Page:Letters from an Oregon Ranch.djvu/129

 Y recent valuable experience with poultry having taught me how to wrestle successfully with an egg famine, I next proceeded to the more complex and at the same time more interesting problems of hatching and raising young chickens. After our appetite for eggs had been appeased, it seemed high time that some of those hens should be getting down to business in another fashion. It was late in the season; the early Spring flowers had bloomed and faded; orchard trees were blossoming, birds singing and nest-building; and here were our feathered folk, wandering over hill and dale, chasing yellow butterflies and young grasshoppers, scratching up earthworms and garden seeds with cheerful zeal, talking and gossiping among themselves, evidently so in love with sunshine and freedom that not one of them had the slightest notion of going into solitary confinement for three long, stupid weeks. It seemed just possible that they belonged to some biddies’ club, were “new-era” dames, and had permanently retired from the hatching business; perhaps they were saying to each other, “If these carnivorous people want Spring chickens, let them buy