United States or Grenada ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"Hen-food!" exclaimed Billings. "You don't 'low that will make hens lay, do you, Pap?" "I ain't advisin' no one to use it that don't want to," said Pap, "but I bet you I'm a-goin' to feed that to my hens"; and he chuckled again. "Pap," said Billings, "you're up to some be-devilment, sure! What is it?"
"You jist keep your hand on your watch till you find out," answered Pap, and he took his package and went home. "Sally," he said when he entered the house, "I got some hen-food now that's bound to make them hens lay, sure." She took the package and opened it. "For law's sake, Pap," she said, "what kind o' hen-food is that? It's blue!" "Yes," said Pap, looking at it closely, "it IS blue, ain't it?
The next morning Sally greeted him with a smile. "Eggs this mornin', Pap," she said. "That hen-food did work like a charm. I got three eggs." Pap ate without comment until he had finished the second egg. He felt that he could eat a dozen, after his long fast. "It do seem good to have eggs agin," he said. That evening, and the next evening he deposited three eggs as before.
Yet these artfully studied qualifications of the cloying sweet may have been all of the taste of wormwood to the honored guest, who cared nothing for his easy triumph with shanghais and the pip and these two-yolk eggs, but prided himself on his bantams and his hen-food, and was clinging to the hope that his discoveries in the higher education would teach hens to observe the legal holidays if they could not be taught to lay on every working-day, and was trusting to keep his measure of failure a secret from the world.
"So your hen-food don't work, Pap?" Pap chuckled. "It's a-workin," he said, "and you can give me a dozen o' them eggs. And, say, you need't tell Sally." Billings laughed. "I'm on," he said. Pap put the bag of eggs back of the cracker-box, and put three of them in his pocket. When he reached home he quietly slipped around the house and deposited the three eggs in three nests, and went it.
"Pshaw, now, Sally," he said, "you'd ought to have let me know you was out. You oughtn't to do that. Feed 'em plenty of it. They deserve it. If you stop feedin' them they'll stop layin' pretty soon. The effect of that hen-food don't last more'n two weeks. No," he said thoughtfully, "ten days is the longest I ever knowed it to last 'em."
"You must allow, Sally," he said, "that it's quite a strain on a hen to keep a-layin' right along through such weather as this, and I'm only thankful they lay any. Mebby if you give them a leetle more o' that hen-food they'll do better." "I believe it," said Sally. "Why, it's wonderful, Pap. I shouldn't be a bit surprised to find 'em layin' duck eggs if I jist give 'em enough o' that stuff."
But she does n't like Mr. Jones, because when he comes to call, his coat-pockets are always bulging with brown paper packages of a hen-food that he has just invented. The other day, when he came to see her, she was out, and he handed me his card.
His pessimism was well founded. The cold spell was too much even for the best hen-food to conquer. No eggs rewarded him. One evening he was sitting in Billings', smoking his pipe and thinking. He had been thinking for some time, and at length a sparkle came into his eyes, and he knocked the ashes from his pipe and arose.
She was gittin' sick o' them she's been buyin' at Billings'. She was downright thankful." About a week later she said: "Them hens of ourn do beat all creation. I run out o' that hen-food a week ago, and I hain't give them a mite since, and they keep a-layin' jist the same. I can't make head nor tail of them, Pap." Pap squirmed in his chair.
Word Of The Day