TO RAISE POULTRY

--[Being a letter written to a Poultry Society that had conferred a
complimentary membership upon the author. Written about 1870.]

Seriously, from early youth I have taken an especial interest in the
subject of poultry-raising, and so this membership touches a ready
sympathy in my breast. Even as a schoolboy, poultry-raising was a study
with me, and I may say without egotism that as early as the age of
seventeen I was acquainted with all the best and speediest methods of
raising chickens, from raising them off a roost by burning lucifer
matches under their noses, down to lifting them off a fence on a frosty
night by insinuating the end of a warm board under their heels. By the
time I was twenty years old, I really suppose I had raised more poultry
than any one individual in all the section round about there. The very
chickens came to know my talent by and by. The youth of both sexes
ceased to paw the earth for worms, and old roosters that came to crow,
"remained to pray," when I passed by.

I have had so much experience in the raising of fowls that I cannot but
think that a few hints from me might be useful to the society. The two
methods I have already touched upon are very simple, and are only used in
the raising of the commonest class of fowls; one is for summer, the other
for winter. In the one case you start out with a friend along about
eleven o'clock' on a summer's night (not later, because in some states
--especially in California and Oregon--chickens always rouse up just at
midnight and crow from ten to thirty minutes, according to the ease or
difficulty they experience in getting the public waked up), and your
friend carries with him a sack. Arrived at the henroost (your