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HE day was Thursday, the date July the twenty-second. We had been chicken farmers for a whole week, and things were beginning to settle down to a certain extent. The coops were finished. They were not masterpieces, and I have seen chickens pause before them in deep thought, as who should say: "Now what in the world have we struck here?" But they were coops, within the meaning of the act, and we induced the hens to become tenants. The hardest work had been the fixing of the wire netting. This was the department of the hired man and myself. Beale and I worked ourselves into a fever in the sun, while the senior partner of the