nty--a fascinating chronicle. Meal-times were delectable festivals,
not only because the bread-and-milk, the boiled rice and tapioca
pudding, and eggs and fruit tasted so good, but by reason of the broad
outlook out of window over the field, the wood, the lake, and the
mountains; supper-time, with the declining sun pouring light into
the little room and making the landscape glorious, was especially
exhilarating. Ambrosial was the bread baked by Mrs. Peters, the taciturn
and serious religious person of color who attended to our cooking; the
prize morsels were the ends, golden brown in hue, crunching so crisply
between our teeth. I used to wonder how a being with hands so dark as
those of Mrs. Peters managed to turn out dough so immaculate. She would
plunge them right into the ivory-hued substance, yet it became only
whiter than before. But the life of life was, of course, out-doors.
There was a barn containing a hay-mow and a large hen-coop, soon
populous with hens and chickens, with an heroic snow-white rooster to
keep them in order. Hens are the most audacious and presuming of pets,
and they have strong individuality.

One of our brood was more intellectual and enterprising than the others;
she found a way of getting out of the coop, no matter how tightly it
was shut up; and she would jump in our laps as we sat eating a piece
of bread in the barn doorway and snatch it away from us; but I think we
sometimes sat there with the bread on purpose to have her do it. Once or
twice--until I was detected and stopped--I enjoyed the poignant delight
of fishing for hens out of the barn loft; my tackle consisted of a bent
pin at the end of a string tied to a stick. It was baited with a grain
of corn, or a bit of rag would do as well, for hens have no hereditary
suspicion of anglers, and are much more readily entrapped than fishes.
Pulling them up, squawking and fluttering, was thrilling, but, of
course, it was wrong, like other thrilling things, and had to be
foregone. A less unregenerate experiment was fastening two grains of
corn to the ends of a long bit of thread; two hens would seize each
a grain and begin swallowing thread until they interfered, with each
other, when a disgorgement would take place. It was an economical
sport--the one bit of thread and the two corn-grains would last all
day--and, in view of the joy afforded to the spectators, did not seem
too unkind. My father had mechanical talent, and with an old door-knob