Warmth is most essential for promoting laying. A severe frost will suddenly stop the laying of even the most prolific hens. "When," says M. Bosc, "it is wished to have eggs during the cold season, even in the dead of winter, it is necessary to make the fowls roost over an oven, in a stable, in a shed where many cattle are kept, or to erect a stove in the fowl-house on purpose. By such methods, the farmers of Ange have chickens fit for the table in the month of April, a period when they are only beginning to be hatched in the farms around Paris, although farther to the south." It is the winter management of fowls that decides the question of profit or loss, for hens will be sure to pay in the summer, even if only tolerably attended to. It is thought by many that each hen can produce only a certain number of eggs; and if such be the case, it is very advantageous to obtain a portion of them in winter when they are generally scarce and can be eaten while fresh, instead of having the whole number produced in the summer, when so many are spoiled from too long keeping in consequence of more being produced than are required for use at the time. When the time for her laying approaches, her comb and wattles change from their previous dull hue to a bright red, the eye brightens, the gait becomes more spirited, and sometimes she cackles for three or four days. After laying her egg on leaving the nest the hen utters a loud cackling cry, to which the cock often responds in a high-pitched kind of scream; but some hens after laying leave the nest in silence. Some hens will lay an egg in three days, some every other day, and others every day. Hens should not be forced. By unnaturally forcing a fowl with stimulating food, and more particularly with hempseed and tallow greaves, to lay in two years or so the eggs that should have been the produce of several, the hen becomes prematurely old and diseased; and it is reasonable to suppose that the eggs are not so good as they would have been if nature had been left to run its own course. The eggs ought to be taken from the nest every afternoon when no more may be expected to be laid; for if left in the nest, the heat of the hens when laying next day will tend to corrupt them.