Adopting An Abandoned Farm by Kate Sanborn (black male authors txt) 📖

the very middle of his neck, between his chin and his breast - and a white mark on his bosom. His face was singularly beautiful; the finest black eyes, very bright, and yet sweet, and fond, and tender - eyes that seemed to speak; a beautiful, complacent mouth, which used sometimes to show one of the long white teeth at the side; a jet black nose; a brow which was bent and flexible, like Mr. Fox's, and gave great sweetness and expression, and a look of thought to his dear face. There never was such a dog! His temper was, beyond comparison, the sweetest ever known. Nobody ever saw him out of humor. And his sagacity was equal to his temper. Thank God, he went off without suffering. He must have died in a moment. I thought I should have broken my heart when I came home and found what had happened. I shall miss him every moment of my life; I have missed him every instant to-day - so have Drum and Granny. He was laid out last night in the stable, and this morning we buried him in the middle plantation on the house side of the fence, in the flowery corner, between the fence and Lord Shrewsbury's fields. We covered his dear body with flowers; every flower in the garden. <i>Everybody loved him; 'dear saint,' as I used to call him, and as <i>I do not doubt he now is!! No human being was ever so faithful, so gentle, so generous, and so fond! I shall never love anything half so well.

"It will always be pleasant to me to remember that I never teased him by petting other things, and that everything I had he shared. He always ate half my breakfast, and the very day before he died I fed him <i>all the morning with filberts." (There may have been a connection between the filberts and the funeral.)

"While I had him, I was always sure of having one who would love me alike in riches or poverty, who always looked at me with looks of the fondest love, always faithful and always kind. To think of him was a talisman against vexing thoughts. A thousand times I have said, 'I want my Mossy,' when that dear Mossy was close by and would put his dear black nose under my hand on hearing his name. God bless you, my Mossy! I cried when you died, and I can hardly help crying whenever I think of you. All who loved me loved Mossy. He had the most perfect confidence in me - always came to me for protection against any one who threatened him, and, thank God, always found it. I value all things he had lately or ever touched; even the old quilt that used to be spread on my bed for him to lie on, and which we called Mossy's quilt; and the pan that he used to drink out of in the parlor, and which was always called Mossy's pan, dear darling!

"I forgot to say that his breath was always sweet and balmy; his coat always glossy like satin; and he never had any disease or anything to make him disagreeable in his life. Many other things I have omitted; and so I should if I were to write a whole volume of his praise; for he was above all praise, sweet angel! I have inclosed some of his hair, cut off by papa after his death, and some of the hay on which he was laid out. He died Saturday, the 21st of August, 1819, at Bertram House. Heaven bless him, beloved angel!"

It is as sad as true that great natures are solitary, and therefore doubly value the affections of their pets.

Southey wrote a most interesting biography of the cats of Greta Hall, and on the demise of one wrote to an old friend: "Alas! Grosvenor, this day poor old Rumpel was found dead, after as long and as happy a life as cat could wish for - if cats form wishes on that subject. There should be a court mourning in Cat-land, and if the Dragon wear a black ribbon round his neck, or a band of crape, <i>à la militaire, round one of the fore paws, it will be but a becoming mark of respect. As we have not catacombs here, he is to be decently interred in the orchard and catnip planted on his grave."

And so closes this catalogue of Southey's "Cattery."

But, hark! my cats are mewing, dogs all calling for me - no - for dinner! After all, what is the highest civilization but a thin veneer over natural appetites? What would a club be without its <i>chefs, a social affair without refreshment, a man without his dinner, a woman without her tea? Come to think of it, I'm hungry myself!


CHAPTER V.

STARTING A POULTRY FARM.


If every hen should only raise five broods yearly of ten each, and
there were ten hens to start with, at the end of two years they
would number 344,760, after the superfluous roosters were sold; and
then, supposing the extra eggs to have paid for their keeping and
the produce to be worth only a dollar and a half a pair, there would
be a clear profit of $258,520. Allowing for occasional deaths, this
sum might be stated in round numbers at a quarter of a million,
which would be a liberal increase from ten hens. Of course I did not
expect to do as well as this, but merely mention what might be done
with good luck and forcing.

ROBERT ROOSEVELT.

Having always heard, on the best authority, that there was "money in hens," I invested largely in prize fowls secured at State fairs and large poultry shows, buying as many kinds as possible to make an effective and brilliant display in their "runs."

There <i>is a good deal of money in my hens - how to get it back is the present problem. These hens were all heralded as famous layers; several did lay in the traveling coops on the journey, great pinky-brown beauties, just to show what they could do if they chose, then stopped suddenly. I wrote anxiously to former owners of this vaunted stock to explain such disappointing behavior. Some guessed the hens were just moulting, others thought "may be they were broody"; a few had the frankness to agree with me that it was mighty curious, but hens always were "sorter contrary critters."

Their appetites remained normal, but, as the little girl said of her pet bantam, they only lay about doing nothing. And when guests desired some of my fine fresh eggs boiled for breakfast, I used to go secretly to a neighbor and buy a dozen, but never gave away the mortifying situation.

Seeing piles of ducks' eggs in a farmer's barn, all packed for market, and picturing the producers, thirty white Pekins, a snowy, self-supporting fleet on my reformed lakelet, I bought the whole lot, and for long weary months they were fed and pampered and coaxed and reasoned with, shut up, let out, kept on the water, forbidden to go to it, but not one egg to be seen!

It was considered a rich joke in that locality that a city woman who was trying to farm, had applied for these ducks just as they had completed their labors for the season of 1888-'90; they were also extremely venerable, and the reticent owner rejoiced to be relieved of an expensive burden at good rates. Knowing nothing of these facts in natural history, I pondered deeply over the double phenomenon. I said the hens seemed normal only as to appetite; the ducks proved abnormal in this respect. They were always coming up to the back door, clamoring for food - always unappeased. They preferred cake, fresh bread, hot boiled potatoes, doted on tender bits of meat, but would gobble up anything and everything, more voracious and less fastidious than the ordinary hog of commerce. Bags of corn were consumed in a flash, "shorts" were never long before their eager gaze, they went for every kind of nourishment provided for the rest of the menagerie. A goat is supposed to have a champion appetite and digestion, but a duck - at least one of my ducks - leaves a goat so far behind that he never could regain his reputation for omniverosity. They were too antique to be eaten themselves - their longevity entitled them to respect; they could not be disposed of by the shrewdest market man to the least particular of boarding-house providers; I could only regard them with amazement and horror and let them go on eating me out of house and home and purse-strings.

But at last I knew. I asked an honest man from afar, who called to sell something, why those ducks would not lay a single egg. He looked at them critically and wrote to me the next day:

"DEAR MADAM: The reason your ducks won't lay is because they're too
old to live and the bigest part of 'em is drakes.

Respectfully,

JONAS HURLBERT."

I hear that there are more ducks in the Chinese Empire than in all the world outside of it. They are kept by the Celestials on every farm, on the private and public roads, on streets of cities, and on all the lakes, ponds, rivers, streams, and brooks in the country. That is the secret of their lack of progress. What time have they to advance after the ducks are fed and cared for? No male inhabitant could ever squeeze out a leisure half-hour to visit a barber, hence their long queues.

About this time the statement of Mr. Crankin, of North Yeaston, Rhode Island, that he makes a clear and easy profit of five dollars and twenty cents per hen each year, and nearly forty-four dollars to every duck, and might have increased said profit if he had hatched, rather than sold, seventy-two dozen eggs, struck me as wildly apocryphal. Also that caring for said hens and ducks was merely an incident of his day's work on the large farm, he working with his laborers. Heart-sick and indignant, contrasting his rosy success with my leaden-hued failure, I decided to give all my ducks away, as they wouldn't, couldn't drown, and there would be no use in killing them. But no one wanted them! And everybody smiled quizzically when I proposed the gift.

Just then, as if in direct sarcasm, a friend sent me a paper with an item marked to the effect that a poor young girl had three ducks' eggs given her as the basis of a solid fortune, and actually cleared one hundred and eighteen dollars from those three eggs the first year.

Another woman solemnly asserts in print a profit of $448.69 from one hundred hens each year.

The census man told me of a woman who had only eighteen hens. They gave her sixteen hundred and ninety eggs, of which she sold eighteen dollars' worth, leaving plenty for household use.

And my hens and my ducks! In my despair I drove a long way to consult a "duck man." He looked like the typical Brother Jonathan, only with a longer beard, and his face was haggard, unkempt, anxious. He could scarcely stop to converse, evidently grudged the time, devotes his entire energies