rapidly than at any other time.

I am quite sure that a poultry-yard may be made very profitable to any
one who will bestow a little trouble on it. Great care must be taken
with the young chickens at night; the hen should be securely cooped
with them: for want of this precaution we in one night lost eight,
when they were a few days old, being, as we supposed, carried off by
the cats.

The best food for ducks when first hatched is bread and milk; in a few
days barley-meal, wetted with water into balls about as big as peas,
should be given to them. It is usual, as soon as both ducks and
chickens come out of the shell, to put a pepper-corn down their
throats. I don't know that it is really of service to them, but it is
a time-honored custom, and so perhaps it is as well to follow it.

As for our butter-making, it continued to prosper; we had some little
trouble with it in the spring, when the weather set in suddenly very
hot. It was certainly much more difficult to reduce the temperature of
the cream to 55' than it was to raise it to that degree.

I often thought with vain longing of the shop in the Strand, where we
used to purchase Wenham Lake Ice: how firm would the butter have come,
could we have had a few lumps to put in the churn half and hour before
we required to use it!

Farmers' wives tell us, that to get firm butter in very hot weather
they get up at three o'clock in the morning, in order that it may be
made before the sun becomes powerful. Now this is a thing that would
not have suited H. or myself at all, and therefore we never mustered