“Not that I know of. I never counted them to find out.”
“Well, if a chicken-hawk was about, you’d hear about it quick enough from the noise the hens and rooster would make to warn the chicks to run home. As for cats, you haven’t kept one and my house is the nearest neighbor and we haven’t a cat, so there!”
This cheered Janet considerably, and she decided to try and raise the two dozen goslings in spite of Sam’s pessimistic views to the contrary.
Having deposited the goslings in the coops, Mr. Ames passed the pig pen on his way to the wagon. He stopped a moment to look at them and then said: “Janet, you got to feed them more milk. Now you got a cow why spare the skim milk? Pigs need about four to six quarts of milk a day besides other feed.”
“You mean six for the three of them?” asked Janet.
“No. I mean six quarts for one. Why a tiny baby drinks two quarts of liquid before it is six months old, and pigs is hungrier critters than babies. You are starvin’ your pigs.”
“I’ll go straight away and ask Rachel if she has any skim milk on hand for them!” declared Janet, running for the house.
When Frances drove to the store that afternoon for the evening mail, she ordered a lawn mower from Mr. Tompkins and borrowed his, meantime. He laughed when she explained how they had hoped the cow would keep the grass cropped short enough to spare them any effort at mowing.
“You’ll find the cow’s hoofs cut up the sod so badly that your lawn will be ruined if she keeps on grazing there. The man who lived on the farm before you took great pride in those lawns. He was always fussing over them and never let folks walk on them until August.”