It was Ethel Blue Morton speaking to her cousin, who was helping her and their other cousin, Dorothy Smith, take Dicky Morton’s newly hatched chickens out of the incubator and put them into the brooder.
“I have dropped one,” exclaimed Dorothy. “Poor little dinky thing! It didn’t hurt it a bit, though. See, it’s running about as chipper as ever.”
“Are you counting ’em?” demanded Dicky, whose small hands were better suited than those of the girls for making the transfer that was to establish the chicks in their new habitation.
“Yes,” answered all three in chorus.
“Here’s one with a twisted leg. He must have fallen off the tray when he was first hatched.” cried Ethel Brown.
“He lookth pretty well. I gueth he’ll live if I feed him by himthelf tho the throng ones won’t crowd him away from the feed panth,” said Dicky, examining the cripple, for in spite of his small supply of seven years he had learned from his big brother Roger and from his grandfather Emerson a great deal about the use of an incubator and the care of young chickens.
“That’s a good hatch for this time of year,” Ethel Brown announced when she added together the numbers which each handler reported to her. “A hundred and thirty-seven.”
“Hear their little beaks tapping the wooden floor,” Ethel Blue said, calling their attention to the behavior of the just-installed little fowls who were making themselves entirely at home with extraordinary promptness.
“They take naturally to oatmeal flakes, don’t they?” commented Dorothy. “I always thought the old hen taught the chicks to scratch, and there’s a little chap scratching as vigorously as if he had been taking lessons ever since he was born.”
“They don’t need lessons. Scratching is as natural as eating to them. Hear them hum?”