Love Among the Chickens

ettledown to a certain extent. The coops were finished. They were notmasterpieces, and I have seen chickens pause before them in d

e and from time to timeabusing his creditors, who were numerous. For we had hardly been inresidence a day before he began to order in a vast supply of necessaryand unnecessary things, all on credit. Some he got from the village,others from neighbouring towns. Axminster he laid heavily undercontribution. He even

e and masterly. If a tradesman suggested that a small cheque onaccount wou

nary expensesabout the house off his back." This sounded well, and suggested thedisbursement of huge sums for rent. The fact that the house had beenlent him rent free was kept with some care in the background. Havingweakened the man with pathos, he wou

verycomfortable. I suppose we all realised that the things woul

t give it time. Soon we shallbe turning over hundreds a week, hundreds! I'm in touch with all thebig places,--Whiteley's, Harrod's, all the nibs. Here I am, I said tothem, with a large chicken farm with all the modern improvements. Youwant egg

of daily life. Stop the first man you meet in the streetand ask him which he'd sooner lose, his egg or his wife, and see whathe says! We're on to a good thing, Garny, my boy. Pass the whisky!"The upshot of it was that the firms mentioned supplied us with aquantity of go

allow the honest smoker to take hisafter-breakfast pipe under ideal conditions. These are the pipes towhich a man looks back in after years with a feeling of wis

n placidindependence of the conditions of life. But I was making up for losttime now. With each blue cloud that left my lips and hung in the stillair above me, striking scenes and freshets of sparkling dialoguerushed through my brain. Another uninterrupte

ic-looking bird whichUkridge, on the strength of an alleged similarity of profile to hiswife's nearest relative, had christened Aunt Elizabeth. A Bolshevisthen, always at the bottom of any disturbance in the fowl-

ed to regard the laying-in of our stock purely in the nature of a tribute to his sportingtastes. He had a fixed idea

nough to tell me that hewas a negligible fact

uch for him, and he had appointed m

I laid aside my novel for future reference, and wepassed out of the paddock in the following order. First, AuntElizabeth, as fresh as paint, going w

me. I continued to pound along doggedly. I was grimlyresolute. I had caught Aunt Elizabeth's eye as she passed me, and thecontempt in it had cut me to the quick. This bird despised me. I amnot a violent or a quick-tem

he ground began to rise. I was in that painfulcondition which occurs when one has lost one

effrontery of her warpedand unpleasant nature, I do not know; but she now slowed down to walk,and even began to

euvres of Arthur," etc., aman of whose work so capable a judge as the Peebles /Advertiser/ hadsaid "Shows promise."A judicious increase of pace brought me within a yard or

. The sun blazed down, concentrating its rays on my back to theexclusion

had again slowed to awalk, and I was capable

another of her sardonic chuckles, dived in head-foremost and struggled through in the mysterious way in which birds doget through hedges. The s

the next moment I found myself emerging with a black face andtottering knees on the gravel path of a private garden. Beyond thepath was a cr

had travelled down with us in thetrai

iracle of adroitness he had captured Aunt Elizabeth, and was holdingh