hey
rather admire your dash. But in the country they tell you about these
things.

So I went to a man and confessed to him my trouble about fresh eggs.

"I see," he said; "you want maybirds."

"No, I don't," I said; "I want hens."

"It's the same thing," he told me. "How many would you like?"

"Five," I said. I thought five would be an unostentatious number and
make it clear that I was not trying to compete with the wholesale
egg-dealers.

He segregated five maybirds and explained their points to me.

It appeared that one of them was a Buff Orpington and three were white
Wyandottes and one had no particular politics. I should say now that
it was an Independent. It has speckles and is the one that keeps
getting into the garden.

I asked him when the creatures would begin to enter upon their new
duties, and he said they would do so at once.

"What is their maximum egg-laying velocity?" I inquired.

"They'll lay about three eggs a day between them," he said, "these
five birds."

"Why between them?" I enquired. But I consented to buy his birds, and
he said if I liked he would run round to my garden at once and run up
a hen-house and a hen-run for me. "Run" seemed rather a word with him.

I said, "Yes, by all means."

He came round that evening and hewed down an apple-tree under the
light of the moon to make room for the maybird-run, and in the morning
he brought a large roll of wire-netting, and the next day he built a
wooden house, and the day after that he brought his five maybirds,
and the day after that he came round and asked for some cinders. He
sprinkled these all over the enclosure, and I watched him while he
worked.

"What is that for?" I asked.

"They want something to scratch in when they run about," he explained.
"Exercise is what they need."

"They seem to be scratching already, but they don't seem to be
running," I said. "Wouldn't it have been better to put a cinder-track
all round the edge and train them to run races round it?"

He said that he hadn't thought of that, but I could try it if I
liked. Then he gave me a bag of food, which he said was particularly
efficacious for maybirds, and produced his bill.

All this happened about a month ago, and for the last four weeks the
principal preoccupation of my household has been the feeding of these
five birds. I have had to lay a gravel-path from the aviary to the
back premises in order to sustain the weight of the traffic. Huge
bowls of