ternal vigilance is the
price of success with poultry as the book she bought, which is different
from mine, says, and Bess decided that she wanted her chickens where she
could go in to see them comfortably when she came from parties and things
without having to go around in the back yard, which is the most lovely
garden in Hayesville anyway, in her slippers and party clothes. "I'd sell
her the chicks at twenty dollars apiece, and that's cheap if they produce
as they ought to with their blood and such--such care as she intends to
bestow on them. The twenty-dollar price will either cure her or start an
idle woman into a producer," said Adam, in answer to my request, as he cut
me out a pair of shoes from a piece of hide like that which the shoes upon
his own feet were made from. It was raining, and I sat at his feet in the
barn and laboriously sewed what he had cut.

I told Bess what Adam said, and she paid me the hundred and twenty dollars
right on the spot, and then insisted on opening the incubator at the
regular time for the ten minutes the book directs, to cool off the eggs
night and morning, and putting her monogram on six of the eggs. To do this
she decided to stay all night, and telephoned her maid, Annette, to pack
her bag and let Matthew bring it out to her when he came to help Polly
Corn-tassel put their first batch of eggs into their incubator. Matthew had
bought twenty hens and two nice brotherly roosters, and they had almost
caught up with me in the number of their brown babies on the whole shells.
Matthew had been coming out night and morning ever since he had brought
out his and the Beesleys' poultry and had either had supper with us at
Elmnest or we had both got riz biscuits and peach preserves and chicken
fried with Aunt Mary and Uncle Silas and Polly and Bud. I had subjugated
Rufus into cooking a few canned things, for which I had traded one of his
pig jaws at the bank-post-office-grocery emporium, and Uncle Silas had
thrown in a few potatoes, and Adam had brought me a great bag of white
beans from across Paradise Ridge, so the diet at Elmnest had changed
slightly. The absorbed twins had never noticed it at all; only they
displayed more hearty vigor in attacking the problems of literature and
history that absorbed them. Also almost every day Pan brought me young
green things that were sprouting in the woods, and I cooked them for him in
an old iron pot down by the spring-house and had supper with him.

"