"I had a lot of hens sitting this year," said the owner of the yard—"sitting on lovely eggs, too, Wally! Some I got from Cunjee, and some from Westwood, and two special sittings from Melbourne. I was going to be awfully rich! You couldn't imagine all I'd planned with the immense sums I was going to make."
"There's a proverb," said Wally, sententiously, "about counting your chickens."
"You're quite the twelfth person who's mentioned that," Norah said, with some asperity. "Anyhow, I never counted them; I only became rich in a vague way, and it was very comforting. I'm glad I had that comfort, for it was all I had."
"Norah, you thrill my very soul with awful fears," Wally gasped. "Tell me the worst!"
"Donkey!" said Norah, unsympathetically. "Well, they were set. I fixed up the boxes myself, and lined them so beautifully that when they were ready, and the eggs in, it was all I could do to prevent myself sitting on them!"
"I know," Wally nodded. "And then the hens wouldn't sit, would they? They never do, when you make the nests especially tempting. I had an old Cochin once who used to sit quite happily for six months at a time on a clod and a bit of stone, expecting to hatch out a half-acre allotment and a town hall; but if you put her on twelve beautiful eggs she simply wouldn't look at them! Makes you vow you'll give up keeping hens at all."
"It would," Norah said. "Only mine didn't do that."
"Oh!" said Wally, a little blankly. "What did they do, then?"
"Sat—"
"And ate the eggs—I know," Wally burst in. "My old brute used to eat one a day if you got her to sit. I remember once it was a race between her and the eggs, and I used to haunt the nest, wondering would she get 'em all eaten before they hatched. They beat her by one—one poor chick came out. The shock was too much for the old hen, and she deserted it, and I poddied it in a box for a week, and called it Moses, and it would eat out of my hand, and then it died!" He gasped for breath, and Norah gazed with undisguised admiration at the orator.