Men are making handsome
incomes from this business--women can do the same. The language of the
poultry magazines, by the way, is equally sentimental and efflorescent
with that of the speeches at agricultural fairs, sufficiently so to
sicken one who has once accepted it as reliable, as for instance: "The
individual must be very abnormal in his tastes if they can not be
catered to by our feathered tribe." "To their owner they are a thing of
beauty and a joy forever. Their ways are interesting, their language
fascinating, and their lives from the egg to the mature fowl replete
with constant surprises."[1]
[Footnote 1: This clause is true.]
"To simply watch them as they pass from stage to stage of development
fills the mind of every sane person with pleasure." One poultry crank
insists that each hen must be so carefully studied that she can be
understood and managed as an individual, and speaks of his hens having
at times an "anxious nervous expression!"
"Yes, it is where the hens sing all the day long in the barn-yard that
throws off the stiff ways of our modern civilization and makes us feel
that we are home and can rest and play and grow young once more. How
many men and women have regained lost health and spirits in keeping
hens, in the excitement of finding and gathering eggs!"
"It is not the natural laying season when snows lie deep on field and
hill, when the frost tingles in sparkling beads from every twig, when
the clear streams bear up groups of merry skaters," etc.
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