In my surprise I could only mutter over and over again the name of William Tell's brother. A great many people do not know that William Tell ever had a brother. His first name was Wat.
After that my friend gave me up as one hopelessly sunken in ignorance, and by a mutual yet unspoken consent we turned the subject to the actors' strike, which was then in full blast. But at intervals ever since I have been thinking of what he told me. To my way of thinking there is something wrong with the economic system of a country which saddles an income tax on an unmarried man with an income of more than two thousand dollars a year and if he be married sinks the ax into all he makes above three thousand, leaving him the interest deduction on the extra one thousand, amounting, I believe, to about twelve dollars and a half, for the support of his wife, on the theory that under the present scale of living any reasonably prudent man can suitably maintain a wife on twelve-fifty a year—I repeat, there is something radically wrong with a government which does this to the wage-earner and yet passes right on by a cow that carries fifteen thousand in life insurance and a bull worth fifty thousand in his own right. It amounts to class privilege, I maintain. It's almost enough to make a man vote the Republican ticket, and I may yet do it, too, sometime when there aren't any Democrats running, just to show how I feel about it.
Yet others of our acquaintances in the amateur-farming group have taken up fruit growing or pigeons or even Belgian hares. Belgian hares have been highly recommended to us as being very prolific. You start in with one pair of domestic-minded Belgian hares and presently countless thousands of little Belgian heirs and heiresses are gladdening the landscape. From what I can hear the average Belgian hare has almost as many aunts and uncles and cousins as a microbe has. They pay well, too. You can sell a Belgian hare to almost anybody who hat never tried to eat one. But as we have only about sixty acres and part of that in woodland, we have felt that there was scarcely room enough for us to go in for Belgian hares without sacrificing space which we may require for ourselves.
Mainly our experiments have been confined to hogs and poultry. I will not claim that we have been entirely successful in these directions. The trouble seems to be that our pigs are so tremendously opposed to race suicide and that our hens are so firmly committed to it. Now offhand you might think an adult animal of the swine family that completely gave herself over to the idea of multiplying and replenishing the earth with her species would be an asset to any farm, but in my own experience I have found that such is not always the case. Into the world a brood of little pinky-white squealers are ushered. They grow apace, devouring with avidity the most expensive brands of pig food that the grocer has in stock; and then, just when your mind is filled with delectable visions of hams in the smokehouse and flitches of bacon in the cellar and tierces of lard in the cold-storage room and spare-ribs and crackling and home-made country sausage and pork tenderloins on the table—why, your prospects deliberately go and catch the hog cholera and are shortly no more. They have a perfect mania for it. They'll travel miles out of their way to catch it; they'll sit up until all hours of the night in the hope of catching it. Hogs will swim the Mississippi River—and it full of ice—to get where hog cholera is. Our hogs have been observed in the act of standing in the pen with their snouts in the air, sniffing in unison until they attracted the germs of it right out of the air. It is very disheartening to be counting on bacon worth eighty cents a pound only to find that all you have on your hands is a series of hurried interments.
In their own sphere of life turkeys are as suicidally minded as hogs are. I speak with authority here because we tried raising turkeys, too. For a young turkey to get its feet good and wet spells doom for the turkey, and accordingly it practically devotes its life to getting its feet wet. If it cannot escape from the pen into the damp grass immediately following a rain it will in its desperation take other measures with a view to catching its death of cold. One of the most distressing spectacles to be witnessed in all Nature is a half-grown feebleminded turkey obsessed with the maniacal idea that it was born a puddle duck, running round and round a coop trying to find a damp spot to stand on; it is a pitiful sight and yet exasperating. In order to get its feet wet an infant turkey has been known to jump down an artesian well two hundred feet deep. This is not mere idle rumor; it if a scientific fact well authenticated. If somebody would only invent a style of overshoe that might be worn in comfort by an adolescent turkey without making the turkey feel distraught or self-concious, that person would confer a boon upon the entire turkey race and at the same time be in a fair way to reap a fortune for himself. I know that a few months back if such an article had been in the market I would gladly have taken fifty pairs, assorted misses' and children's sizes.
As for hens, I confess that at times I have felt like altogether abandoning my belief in the good faith and honest intentions of hens. Naturally one thinks of hens in connection with fresh-laid eggs, but my experience has been that the hen does not follow this line of reasoning. She prefers to go off on a different bent. She figures she was created to adorn society, not to gladden the breakfast platter of man. Or at any rate I would state that this has been the obsession customarily harbored by the hens which we have owned and which we persistently continue, in the face of disappointment compounded, to go on owning.
We started out by buying, at a perfectly scandalous outlay, a collection of blooded hens of the white Plymouth Rock variety. We had been told that the sun never set on a setting white Plymouth Rock hen; that a white Plymouth Rock hen which had had the right sort of influences in her life and the right sort of hereditary instincts to guide her in her maturer career would inevitably dedicate her entire being to producing eggs. And we believed it until the hens we had purchased themselves offered proof to the absolute contrary.
It was enough almost to break one's heart to see a great broad-beamed, full-busted husky hen promenading round the chicken run, eating her head off, gadding with her sister idlers, wasting the precious golden hours of daylight in idle social pursuits and at intervals saying to herself: “Lay an egg? Well, I guess not! Why should I entail a strain on my nervous system and deny myself the pleasures of the gay life for the sake of these people? If they were able to pay four dollars for me, sight unseen, they are sufficiently affluent to buy their own eggs. Am I right? I'll say I am!”
You could look at her expression and tell what she was thinking. And then when you went and made the rounds of the empty and untenanted nests you knew that you had correctly fathomed the workings of her mind.
We tried every known argument on those hens in an effort to make them see the error of their ways and the advantages of eggs. We administered to them meat scraps and fresh carrots and rutabagas and sifted gravel and ground-up oyster shells; the only result was to make them finicky and particular regarding their diet. No longer were they satisfied with the things we ate ourselves; no, they must have special dishes; they wished to be pampered like invalids. We bought for them large quantities of costly chick feed—compounds guaranteed to start the most confirmed spinster hen to laying her head off.