would have seen, besides a farmer named Grayson with a gray bag
hanging from his shoulder, a strange company following close upon
his steps. Among this crew you would have made out easily:

Two fine cows.
Four Berkshire pigs.
One team of gray horses, the old mare a little lame in her right
foreleg.
About fifty hens, four cockerels, and a number of ducks and
geese.

More than this--I shall offer no explanation in these writings of
any miracles that may appear--you would have seen an entirely
respectable old farmhouse bumping and hobbling along as best it
might in the rear. And in the doorway, Harriet Grayson, in her
immaculate white apron, with the veritable look in her eyes which
she wears when I am not comporting myself with quite the proper
decorum.

Oh, they would not let me go! How they all followed clamoring
after me. My thoughts coursed backward faster than ever I could
run away. If you could have heard that motley crew of the
barnyard as I did-- the hens all cackling, the ducks quacking,
the pigs grunting, and the old mare neighing and stamping, you
would have thought it a miracle that I escaped at all.

So often we think in a superior and lordly manner of our
possessions, when, as a matter of fact, we do not really possess
them, they possess us. For ten years I have been the humble
servant, attending upon the commonest daily needs of sundry hens,