff’s Daughter.—“Perhaps not; but
I could at least defer it, couldn’t I?”

True Love.—“Why postpone the
inevitable?”

Bailiff’s Daughter.—“Doubtless I
shrank from giving you the pain of a refusal.”

True Love.—“Perhaps; but do you know what I
suspect?”

Bailiff’s Daughter.—“I’m not a
suspicious person, thank goodness!”

True Love.—“That, on the contrary, you are
wilfully withholding from me the joy of acceptance.”

Bailiff’s Daughter.—“If I intended to
accept you, why did I run away?”

True Love.—“To make yourself more desirable
and precious, I suppose.”

Bailiff’s Daughter (with the most confident
coquetry).—“Did I succeed?”

True Love.—“No; you failed
utterly.”

Bailiff’s Daughter (secretly
piqued).—“Then I am glad I tried it.”

True Love.—“You couldn’t succeed
because you were superlatively desirable and precious already;
but you should never have experimented.  Don’t you
know that Love is a high explosive?”

Bailiff’s Daughter.—“Is it? 
Then it ought always to be labelled ‘dangerous,’
oughtn’t it?  But who thought of suggesting
matches?  I’m sure I didn’t!”

True Love.—“No such luck; I wish you
would.”

Bailiff’s Daughter.—“According to
your theory, if you apply a match to Love it is likely to
‘go off.’”

True Love.—“I wish you would try it on mine
and await the result.  Come now, you’ll have to marry
somebody, sometime.”

Bailiff’s Daughter.—“I confess I
don’t see the necessity.”

True Love (morosely).—“You’re the
sort of woman men won’t leave in undisturbed spinsterhood;
they’ll keep on badgering you.”

Bailiff’s Daughter.—“Oh, I
don’t mind the badgering of a number of men; it’s
rather nice.  It’s the one badger I find
obnoxious.”

True Love (impatiently).—“That’s just
the perversity of things.  I could put a stop to the
protestations of the many; I should like nothing better—but
the pertinacity of the one!  Ah, well!  I can’t
drop that without putting an end to my existence.”

Bailiff’s Daughter (politely).—“I
shouldn’t think of suggesting anything so
extreme.”

True Love (quoting).—“‘Mrs. Hauksbee
proceeded to take the conceit out of Pluffles as you remove the
ribs of an umbrella before re-covering.’  However, you
couldn’t ask me anything seriously that I wouldn’t
do, dear Mistress Perversity.”

Bailiff’s Daughter (yielding a
point).—“I’ll put that boldly to the
proof.  Say you don’t love me!”

True Love (seizing his advantage).—“I
don’t!  It’s imbecile and besotted
devotion!  Tell me, when may I come to take you
away?”

Bailiff’s Daughter
(sighing).—“It’s like asking me to leave
Heaven.”

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; she was sitting beside it
when I called, her hand in that of a straw-coloured person named
Gladwish, and the ground in her vicinity completely strewn with
votive offerings.  You shall splash your silver sea with an
ivory wand; your hens shall have suburban cottages, each with its
garden; their perches shall be of satin-wood and their water
dishes of mother-of-pearl.  You shall be the Goose Girl and
I will be the Swan Herd—simply to be near you—for I
hate live poultry.  Dost like the picture?  It’s
a little like Claude Melnotte’s, I confess.  The fact
is I am not quite sane; talking with you after a fortnight of the
tabbies at the Hydro is like quaffing inebriating vodka after
Miffin’s Food!  May I come to-morrow?”

Bailiffs Daughter (hedging).—“I shall be
rather busy; the Crossed Minorca hen comes off
to-morrow.”

True Love.—“Oh, never mind! 
I’ll take her off to-night when I escort you to the farm;
then she’ll get a day’s advantage.”

Bailiff’s Daughter.—“And rob fourteen
prospective chicks of a mother; nay, lose the chicks
themselves?  Never!”

True Love.—“So long as you are a Goose
Girl, does it make any difference whose you are?  Is it any
more agreeable to be Mrs. Heaven’s Goose Girl than
mine?”

Bailiff’s Daughter.—“Ah! but in one
case the term of service is limited; in the other,
permanent.”

True Love.—“But in the one case you are the
slave of the employer, in the other the employer of the
slave.  Why did you run away?”

Bailiff’s Daughter.—“A man’s
mind is too dull an instrument to measure a woman’s reason;
even my own fails sometimes to deal with all its delicate shades;
but I think I must have run away chiefly to taste the pleasure of
being pursued and brought back.  If it is necessary to your
happiness that you should explore all the Bluebeard chambers of
my being, I will confess further that it has taken you nearly
three weeks to accomplish what I supposed you would do in three
days!”

True Love (after a well-spent
interval).—“To-morrow, then; shall we say before
breakfast?  All, do!  Why not?  Well, then,
immediately after breakfast, and I breakfast at seven nowadays,
and sometimes earlier.  Do take off those ugly cotton
gloves, dear; they are five sizes too large for you, and so rough
and baggy to the touch!”