at the breakfast table.

"Will you feed the chickens for me, Bob?" asked his grandmother, as he
rose from the table after breakfast. "You'll find some shell corn in a
feed box on the thrashing floor. Give them two measures."

"Come around to the wagon shed when you get through with feeding the
chickens, Bob," called his uncle, as he started for the barn. "I'll
get the team and we'll clean out the cow stable to-day."

Bob filled the small wooden box he found in the feed bin, then
stepping out into the barnyard, he called the chickens around him. He
could not help observing what a nondescript lot of chickens they were
--not a purebred among them; besides, he noticed many were old, and
some had frozen feet and combs. No wonder, he thought, as he glanced
at the poorly built hen house that faced the east instead of south--a
lean-to built against the side of the barn, with only one small
window, and that one on the north end, while the cracks between the
upright boards, of which the coop was constructed, were not even
covered by strips.

With these fowls he contrasted his own prize-winning white leghorns,
with their well-built and ventilated pen, with its two large windows
to the south. He wondered how long they would have averaged four eggs
a day for the eight hens through the entire winter, if he had fed them
with only cold grain instead of carefully prepared feed, and had kept
them in such a cheerless home. No wonder his grandmother, who got the
money from the sale of the eggs, said chickens didn't pay, and that
the few eggs the hens did lay in the winter were usually frozen before
they could be collected.