“You see,” he told his mother, “it would have been such a pity for Veatra to sit another whole week on something that was never meant for anything but an omelette!”
Mrs. Wood never expected the chickens to hatch; but they did, every one of them,—this is a true story,—and grew up to be exactly the kind of chickens that one would expect from grocery-store eggs. They were none of them brothers and sisters, or even distant cousins, and all seemed like dreadfully ordinary fowls. But Franklin enjoyed them all the more, because each one that came out was such a surprise. He rose at five o’clock in the morning when the first was due, and stole downstairs in his nightgown to feel under the hen. She responded with her usual angry squawk, but at the same time he heard a little soft, sweet sound like the note of a bird, and drew forth a mouse-colored ball of down that looked at him confidingly out of round baby eyes.
“Say, you’re the fellow I came to meet!” Franklin said, setting the thing on its tiny feet. And he mixed some corn-meal mush for it, which Veatra ate up immediately. After breakfast there were two more chickens, and before night the whole seven were cuddled under Veatra’s wing.
“What’s that on the back of the stove?” asked Biddy the next morning, as Eunice came into the kitchen.
“Oh, that’s my incubator with an egg in it. I’m goin’ to have some chickens, too.”
The incubator was an old candy box, stuffed with cotton and hung on top of the range.
“Whin it hatches, you can have my bist bonnet to raise it in,” said Biddy, disrespectfully. But she was never called upon to keep her promise, for the egg baked hard on the next washing day, and Eunice ate it.
Franklin set Hannah on some home-made eggs; but she used to leave them to fly at the cats, and none of them hatched but an egg of Flossy’s, which was named “Fairy Lilian.” She afterwards grew up to be an enormous white rooster, with shaggy legs, and a great deal of manner.
When the warm weather came, the cats were fed in the yard, and as the chickens were always escaping from their own quarters, there were many pitched battles over the food. The hens stole things from the kittens, and pecked them cruelly when they tried to interfere. Once Eunice saw John Alden seize a whole mutton-chop bone, and hurry around the house with it, followed by all the cats. It seemed too unfair, and Eunice wrote a note to Franklin that day about it, in school.
Dear Franklin:—