, isn't it?
Here we are at the hen house, or rather one of the hen houses."

"Don't you keep your hens all together?" asked Miss Laura.

"Only in the winter time," said Mrs. Wood. "I divide my flock in the
spring. Part of them stay here and part go to the orchard to live in
little movable houses that we put about in different places. I feed each
flock morning and evening at their own little house. They know they'll
get no food even if they come to my house, so they stay at home. And
they know they'll get no food between times, so all day long they pick
and scratch in the orchard, and destroy so many bugs and insects that it
more than pays for the trouble of keeping them there."

"Doesn't this flock want to mix up with the other?" asked Miss Laura, as
she stepped into the little wooden house.

"No; they seem to understand. I keep my eye on them for a while at
first, and they soon find out that they're not to fly either over the
garden fence or the orchard fence. They roam over the farm and pick up
what they can get. There's a good deal of sense in hens, if one manages
them properly. I love them because they are such good mothers."

We were in the little wooden house by this time, and I looked around it
with surprise. It was better than some of the poor people's houses in
Fairport. The walls were white and clean, so were the little ladders
that led up to different kinds of roosts, where the fowls sat at night.
Some roosts were thin and round, and some were broad and flat. Mrs. Wood
said that the broad ones were for a heavy fowl called the Brahma. Every
part of the little house was almost as light as it was out doors, on
account of the large windows.

Miss Laura spoke of it. "Why, auntie, I never saw such a light hen
house."

Mrs. Wood was diving into a partly shut-in place, where it was not so
light, and where the nests were. She straightened herself up, her face
redder than ever, and looked at the windows with a pleased smile.

"Yes, there's not a hen house in New Hampshire with such big windows.
Whenever I look at them, I think of my mother's hens, and wish that they
could have had a place like this. They would have thought themselves in
a hen's paradise. When I was a girl we didn't know that hens loved light
and heat, and all winter they used to sit in a dark hencoop, and the
cold was so bad that their combs would freeze stiff, and the tops of
them would drop off. We never thought about it. If we'd had any sens