Then I cut a slit across the chicken just back of the keel of the breast bone.  I cut the feet off at the knee joint and slip the drumstick through this slit.  Then I lay the chicken up to cool out overnight.  The next morning it may be wrapped and boxed, and is then ready for mailing.

Wrapping and boxing must not be slighted.  The clean, sanitary appearance of the chicken when it is unpacked in the kitchen of your customer goes a long way toward prejudicing that customer in your favor.  I buy thirty pounds of waxed paper, twenty-four by thirty-six inches, and have the paper house cut it in two.  This gives me 1000 sheets, each eighteen by twenty-four inches, for the price of a ream of the full size—­at this time about five dollars, or a half cent a sheet.

Each chicken is wrapped in one sheet of this waxed paper, and is then packed in a corrugated paper box made especially for sending chickens by parcel post.

I buy three sizes of these boxes.  One size, which costs me four cents each, will hold one four-pound chicken when dressed and drawn.  The next size, costing five cents each, will hold two very small chickens, or one large chicken.  The third size, costing six cents each, will hold two large chickens, three medium-sized ones, or four small ones.

Do not use makeshifts, such as old shoe boxes.  In the first place, your shipment is not properly protected by such a box; in the second place, your postmaster is likely to refuse to accept it for mailing, as he would be justified in doing; and in the third place, your customer receives his chicken in a box that has been used for he wonders what, and has been in he wonders what places.

It is for this reason that I never ask a customer to return a box to me.  I do not want to use a box a second time.  If I were a city man, getting my chickens by mail, I should want them sent to me in a brand-new box, made for the special purpose of sending chickens by mail—­and I’d want them in no other box.  Then I’d feel sure of them.

The cost of shipping by parcel post is low.  I live ten miles from my county seat, and the postage required to send a five-pound, live-weight chicken, dressed and boxed, from my place to town is eight cents.  The postage required to send that same five-pound chicken from here to Chicago, one hundred and fifty miles, is eight cents.  The express company charges twenty-six cents for the same service, and does not deliver so quickly.

But parcel-post delivery was not always so admirably done in Chicago.  When I began shipping up there last September it was no uncommon thing for my packages to be so delayed that many chickens would spoil.

I recall the “straw that broke the camel’s back.”  I mailed twenty-six chickens one day—­and in due course I received thirteen letters, each advising me of the same mournful event.  The chicken had spoiled because of delay in delivery.  My wife wanted to quit.  I didn’t.  I made good the losses to the customers and prepared a label, a copy of which I forwarded to the Third Assistant Postmaster General at Washington, asking his permission to use it, and telling him of the vexatious and expensive delays in delivering my packages in Chicago.