The multiplication of well-paid and well-paying labor is a thing to be specially desired.  If the soiling farm will keep two or three more men employed at good wages, and at the same time pay better interest than the grazing farm, it should be looked upon as much the better method.  The question of furnishing landscape for hogs is one that borders too closely on the aesthetic or the sentimental to gain the approval of the factory-farm man.  What is true of hogs is also true of cows.  They are better off under the constant care of intelligent and interested human beings than when they follow the rippling brook or wind slowly o’er the lea at their own sweet pleasure.

The truth is, the rippling brook doesn’t always furnish the best water, and the lea furnishes very imperfect forage during nine months of the year.  A twenty-acre lot in good grass, in which to take the air, is all that a well-regulated herd of fifty cows needs.  The clean, cool, calm stable is much to their liking, and the regular diet of a first-class cow-kitchen insures a uniform flow of milk.

What is true of hogs and cows is true also of hens.  The common opinion that the farm-raised hen that has free range is healthier or happier than her sister in a well-ordered hennery is not based on facts.  Freedom to forage for one’s self and pick up a precarious living does not always mean health, happiness, or comfort.  The strenuous life on the farm cannot compare in comfort with the quiet house and the freedom from anxiety of the well-tended hen.  The vicissitudes of life are terrible for the uncooped chicken.  The occupants of air, earth, and water lie in wait for it.  It is fair game for the hawk and the owl; the fox, the weasel, the rat, the wood pussy, the cat, and the dog are its sworn enemies.  The horse steps on it, the wheel crushes it; it falls into the cistern or the swill barrel; it is drenched by showers or stiffened by frosts, and, as the English say, it has a “rather indifferent time of it.”  If it survive the summer, and some chickens do, it will roost and shiver on the limb of an apple tree.  Its nest will be accessible only to the mink and the rat; and, like Rachel, it will mourn for its children, which are not.

No, the well-yarded hen has by all odds the best of it.  The wonder is that, with three-fourths of the poultry at large and making its own living, hens still furnish a product, in this country alone, $100,000,000 greater in value than the whole world’s output of gold.  Our annual production of eggs and poultry foots up to $280,000,000,—­$4 apiece for every man, woman, and child,—­and yet people say that hens do not pay!

Each flock of forty hens at Four Oaks has a house sixteen feet by twenty, and a run twenty feet by one hundred.  I hear no complaints of close quarters or lack of freedom, but I do hear continually the song of contentment, and I see results daily that are more satisfactory than those of any oil well or mine in which I have ever been interested.