fatal results to the Skinners.

But Mr. Bensington, reading between the lines saw in this rankness of
growth the attainment of his long sought goal. The next morning he
alighted at Urshot station, and in the bag in his hand he carried,
sealed in three tins, a supply of the Food of the Gods sufficient for
all the chicks in Kent.

It was a bright and beautiful morning late in May, and his corns were so
much better that he resolved to walk through Hickleybrow to his farm. It
was three miles and a half altogether, through the park and villages and
then along the green glades of the Hickleybrow preserves. The trees were
all dusted with the green spangles of high spring, the hedges were full
of stitchwort and campion and the woods of blue hyacinths and purple
orchid; and everywhere there was a great noise of birds--thrushes,
blackbirds, robins, finches, and many more--and in one warm corner of
the park some bracken was unrolling, and there was a leaping and rushing
of fallow deer.

These things brought back to Mr. Bensington his early and forgotten
delight in life; before him the promise of his discovery grew bright and
joyful, and it seemed to him that indeed he must have come upon the
happiest day in his life. And when in the sunlit run by the sandy bank
under the shadow of the pine trees he saw the chicks that had eaten the
food he had mixed for them, gigantic and gawky, bigger already than many
a hen that is married and settleds and still growing, still in their
first soft yellow plumage (just faintly marked with brown along the
back), he knew indeed that his happiest day had come.

At Mr. Skinner's urgency he went into the runs but after he had been