So far as I might observe, this, too, was of no avail. The more confirmed imbibers of the special dishes merely developed lumpy dropsical figures and sat about in shady spots and brooded in a morbid way as though they had heavy loads on their minds. We killed one of them as a sacrifice to scientific investigation and cut her open, and lo, she was burdened inside with half-developed yolks—a case, one might say, of mislaid eggs.
In desperation I even thought of invoking the power of mental suggestion on them. Possibly it might help to hang up a picture of a lady sturgeon in the henhouse? Or would it avail to shoo them into a group and read aloud to them the begat chapter in the Old Testament?
While I was considering these expedients some one suggested that probably the trouble lay in the fact that our fowls either were too highly bred or were too closely related and perhaps an infusion of new blood was what was needed. So now we went to the other extreme and added to our flock a collection of ordinary scrub hens, mixed as to breed and homely as to their outward appearance, but declared—by their former owner—to be passionately addicted to the pursuit of laying eggs. Conceding that this was true, the fact remained that immediately they passed into our possession they became slackers and nonproducers. I imagine the mistake we made was in permitting them to associate with the frivolous white débutantes we already owned; undoubtedly those confirmed bachelor maids put queer ideas into their heads, causing them to believe there was no nourishment in achieving eggs to be served up with a comparative stranger's fried ham. On the theory that they might require exercise to stimulate their creative faculties we let them range through the meadows. Some among them promptly deserted the grassy leas to ravage our garden; others made hidden nests in the edges of the thickets, where the hawks and the weasels and the skunks and the crows might fatten on the fruits of their misdirected industry. So we cooped them up again in their run, whereupon they developed rheumatism and sore eyes and a perverted craving for eating one another's tail feathers. At present our chicken yard is nothing more nor less than a hen sanitarium. But we do not despair of ultimate success with our hens. We may have to cross them with the Potomac shad, but we mean to persevere until victory has perched upon our roosts. As Rupert Hughes remarked when, after writing a long list of plays which died a-borning, he eventually produced a riotous hit of hits: “Well, I'm only human—I couldn't fail every time.”
I should have said that there is one fad to which all our Westchester County colony of amateur farmers are addicted. Some may pursue one agricultural hobby and some another, but almost without exception the members of our little community are confirmed hired-help fanciers. You meet a neighbor and he tells you that after a disastrous experience with Polled Polaks he is now about to try the White Face Cockneys; they have been highly recommended to him. And next month when you encounter him again he is experimenting with Italian road builders or Scotch gardeners or Swedish stable hands or Afro-American tree trimmers or what not.
One member of our group after a prolonged season of alternating hopes and disappointments during which he first hired and then for good and sufficient reasons fired representatives of nearly all the commoner varieties—plain and colored, domestic and imported, strays, culls and mavericks—decided to try his luck in the city at one of the employment agencies specializing in domestic servitors for country places. He procured the address of such an establishment and repaired thither—simply attired in his everyday clothes. As soon as he entered the place he realized that he was in the wrong pew; here, plainly, was a shop to which repaired the proprietors of ostentatious estates rather than the modest owners of farms, among whom he numbered himself. He tried to back out, making himself as inconspicuous as possible in so doing, but at that before he succeeded in escaping he had two good jobs offered to him—one as assistant groom in a racing stable over on Long Island and one as general handyman at a yacht club up in Connecticut. He is convinced now that the rich are so hard pressed for servants that they'll hire almost anybody without requiring references.
None of us will ever be rich; we're all convinced of that, the cost of impractical farming being what it is, but by the same token none of us would give up the pleasures of a landed proprietor's lot—the word landed being here used to imply one baited, hooked and caught; i.e., a landed sucker—for the life of a flat dweller again. It's a great life if a fellow doesn't weaken—and we'll never weaken.