ience are only too glad to get out of it. Even clergymen and actors
are bitten with the desire to transform so many pounds of corn into so
many pounds of spring chicken. The now successful manager, Mackaye,
spent about a thousand dollars, in constructing hatching machines and
artificial mothers in Connecticut, but he found that the stage paid
better, and his expensive devices may now be bought for the value of old
tin.

"Enthusiasts will tell you that by the new discovery chickens may be
made out of corn with absolute certainty. In Paris this has been done;
but the conditions are entirely different here. There the land is
valuable, and they cannot devote large fields to a few hundred chickens;
the French climate is so uniform that the markets of Paris cannot be
supplied from the south with produce which ripens or matures before that
of the neighborhood of Paris; the price of chickens is so high and labor
so cheap that more care can be given with profit to one spring chicken
than one of our poultry raisers could give to a dozen. Here we have
plenty of land, the climate south of us is so far advanced in warmth
that even with steam we cannot raise poultry ahead of the south, and the
margin of profit is so small that one failure with a large batch of
chickens sweeps away the profits from several successful experiments.

"When persons wanted me to go into the project I declined and was called
an old fogy. One man spent a fortune on the enterprise in New Jersey,
and at first was hailed as a public benefactor. What was the result of
all his outlay and work? He managed to hatch quantities of young
chickens every February, but although he could fatten them by placing
them in boxes and forcing a fattening mixture down their throats, he
could not make them grow; they had no exercise; they remained puny
little things, and another defect soon appeared: though fat they were
tough and stringy. The breeder sent lots of them to me, and they looked
fat and tender; but my customers complained that they could not be
young, for they were tough and tasteless, and that I must have sold them
aged dwarfs under the name of spring chickens. It was found absolutely
necessary to let them run out of doors as soon as the weather allowed
it, and by the time that they were ready for market the southern
chickens were here and could be sold for less than these. The upshot of
the business is that this breeder has sold out, and another man has now
taken h