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Love Among the Chickens by P. G. (Pelham Grenville) Wodehouse
page 45 of 220 (20%)
My pipe was behaving like the ideal pipe; and, as I strolled
spaciously about the lawn, my novel was growing nobly. I had neglected
my literary work for the past week, owing to the insistent claims of
the fowls. I am not one of those men whose minds work in placid
independence of the conditions of life. But I was making up for lost
time now. With each blue cloud that left my lips and hung in the still
air above me, striking scenes and freshets of sparkling dialogue
rushed through my brain. Another uninterrupted half hour, and I have
no doubt that I should have completed the framework of a novel which
would have placed me in that select band of authors who have no
christian names. Another half hour, and posterity would have known me
as "Garnet."

But it was not to be.

"Stop her! Catch her, Garny, old horse!"

I had wandered into the paddock at the moment. I looked up. Coming
towards me at her best pace was a small hen. I recognised her
immediately. It was the disagreeable, sardonic-looking bird which
Ukridge, on the strength of an alleged similarity of profile to his
wife's nearest relative, had christened Aunt Elizabeth. A Bolshevist
hen, always at the bottom of any disturbance in the fowl-run, a bird
which ate its head off daily at our expense and bit the hands which
fed it by resolutely declining to lay a single egg. Behind this fowl
ran Bob, doing, as usual, the thing that he ought not to have done.
Bob's wrong-headedness in the matter of our hens was a constant source
of inconvenience. From the first, he had seemed to regard the laying-
in of our stock purely in the nature of a tribute to his sporting
tastes. He had a fixed idea that he was a hunting dog and that,
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