Of course I know, Mrs. Evan, that I was in a temper, and that my “in-laws” mean well, but since comfortable setting hens have gone out of fashion, and incubators and brooders taken their place, there is no more pleasure or sentiment about raising poultry than in manufacturing any other article by rule.  It’s a business, and a very pernickety one to boot, and it’s to keep Bart away from business that we are striving.  Besides, that chicken book tells how many square feet per hen must be allowed for the exercising yards, and how the pens for the little chicks must be built on wheels and moved daily to fresh pasture.  All the vegetable garden and flower beds and the bit of side lawn which I want for mother’s rose garden would not be too much!  But I seem to be leaving the track again.

Bart didn’t say a word, except that “At any rate we must bring the fowls up from the station,” and as the stable door was locked and the key in Barney’s pocket, Bart and The Man started to walk down to the village to look him up in some of his haunts, or failing in this to get the express wagon from the stable.

Maria and I sat and talked for some time about The Man from Everywhere, the chickens, and the location of the rose beds.  She is surprisingly keen about flowers, considering that it is quite ten years since her own home in the country was broken up, but then I think this is the sort of knowledge that stays by one the longest of all.  I hope that I have succeeded in convincing her that The Man is not company to be bothered about, but a comfortable family institution to come and go as he likes, to be taken easily and not too seriously.

When the moon disappeared beyond the river woods, we went to the southwest porch, and there decided that the piece of lawn where we had some uninteresting foliage beds one summer was the best place for the roses and we might possibly have a trellis across the north wall for climbers.  Would you plant roses in rows or small separate beds?  And how about the soil?  But perhaps the plan you are sending me will explain all this.

It was more than an hour before the men returned, and, not having found Barney, Bart had signed for the poultry in order to leave the express agent free to go home, and had left word at the stable for them to send the crates up as soon as the long wagon returned from Leighton, whither it had gone with trunks.

After much discussion we decided that the fowls should be housed for the night in the small yard back of the stable, where the Infant’s cow (a present from my mother) spends her nights under the shed.

“Did you find any signs of a chicken house on the place when you first came?” asked Maria, in a matter-of-fact tone, as if its location was the only thing now to be considered.

“Yes, there was one directly in the fence line at the eastern gap where we see the Three Brothers Hills,” said Bart, “and I’ve always intended to plant a flower bed of some sort there both to hide the gap in the wall and that something may be benefited by the hen manure of decades that must have accumulated there!”