Page:Letters from an Oregon Ranch.djvu/130

 an incubator and hatch them. Let none look to us for early broilers,—we are emancipated females.”

One day I was out raking the yard when Tom, coming up the walk, said: “Brace yourself for painful news. This very day two hens belonging to those shameless Stanhopes were set—or sat—which would you say?

Two fowls, dusting themselves under a rose-bush near us, apparently overheard this talk; one of them sprang up and really did seem to say, quite sharply, “What’s that?”

“I said, madam,” answered Tom, “that the Stanhopes have two hens set; and I ask, ‘Why stand ye here all the day idle?’ You are a Plymouth dame, and should have the Plymouth conscience.”

This speech aroused the ire of the recumbent Susan Nipper, who scrambled to her feet and began a furious scratching, indignantly hurling dead leaves and gravel toward the speaker, who said in retaliation, “As for you, Mistress Nipper, the guillotine will get you if you don’t watch out!”

Whether or not our hens were influenced by this talk will probably never be definitely known, but a couple of weeks later the sitting craze broke out among them, raging as fiercely as the Egyptian plague. Clucking hens were everywhere, some sitting in the most ludicrous places, others in their proper boxes, often two and sometimes even three on the same nest. The