Thornycroft Farm is a sweet place, too, of odours as well as sounds.  The scent of the hay is for ever in the nostrils, the hedges are thick with wild honeysuckle, so deliciously fragrant, the last of the June roses are lingering to do their share, and blackberry blossoms and ripening fruit as well.

I have never known a place in which it is so easy to be good.  I have not said a word, nor scarcely harboured a thought, that was not lovely and virtuous since I entered these gates, and yet there are those who think me fantastic, difficult, hard to please, unreasonable!

I believe the saints must have lived in the country mostly (I am certain they never tried Hydropathic hotels), and why anybody with a black heart and natural love of wickedness should not simply buy a poultry farm and become an angel, I cannot understand.

Living with animals is really a very improving and wholesome kind of life, to the person who will allow himself to be influenced by their sensible and high-minded ideals.  When you come to think about it, man is really the only animal that ever makes a fool of himself; the others are highly civilised, and never make mistakes.  I am going to mention this when I write to somebody, sometime; I mean if I ever do.  To be sure, our human life is much more complicated than theirs, and I believe when the other animals notice our errors of judgment they make allowances.  The bee is as busy as a bee, and the beaver works like a beaver, but there their responsibility ends.  The bee doesn’t have to go about seeing that other bees are not crowded into unsanitary tenements or victimised by the sweating system.  When the beaver’s day of toil is over he doesn’t have to discuss the sphere, the rights, or the voting privileges of beaveresses; all he has to do is to work like a beaver, and that is comparatively simple.

CHAPTER XIII

I have been studying The Young Poultry Keeper’s Friend of late.  If there is anything I dislike and deplore, it is the possession of knowledge which I cannot put to practical use.  Having discovered an interesting disease called Scaly Leg in the July number, I took the magazine out into the poultry-yard and identified the malady on three hens and a cock.  Phoebe joined me in the diagnosis and we treated the victims with a carbolic lotion and scrubbed them with vaseline.

As Phoebe and I grow wise in medical lore the case of Cannibal Ann assumes a different aspect.  As the bibulous man quaffs more and more flagons of beer and wine when his daily food is ham, salt fish, and cabbage, so does the hen avenge her wrongs of diet and woes of environment.  Cannibal Ann, herself, has, so far as we know, been raised in a Christian manner and enjoyed all the advantages of modern methods; but her maternal parent may have lived in some heathen poultry-yard which was asphalted or bricked or flagged, so that she was debarred from scratching in Mother Earth and was forced to eat her own shells in self-defence.