rong with it."

"Perhaps it's your dodge of letting down the temperature."

I had touched upon a tender point.

"My dear fellow," he said earnestly, "there's nothing the matter with
my figures. It's a mathematical certainty. What's the good of
mathematics if not to help you work out that sort of thing? No,
there's something wrong with the machine itself, and I shall probably
make a complaint to the people I got it from. Where did we get the
incubator, Millie?"

"Harrod's, I think, dear. Yes, it was Harrod's. It came down with the
first lot of things from there."

"Then," said Ukridge, banging the table with his fist, while his
glasses flashed triumph, "we've got 'em! Write and answer that letter
of theirs to-night, Millie. Sit on them."

"Yes, dear."

"And tell 'em that we'd have sent 'em their confounded eggs weeks ago
if only their rotten, twopenny-ha'penny incubator had worked with any
approach to decency."

"Or words to that effect," I suggested.

"Add in a postscript that I consider that the manufacturer of the
thing ought to rent a padded cell at Earlswood, and that they are
scoundrels for palming off a groggy machine of that sort on me. I'll
teach them!"

"Yes, dear."

"The ceremony of opening the morning's letters at Harrod's ought to be
full of interest and excitement to-morrow," I said.

This dashing counter stroke served to relieve Ukridge's pessimistic
mood. He seldom looked on the dark side of things for long at a time.
He began now to speak hopefully of the future. He planned out
ingenious, if somewhat impracticable, improvements in the farm. Our
fowls were to multiply so rapidly and consistently that within a short
space of time Dorsetshire would be paved with them. Our eggs were to
increase in size till they broke records, and got three-line notices
in the "Items of Interest" column of the _Daily Mail_. Briefly, each
hen was to become a happy combination of rabbit and ostrich.

"There is certainly a good time coming," I said. "May it be soon.
Meanwhile, there remain the local tradesmen. What of them?"

Ukridge relapsed once more into pessimism.

"They are the worst of the lot," he said. "I don't mind about the
London men so much. They only write. And a letter or two hurts nobody.
But when it comes to butchers and bakers and grocers and fishmongers
and fruiterers, and what not, coming up to one's house and dunning one
in one's own garden--well, it's a little hard, what?"

It may be w