Those two dears are the most precious old Rips I ever beheld," said Bess
when we had retired to my room after supper on the fateful night of our
near tragedy. "You are so fortunate, Ann, to have two delicious fathers in
name only. Mine pokes into my business at all angles and insists on so much
attention from me that I don't know how I'll amount to anything in this
world. He says it takes a very fine and brainy woman to earn about ten
thousand dollars a year being affectionate and agreeable to her own father,
and that I get so much because there is no possible competition as I am an
only child, but all the same it looks like unearned money to me. Just wait
until those six little chickens begin to earn me a hundred dollars a month
like my book guarantees they will do in their second year; then I'm going
to show dad just how much I love him for himself and give him back my
bank-book."

"Still it is an awful lot of work, Bess," I remonstrated feebly, because I
knew that I couldn't have made myself believe all I had learned in just two
months at Elmnest the day I started in business.

"You know, Ann, I told you about that wonderful Evan Baldwin who has been
in Hayesville two or three times this winter, the man to whom the governor
gave the portfolio of agriculture, I believe they call it. Well, he was at
the Old Hickory ball the other night when you wouldn't come, and I told him
all about you and about buying those little chickens from you, and he was
so wonderful and sympathetic that Owen Murray sulked dreadfully. He
encouraged me entirely and told me a lot of things about some of his
experiment stations in all the different States. You thought you were going
to stagger me with that twenty-dollar price on those chicks in shell, but
he said he had paid as much as five hundred dollars apiece for a few eggs
he got from some prize chickens in England and had brought them over in a
basket in his own hand. He said he thought from what I told him about the
Golden Bird that twenty would be about right for one of his sons or
daughters. Ann, he is a perfectly delicious man, and you must meet him. It
is awful the way all the girls and women just follow him in droves, though
I'm sure he doesn't seem to notice us."

"I never want to lay eyes on him, Bess. He has insulted me and I never--"
but just here a thought struck me in my solar plexus and crinkled me
entirely up. "Oh, Bess, I forgot to fill the lamp in the incubator
to-night, an