“I don’t believe I’ll be able to stand seeing them hop out,” I remarked to Baby Tillett, the lambkins, and the good old red ally, who was patiently seated on a box over fifteen of the pearls.  Adam had kept the poor old darling covering some white china eggs for nearly two weeks before he gave her the pearls on the same day we put the forty-five in the interior of her metal rival.  I didn’t at first understand his sinister purpose in thus holding her back until the metal rival could get an even start, but I did later.

“I hope you have a mighty good hatching, Nancy, but I have no faith in half-way measures, and a tin box is a half-way measure for a hen, just as cleaning house without bed-sunning is trifling,” said Mrs. Addcock, with a final prod as she came out to the barn with Mrs. Tillett to reclaim Baby Tillett.

“You ain’t married, Miss Nancy, and you won’t understand how babies need mothers, even the chicken kind,” said Mrs. Tillett, as she cuddled Baby Tillett gurglingly against her shoulder and followed in the wake of Mrs. Addcock with the mops and buckets down the walk and around the house.

I stood beside the tin triumph of science, with my baby lambs licking at my hands, while Mrs. Ewe nuzzled for corn in one of my huge pockets, and a baby collie, which Pan had brought the week before, when her eyes were scarcely open, tumbled about my feet, and looked after the retreating women—­and I did understand.

“Still, I’ll do the best I can by your—­your progeny, Mr. G. Bird,” I said as the great big, white old fellow came and pecked in my pocket for corn in perfect friendliness with Mrs. Ewe.

I was called upon to keep my promise in less than a week.  It might have been a tragedy if Bess Rutherford’s practical sense had not helped save my affections from a panic.  This is how it happened.

“Yes, chicken culture is a germ that spreads by contagion.  I’m not at all surprised at your friends,” Adam had answered when I had appealed to him to know if I could sell Bess Rutherford just six of the baby chicks, when they came out, for her to begin a brood in a new back-yard system, only Bess is so progressive that she is having a nice big place in the conservatory that opens out of her living-room cleared for them to run about out of their tin mother when they want to.  She says she believes eternal vigilance is the price of success with poultry as the book she bought, which is different from mine, says, and Bess decided that she wanted her chickens where she could go in to see them comfortably when she came from parties and things without having to go around in the back yard, which is the most lovely garden in Hayesville anyway, in her slippers and party clothes.  “I’d sell her the chicks at twenty dollars apiece, and that’s cheap if they produce as they ought to with their blood and such—­such care as she intends to bestow on them.  The twenty-dollar price will either cure her or start an idle woman into a producer,” said Adam, in answer to my request, as he cut me out a pair of shoes from a piece of hide like that which the shoes upon his own feet were made from.  It was raining, and I sat at his feet in the barn and laboriously sewed what he had cut.