young sheep mother was now in blooming health, and the valuable progeny
were growing by the hours, most of which they spent at the maternal fount,
opposite each other and both small tails going like a new variety of
speedometer.

"I see mother ewe knows enough to hang around the lady of the barn and
feed-bins. Those lambkins are two pounds heavier than any born within a
week of them at Plunkett's," Pan had said not a week past, and both sheep
mother and I had beamed with gratified pride at his commendation.

[Illustration: I put his babykins in a big feed-basket and the lamb twins
came and welcomed him]

Then while the renovation of the four-posters went on with a happy buzz, I
busied myself in and out and about with the numberless details of care of
the Bird family. My knowledge of music earned by many long hours in the
practice of harmonics and a delighted and diligent attendance at the opera
seasons of New York, Berlin, and Paris, to say nothing of Boston and
London, had not, in my new life, in any way aided me to see that I had made
a mistake in ordering a three-hundred-egg incubator to start building a
prize flock with Mr. Golden Bird and the ten Ladies Leghorn, but in this
case Adam had guided me from off that shoal, and by telegram I had changed
the order for three fifty-egg improved metal mothers and the implements
needed in accomplishing their maternal purpose. In one of them were now
fifty beautiful white pearls that I could not refrain from visiting and
regarding through the little window in the metallic side of the metallic
mother at least several times an hour, though I knew that twice a day to
regulate the heat and fill the lamp was sufficient.

"I don't believe I'll be able to stand seeing them hop out," I remarked to