After my pathetic experience with chickens, who after a few days of downy content grew ill, and gasped until they gave up the ghost; ducklings, who progressed finely for several weeks, then turned over on their backs and flopped helplessly unto the end; or, surviving that critical period, were found in the drinking trough, “drowned, dead, because they couldn’t keep their heads above water”; turkeys who flourished to a certain age, then grew feeble and phantom-like and faded out of life, I weary of gallinaceous rhodomontade, and crave “pointers” for my actual needs.

I still read “Crankin’s” circulars with a thrill of enthusiasm because his facts are so cheering.  For instance, from his latest:  “We have some six thousand ducklings out now, confined in yards with wire netting eighteen inches high.  The first lot went to market May 10th and netted forty cents per pound.  These ducklings were ten weeks old and dressed on an average eleven pounds per pair.  One pair dressed fourteen pounds.”  Isn’t that better than selling milk at two and a half cents per quart?  And no money can be made on vegetables unless they are raised under glass in advance of the season.  I know, for did I not begin with “pie plant,” with which every market was glutted, at one cent per pound, and try the entire list, with disgustingly low prices, exposed to depressing comparison and criticism?  When endeavoring to sell, one of the visiting butchers, in reply to my petition that he would buy some of my vegetables, said:  “Well now, Marm, you see just how it is; I’ve got more’n I can sell now, and women keep offering more all the way along.  I tell ’em I can’t buy ’em, but I’ll haul ’em off for ye if ye want to get rid of ’em!” So much for market gardening at a distance from city demands.

But ducks!  Sydney Smith, at the close of his life, said he “had but one illusion left, and that was the Archbishop of Canterbury.”  I still believe in Crankin and duck raising.  Let me see:  “One pair dressed fourteen pounds, netted forty cents per pound.”  I’ll order one of Crankin’s “Monarch” incubators and begin a poultry farm anew.

“Dido et dux,” and so do Boston epicures.  I’ll sell at private sales, not for hotels!  I used to imagine myself supplying one of the large hotels and saw on the menu: 

“Tame duck and apple sauce (from the famous ‘Breezy Meadows’ farm).”  But I inquired of one of the proprietors what he would give, and “fifteen cents per pound for poultry dressed and delivered” gave me a combined attack of chills and hysterics.

Think of my chickens, from those prize hens (three dollars each)—­my chickens, fed on eggs hard boiled, milk, Indian meal, cracked corn, sun-flower seed, oats, buckwheat, the best of bread, selling at fifteen cents per pound, and I to pay express charges!  Is there, is there any “money in hens?”

To show how a child would revel in a little rational enjoyment on a farm, read this dear little poem of James Whitcomb Riley’s: