[THE MAN BUILDS A POULTRY-HOUSE]
It would be wrong to say that all the poultry on the farm really liked the Man. The White Cock and the Brown Hen had never been known really to approve of anybody, and the Shanghai Cock was not given to saying pleasant things of people. However, the Man certainly had more and more friends among the fowls on the place, and when the White Cock and the Brown Hen wanted to say what they thought of his ways, they had to go off together to some far-away corner where they could not be overheard. If they did not do this, they were quite certain to be asked to talk about something else.
The five Hens who had had Chickens given to them were his firmest friends. It is true that each of them had really been on the nest long enough to hatch out Chickens of her own, yet they saw that another time they would be saved the long and weary sitting. They remembered, too, the Man’s thoughtfulness in putting food and water where they could reach it easily on that first day, when they disliked so much to leave their families. They had spoken of this to the Gander, and had tried to make him change his mind about the fat table in the cellar. They might exactly as well have talked to a feed-cutter.
“I hear what you say,” he replied politely (Ganders are often the most polite when they are about to do or say mean things). “I hear what you say, but you cannot expect me to change my mind about what I have seen with my own eyes. It was certainly quite wrong for him to get ready to burn those eggs, and the marking of them was almost as bad. As for this nonsense about the table hatching out Chickens, that is quite absurd. You could not expect a Gander to believe that. It is the sort of thing which Hens believe.”
So the Man’s friends had to give up talking to the Gander. Even the Geese were not sure that it was all right. “We would like to think so,” they often remarked, “but the Gander says it cannot be.”
Now the fowls had something new to puzzle them, for the Man spent one sunshiny morning in walking to and fro in the fields which had always been used for a pasture, stopping every now and then to drive a stake. Sometimes he walked with long strides, and then when his Little Girls spoke to him he would shake his head and not answer. Afterward he seemed to be measuring off the ground with a long line of some sort, letting the Little Girls take turns in holding one end of it for him.
After all of the stakes had been driven, the Man harnessed Brownie to the old stone-boat and began to draw large stones from different parts of the farmyard and pasture. He even went along the road and pried out some which had always lain there, right in the way of every team that had to turn aside from the narrow track. All these were drawn over to the stakes and tumbled off on the ground there.