d under their heels. By the
time I was twenty years old, I really suppose I had raised more poultry
than any one individual in all the section round about there. The very
chickens came to know my talent by and by. The youth of both sexes
ceased to paw the earth for worms, and old roosters that came to crow,
"remained to pray," when I passed by.

I have had so much experience in the raising of fowls that I cannot but
think that a few hints from me might be useful to the society. The two
methods I have already touched upon are very simple, and are only used in
the raising of the commonest class of fowls; one is for summer, the other
for winter. In the one case you start out with a friend along about
eleven o'clock' on a summer's night (not later, because in some states
--especially in California and Oregon--chickens always rouse up just at
midnight and crow from ten to thirty minutes, according to the ease or
difficulty they experience in getting the public waked up), and your
friend carries with him a sack. Arrived at the henroost (your
neighbor's, not your own), you light a match and hold it under first one
and then another pullet's nose until they are willing to go into that bag
without making any trouble about it. You then return home, either taking
the bag with you or leaving it behind, according as circumstances shall
dictate. N. B.--I have seen the time when it was eligible and
appropriate to leave the sack behind and walk off with considerable
velocity, without ever leaving any word where to send it.

In the case of the other method mentioned for raising poultry, your
friend takes along a covered vessel with a charcoal fire in it, and you
carry a long slender plank. This is a frosty night, understand. Arrived
at the tree, or fence, or other henroost (your own if you are an idiot),
you warm the end of your plank in your friend's fire vessel, and then
raise it aloft and ease it up gently against a slumbering chicken's foot.
If the subject of your attentions is a true bird, he will infallibly
return thanks with a sleepy cluck or two, and step out and take up
quarters on the plank, thus becoming so conspicuously accessory before
the fact to his own murder as to make it a grave question in our minds as
it once was in the mind of Blackstone, whether he is not really and
deliberately, committing suicide in the second degree. [But you enter
into a contemplation of these legal refinements subsequently not then.]