Moreover, the Buff Rock is a layer, is the layer, maturing as she does about four weeks later than the Rhode Island Reds, and so escaping that fatal early fall laying with its attendant moult and eggless interim until March! On the other hand, the Buff Rock matures about a month earlier than the logy, slow-growing breeds, and so gets a good start before the cold and eggless weather comes.
And such an egg! There are white eggs and brown eggs, large and small eggs, but only one ideal egg—the Buff Rock's. It is of a soft lovely brown, yet whitish enough for a New York market, but brown enough, however, to meet the exquisite taste of the Boston trade. In fact it is neither white nor brown, but rather a delicate blend of the two—a new tone, indeed, a bloom rather, that I must call fresh-laid lavender.
So, at least, I am told. My pullets are not yet laying, having had a very late start last spring. But the real question, speaking professionally, with any breed of fowls is a market question: How do they dress? How do they eat?
If the Buff Plymouth Rock is an ideal bird in her feathers, she is even more so plucked. All white-feathered fowl, in spite of yellow legs, look cadaverous when picked. All dark-feathered fowl, with their tendency to green legs and black pin-feathers, look spotted, long dead, and unsavory. But the Buff Rock, a melody in color, shows that consonance, that consentaneousness, of flesh to feather that makes the plucked fowl to the feathered fowl what high noon is to the faint and far-off dawn—a glow of golden legs and golden neck, mellow, melting as butter, and all the more so with every unpicked pinfeather.
Can there be any doubt of the existence of hen-perfection? Any question of my having attained unto it—with the maturing of this new breed of hens?
For all spiritual purposes, that is, for all satisfactions, the ideal hen is the pullet—the Buff Plymouth Rock pullet.
Just so the ideal wife. If we could only keep them pullets!
The trouble we husbands have with our wives begins with our marrying them. There is seldom any trouble with them before. Our belief in feminine perfection is as profound and as eternal as youth. And the perfection is just as real as the faith. Youth is always bringing the bride home—to hang her on the kitchen clothes-dryer. She turns out to be ordinary cheese-cloth, dyed a more or less fast black—this perfection that he had stamped in letters of indelible red!
The race learns nothing. I learn, but not my children after me. They learn only after themselves. Already I hear my boys saying that their wives—! And the oldest of these boys has just turned fourteen!
Fourteen! the trouble all began at fourteen. No, the trouble began with Adam, though Eve has been responsible for much of it since. Adam had all that a man should have wanted in his perfect Garden. Nevertheless he wanted Eve. Eve in turn had Adam, a perfect man! but she wanted something more—if only the apple tree in the middle of the Garden. And we all of us were there in that Garden—with Adam thinking he was getting perfection in Eve; with Eve incapable of appreciating perfection in Adam. The trouble is human.