increased, and they were spread over a larger area and sometimes placed in fields and pastures a long distance from the farmhouse, the work of caring for the fowls, even by the simple method used, became too heavy to be done by man power alone, and a horse and cart was used in carrying food and water, collecting eggs, and moving chicks and fowls from one part of the farm to another. Thus the work was put on a very economical basis, and keeping fowls by this method became a common feature of the farming of this section of Rhode Island. The methods used here have changed little, if at all, since the system was started sixty or seventy years ago. The system is so primitive that people who are familiar with more elaborate methods often imagine that the Rhode Island farmer, who does so well by his simple methods, would certainly do very much better if he applied more of the modern ideas. But the test of time has demonstrated that this simple colony system is easily made permanent, while most of the more ambitious and complex systems either fail utterly or have but a transient success. [Illustration: Fig. 101. Collecting eggs on Rhode Island farm. The little girl is in the box in which dough is carried in the morning] =Numbers of hens kept.= The number of hens kept on a farm in this section varies from four or five hundred to over two thousand. Stocks of from eight hundred to twelve hundred are most common. The principal object is to produce market eggs, but as the two-year-old hens and the cockerels that are not needed for breeding purposes are sold every year, the receipts from the sale of live poultry are sometimes considerable. [Illustration: Fig. 102. Colony houses at Michigan Agricultural College. (Photograph from the college)] =Feeding, care, and results.= The hens, being well distributed over the farm, pick a large part of their living. Hard grain (usually cracked corn) is kept always before them in the house, in hoppers which will hold a bag of grain each. Once a day, in the morning, the hens are given a feed of mash (or, as it is called in this locality, dough) of about the same composition as the mash described on page 89. The dough is cooked in a large iron set-kettle in the evening and left there until it is to be fed the next morning. Then it is loaded into boxes or large tubs on a cart. The cart also carries a barrel of water. As he reaches each house the driver, with a shovel, throws what dough the hens need on the grass near the house. Then he fills the water pail and drives on to the next house. The hens require no more attention until evening, when the man collects the eggs and gives more water where it is necessary. [Illustration: Fig. 103. Moving one of the houses in Fig. 102] [Illustration: Fig. 104. Colony houses at Iowa Agricultural College. (Photograph from the college)]