horror and let them go on eating me out of house and home and
purse-strings.

But at last I knew. I asked an honest man from afar, who called to sell
something, why those ducks would not lay a single egg. He looked at them
critically and wrote to me the next day:

"DEAR MADAM: The reason your ducks won't lay is because they're too
old to live and the bigest part of 'em is drakes.

Respectfully,

JONAS HURLBERT."

I hear that there are more ducks in the Chinese Empire than in all the
world outside of it. They are kept by the Celestials on every farm, on
the private and public roads, on streets of cities, and on all the
lakes, ponds, rivers, streams, and brooks in the country. That is the
secret of their lack of progress. What time have they to advance after
the ducks are fed and cared for? No male inhabitant could ever squeeze
out a leisure half-hour to visit a barber, hence their long queues.

About this time the statement of Mr. Crankin, of North Yeaston, Rhode
Island, that he makes a clear and easy profit of five dollars and twenty
cents per hen each year, and nearly forty-four dollars to every duck,
and might have increased said profit if he had hatched, rather than
sold, seventy-two dozen eggs, struck me as wildly apocryphal. Also that
caring for said hens and ducks was merely an incident of his day's work
on the large farm, he working with his laborers. Heart-sick and
indignant, contrasting his rosy success with my leaden-hued failure, I