But here I should explain that Serena insisted on “raising” ducks every year. I had striven in vain to induce her to transfer her love from the unprofitable duck to the remunerative hen. Ducks amused her, and at first I shared her pleasure when she took me to see a brood that had just “broke through.” A nestful of chickens is tame in comparison with ducklings that seduce the eye with their deeper, ineffable downiness and their constant vibratory motions that seem to annex the air to their twinkling contour. As they grow older the entertainment deepens. The rôle of parent, for good reasons, is enacted always by a hen, and she will soon learn to wander unconcernedly on the bank while her charges are diving and paddling in the water, but it is another matter when, a little after sundown, she attempts to hover ducklings that are determined to straggle about until after dark. The desperate mother wears herself out clucking, squawking, and spluttering as she tries to prevail upon the rebels to change their nature and go to sleep. Sometimes they impishly gather under her and are quiet for a moment, then as soon as the hen is in a merciful doze, out they come. The morning also has its drama, for the ducklings are awake and ready to run about before daylight, while the hen is still longing for sleep. Throughout the day she will droop from weariness and distractedly revive to pursue her duty unthanked and derided. As time passed, Serena’s ducklings remained out later, and finally would stroll home, drabbled and noisy, around nine o’clock. In the early morning one might see the hen roaming disconsolately without an offspring to cheer her, all of her brood being far in the woods searching the little streams and wet banks for the food ancestrally beloved. Their number lessened as wild creatures devoured them. Even dogs considered them rightfully their own, if found far from the barnyard, and by the end of the summer Serena would be as duckless as at its beginning, but she had had many a pleasant, shady jaunt in search of them “outdoin’est things.” “I’ll try again,” she would say. “Duck-feathers make sech good pillers.” But she never got a feather. On the day I have mentioned, she rippled in and said: “You know I set that gray hen on duck-eggs again.” “So late in the year? Of course you’ll lose them.”