“When we get a connection, we shall be able to name our terms.  It stands to reason, laddie.  Have you ever seen a man, woman, or child who wasn’t eating an egg or just going to eat an egg or just coming away from eating an egg?  I tell you, the good old egg is the foundation of daily life.  Stop the first man you meet in the street and ask him which he’d sooner lose, his egg or his wife, and see what he says!  We’re on to a good thing, Garny, my boy.  Pass the whisky!”

The upshot of it was that the firms mentioned supplied us with a quantity of goods, agreeing to receive phantom eggs in exchange.  This satisfied Ukridge.  He had a faith in the laying power of his hens which would have flattered them if they could have known it.  It might also have stimulated their efforts in that direction, which up to date were feeble.

It was now, as I have said, Thursday, the twenty-second of July,—­a glorious, sunny morning, of the kind which Providence sends occasionally, simply in order to allow the honest smoker to take his after-breakfast pipe under ideal conditions.  These are the pipes to which a man looks back in after years with a feeling of wistful reverence, pipes smoked in perfect tranquillity, mind and body alike at rest.  It is over pipes like these that we dream our dreams, and fashion our masterpieces.

My pipe was behaving like the ideal pipe; and, as I strolled spaciously about the lawn, my novel was growing nobly.  I had neglected my literary work for the past week, owing to the insistent claims of the fowls.  I am not one of those men whose minds work in placid independence of the conditions of life.  But I was making up for lost time now.  With each blue cloud that left my lips and hung in the still air above me, striking scenes and freshets of sparkling dialogue rushed through my brain.  Another uninterrupted half hour, and I have no doubt that I should have completed the framework of a novel which would have placed me in that select band of authors who have no christian names.  Another half hour, and posterity would have known me as “Garnet.”

But it was not to be.

“Stop her!  Catch her, Garny, old horse!”

I had wandered into the paddock at the moment.  I looked up.  Coming towards me at her best pace was a small hen.  I recognised her immediately.  It was the disagreeable, sardonic-looking bird which Ukridge, on the strength of an alleged similarity of profile to his wife’s nearest relative, had christened Aunt Elizabeth.  A Bolshevist hen, always at the bottom of any disturbance in the fowl-run, a bird which ate its head off daily at our expense and bit the hands which fed it by resolutely declining to lay a single egg.  Behind this fowl ran Bob, doing, as usual, the thing that he ought not to have done.  Bob’s wrong-headedness in the matter of our hens was a constant source of inconvenience.  From the first, he had seemed to regard the laying-in of our stock purely in the nature of a tribute to his sporting tastes.  He had a fixed idea that he was a hunting dog and that, recognising this, we had very decently provided him with the material for the chase.