CHICKEN CHAT. Let me see--it was sometime during the month of December that the "Man of the Prairie" went wandering all over the village, and even scoured the country round about the village in search of an extra dozen eggs, and went home mad, and, man fashion, threatened to kill off every hen on the place if they didn't proceed to do their duty like hens and fellow citizens. It was also during that same December that the fifty Plymouth Rock hens that we are wintering in the barn cellar, laid, regardless of the weather, 736 eggs--an average of nearly fifteen eggs apiece. "Is it a fact that the corn is too poor for manufacture into eggs?" I don't know anything about the corn in your locality, but I do know that our Plymouth Rocks had whole corn for supper exactly thirty-one nights during the month of December--not Western corn, but sound, well-ripened, Northern corn, that sells in our market for twenty cents more per bushel than Western corn. I also know that hens fed through the winter on corn alone will not lay enough to pay for the corn, but in our climate the poultry-raiser may feed corn profitably fully one-half the time. When the morning feed consists of cooked vegetable and bran or shorts, and the noon meal of oats or buckwheat, the supper may be of corn. I believe the analytical fellows tell us that corn won't make eggs, and I am sure I don't know whether it will or not, and I don't much care; but I know that hens will eat corn, when they can get it, in preference to any other grain, and I know that it "stands by" better than anything else, and that it is a heat-producing grain, and consequently just the thing to feed when the days are short and the nights long, and the mercury fooling around 30 degrees below zero. Hens need something besides egg material; they must have food to keep up the body heat, and the poultry-raiser who feeds no corn in winter blunders just as badly as the one who feeds all corn. * * * * *