ouble, and while Henry was
speculating as to what the cause of his anxiety might be, the learned
bookseller said, somewhat anxiously, and in a thin, wheezy voice:

"Tell me, do you know anythink about poultry?"

"Poultry!" gasped Henry.

"Yes," replied Mr. Griggs, with a solemnity which struck the new
assistant as absurdly pathetic. "Hens," he explained further; "my best
one is down with croup or somethink o' the kind. Your father has taken a
many prizes with his birds, and I thought you might know all about 'em.
I've never had great success with 'em myself. Come outside and tell me
what you think."

Without waiting for a reply, the bookseller shuffled through the passage
into a back-yard, and the youth followed as one in a dream.

The yard was almost entirely devoted to poultry, and if Mr. Griggs was
an amateur at the pursuit, he had at least prepared for it in no mean
way, three sides of the place being taken up with wired hen-runs and a
wooden house for his stock. In a compartment by itself, gasping and
choking, lay the object of the old man's solicitude.

"The finest layer I ever had," he declared despondingly. "An egg a day
as reg'lar as clockwork. I'd rather lose two of the others."

His sorrow deepened when Henry said that he had never seen a hen in
that state before, and did not know what was wrong with it.

"Then I'll be forced to ask old John Shakespeare, the grocer, what to
do; although I 'ate the man, and don't want to be beholden to him for
anythink. But he's our champion breeder, and what must be, must be."

Shakespeare, grocer, hens! Henry doubted seriously if his ears were
doing their duty, but there was no mistaking the anxiety of Mr. Ephraim
Griggs. He could not have been more perturbed if his wife had been
dangerously ill. His wife? That reminded Henry that he had heard his
father say Mrs. Griggs had been dead these many years. Perhaps that was
why the bookseller was so untidy.

"You had better go back to the shop, my lad," said he, in a voice which
meant he was now resigned to the worst, "and take a look round. I'll be
in there directly."

When Henry returned to the shop he found that Mr. Pemble, the senior
assistant, had arrived; but for the moment that young gentleman was so
engrossed with the study of his features in a broken looking-glass that
he did not notice Henry's entrance. Mr. Pemble's anxiety seemed to be
centred around the tardy growth of an incipient moustache, which, when
a