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 from dawn to twilight to slaving for his eight hundred
d