Adopting An Abandoned Farm - Kate Sanborn (new books to read txt) 📗

from dawn to twilight to slaving for his eight hundred ducklings. He also kept an incubator going all the time.

"Do ducks pay you?" I asked.

"Wall, I'm gettin' to be somewhat of a bigotist," he said; "I barely git a livin'."

"Why Mr. Crankin - " I began.

The name roused his jealous ire, and his voice, a low mumble before, now burst into a loud roar. "Yes, Crankin makes money, has a sight o' incubators, makes 'em himself, sells a lot, but some say they don't act like his do when they git off his place; most on 'em seem possessed, but Crankin, <i>he can manage 'em and makes money too."

"Do your ducks lay much?"

"Lay! I don't want 'em to lay! Sell 'em all out at nine weeks, 'fore the pin feathers come; then they're good eatin' - for them as likes 'em. I've heard of yure old lot. Kill 'em, I say, and start new!"

"Crankin says - "

"I don't care nothing what Crankin says" (here the voice would have filled a cathedral), "I tell ye; me and Crankin's two different critters!"

So I felt; but it would not do to give up. I purchased an expensive incubator and brooder - needn't have bought a brooder. I put into the incubator at a time when eggs were scarce and high priced, two hundred eggs - hens' eggs, ducks' eggs, goose eggs. The temperature must be kept from 102° to 104°. The lamps blazed up a little on the first day, but after that we kept the heat exactly right by daily watching and night vigils. It engrossed most of the time of four able-bodied victims.

Nothing ever was developed. The eggs were probably cooked that first day!

Now I'm vainly seeking for a purchaser for my I. and B. Terms of sale very reasonable. Great reduction from original price; shall no doubt be forced to give them away to banish painful recollections.

I also invested in turkeys, geese, and peacocks, and a pair of guinea hens to keep hawks away.

For long weary months the geese seemed the only fowls truly at home on my farm. They did their level best. Satisfied that my hens would neither lay nor set, I sent to noted poultry fanciers for "settings" of eggs at three dollars per thirteen, then paid a friendly "hen woman" for assisting in the mysterious evolution of said eggs into various interesting little families old enough to be brought to me.

Many and curious were the casualties befalling these young broods. Chickens are subject to all the infantile diseases of children and many more of their own, and mine were truly afflicted. <i>Imprimis, most would not hatch; the finest Brahma eggs contained the commonest barn-yard fowls. Some stuck to the shell, some were drowned in a saucer of milk, some perished because no lard had been rubbed on their heads, others passed away discouraged by too much lard. Several ate rose bugs with fatal results; others were greedy as to gravel and agonized with distended crops till released by death. They had more "sand" than was good for them. They were raised on "Cat Hill," and five were captured by felines, and when the remnant was brought to me they disappeared day by day in the most puzzling manner until we caught our mischievous pug, "Tiny Tim," holding down a beautiful young Leghorn with his cruel paw and biting a piece out of her neck.

So they left me, one by one, like the illusions of youth, until there was no "survival of the fittest."

In a ragged old barn opposite, a hen had stolen her nest and brought out seventeen vigorous chicks. I paid a large bill for the care of what might have been a splendid collection, and meekly bought that faithful old hen with her large family. It is now a wonder to me that any chickens arrive at maturity. Fowls are afflicted with parasitic wrigglers in their poor little throats. The disease is called "gapes," because they try to open their bills for more air until a red worm in the trachea causes suffocation. This horrid red worm, called scientifically <i>Scelorostoma syngamus, destroys annually <i>half a million of chickens.

Dr. Crisp, of England, says it would be of truly national importance to find the means of preventing its invasion.

The unpleasant results of hens and garden contiguous, Warner has described. They are incompatible if not antagonistic. One man wisely advises: "Fence the garden in and let the chickens run, as the man divided the house with his quarrelsome wife, by taking the inside himself and giving her the outside, that she might have room according to her strength."

Looking over the long list of diseases to which fowls are subject is dispiriting. I am glad they can't read them, or they would have all at once, as J.K. Jerome, the witty playwright, decided he had every disease found in a medical dictionary, except housemaid's knee. Look at this condensed list:

DISEASES OF NERVOUS SYSTEM. - 1. Apoplexy. 2. Paralysis. 3. Vertigo.
4. Neuralgia. 5. Debility.

DISEASES OF DIGESTIVE ORGANS. - 99.

DISEASES OF LOCOMOTIVE ORGANS. - 1. Rheumatism. 2. Cramp. 3. Gout. 4.
Leg weakness. 5. Paralysis of legs. 6. Elephantiasis.

Next, diseases caused by parasites.

Then, injuries.

Lastly, miscellaneous.

I could add a still longer list of unclassified ills: Homesickness, fits, melancholia, corns, blindness from fighting too much, etc.

Now that I have learned to raise chickens, it is a hard and slow struggle to get any killed. I say in an off-hand manner, with assumed nonchalance: "Ellen, I want Tom to kill a rooster at once for tomorrow's dinner, and I have an order from a friend for four more, so he must select five to-night." Then begins the trouble. "Oh," pleads Ellen, "don't kill dear Dick! poor, dear Dick! That is Tom's pet of all; so big and handsome and knows so much! He will jump up on Tom's shoulder and eat out of his hand and come when he calls - and those big Brahmas - don't you know how they were brought up by hand, as you might say, and they know me and hang around the door for crumbs, and that beauty of a Wyandock, you <i>couldn't eat <i>him!" When the matter is decided, as the guillotining is going on, Ellen and I sit listening to the axe thuds and the death squaks, while she wrings her hands, saying: "O dearie me! What a world - the dear Lord ha' mercy on us poor creatures! What a thing to look into, that we must kill the poor innocents to eat them. And they were so tame and cunning, and would follow me all around!" Then I tell her of the horrors of the French Revolution to distract her attention from the present crisis, and alluded to the horrors of cannibalism recently disclosed in Africa. Then I fall into a queer reverie and imagine how awful it would be if we should ever be called to submit to a race of beings as much larger than we are as we are above the fowls. I almost hear such a monster of a house-wife, fully ninety feet high, say to a servant, looking sternly and critically at me:

"That fat, white creature must be killed; just eats her old head off - will soon be too tough" - Ugh! Here Tom comes with five headless fowls. Wasn't that a weird fancy of mine?

Truly "Me and Crankin's two different critters."

From the following verse, quoted from a recent poultry magazine, I conclude that I must be classed as a "chump." As it contains the secret of success in every undertaking, it should be committed to memory by all my readers.

"Grit makes the man,
The want of it the chump.
The men who win,
Lay hold, hang on, and hump."


CHAPTER VI.

GHOSTS.


"But stop," says the courteous and prudent reader, "are there any
such things as ghosts?"

"Any ghostesses!" cries Superstition, who settled long since in the
country, near a church yard on a "rising ground," "any ghostesses!
Ay, man, lots on 'em! Bushels on 'em! Sights on 'em! Why, there's
one as walks in our parish, reglar as the clock strikes twelve - and
always the same round, over church-stile, round the corner, through
the gap, into Shorts Spinney, and so along into our close, where he
takes a drink at the pump - for ye see he died in liquor, and then
arter he squenched hisself, wanishes into waper.

"Then there's the ghost of old Beales, as goes o' nights and sows
tares in his neighbor's wheat - I've often seed 'em in seed time.
They do say that Black Ben, the poacher, have riz, and what's more,
walked slap through all the squire's steel traps, without springing
on 'em. And then there's Bet Hawkey as murdered her own infant - only
the poor little babby hadn't learned to walk, and so can't appear
ag'in her."

THOMAS HOOD, <i>The Grimsby Ghost.

That dark little room I described as so convenient during a terrific thunderstorm or the prowling investigations of a burglar, began after a while to get mysterious and uncanny, and I disliked, nay, dreaded to enter it after dark. It was so still, so black, so empty, so chilly with a sort of supernatural chill, so silent, that imagination conjured up sounds such as I had never heard before. I had been told of an extremely old woman, a great-great-grandmother, bed-ridden, peevish, and weak-minded, who had occupied that room for nearly a score of years, apparently forgotten by fate, and left to drag out a monotonous, weary existence on not her "mattress grave" (like the poet Heine), but on an immensely thick feather bed; only a care, a burden, to her relations.

As twilight came on, I always carefully closed that door and shut the old lady in to sleep by herself. For it seemed that she was still there, still propped up in an imaginary bed, mumbling incoherently of the past, or moaning out some want, or calling for some one to bring a light, as she used to.

Once in a while, they told me, she would regain her strength suddenly and astonish the family by appearing at the door. When the grand-daughter was enjoying a Sunday night call from her "intended" it was rather embarrassing.

I said nothing to my friends about this unpleasant room. But several were susceptible to the strange influence. One thought she should not mind so much if the door swung open, and a <i>portière concealed the gloom. So a cheerful cretonne soon was hung. Then the fancy came that the curtain stirred and swayed as if some one or something was groping feebly with ghostly or ghastly fingers behind it. And one night, when sitting late and alone over the embers of my open fire, feeling a little forlorn, I certainly heard moans coming from that direction.