been a tragedy if Bess Rutherford's practical sense had not helped save my
affections from a panic. This is how it happened.

"Yes, chicken culture is a germ that spreads by contagion. I'm not at all
surprised at your friends," Adam had answered when I had appealed to him to
know if I could sell Bess Rutherford just six of the baby chicks, when they
came out, for her to begin a brood in a new back-yard system, only Bess is
so progressive that she is having a nice big place in the conservatory that
opens out of her living-room cleared for them to run about out of their tin
mother when they want to. She says she believes eternal vigilance is the
price of success with poultry as the book she bought, which is different
from mine, says, and Bess decided that she wanted her chickens where she
could go in to see them comfortably when she came from parties and things
without having to go around in the back yard, which is the most lovely
garden in Hayesville anyway, in her slippers and party clothes. "I'd sell
her the chicks at twenty dollars apiece, and that's cheap if they produce
as they ought to with their blood and such--such care as she intends to
bestow on them. The twenty-dollar price will either cure her or start an
idle woman into a producer," said Adam, in answer to my request, as he cut
me out a pair of shoes from a piece of hide like that which the shoes upon
his own feet were made from. It was raining, and I sat at his feet in the
barn and laboriously sewed what he had cut.

I told Bess what Adam said, and she paid me the hundred and twenty dollars
right on the spot, and then insisted on opening the incubator at the
regular time for the ten minutes the book directs, to cool off the eggs
night and morning, and putting her monogram on six of the eggs. To do this
she decided to stay all night, and telephoned her maid, Annette, to pack
her bag and let Matthew bring it out to her when he came to help Polly
Corn-tassel put their first batch of eggs into their incubator. Matthew had