The pheasant is also a useful and beautiful fowl. One may put down bread-crumbs to attract the pheasant to one's garden when he is alive, or to one's plate when he is dead. But I can see no justification whatever for keeping maybirds, for they are neither useful nor beautiful. Perhaps you do not know what a maybird is. I have five maybirds. I have them because people here would keep saying to me, "Look at the price of fresh eggs, and how much nicer it is to have your own." It is a curious thing about the country that people are always giving one disinterested advice in the matter of domestic economy. In London it is different. In London people let you take a twopenny bus ticket to Westminster instead of walking across the Park, and go to ruin in your own sweet way. They rather admire your dash. But in the country they tell you about these things. So I went to a man and confessed to him my trouble about fresh eggs. "I see," he said; "you want maybirds." "No, I don't," I said; "I want hens." "It's the same thing," he told me. "How many would you like?" "Five," I said. I thought five would be an unostentatious number and make it clear that I was not trying to compete with the wholesale egg-dealers. He segregated five maybirds and explained their points to me. It appeared that one of them was a Buff Orpington and three were white Wyandottes and one had no particular politics. I should say now that it was an Independent. It has speckles and is the one that keeps getting into the garden. I asked him when the creatures would begin to enter upon their new duties, and he said they would do so at once. "What is their maximum egg-laying velocity?" I inquired. "They'll lay about three eggs a day between them," he said, "these five birds." "Why between them?" I enquired. But I consented to buy his birds, and he said if I liked he would run round to my garden at once and run up a hen-house and a hen-run for me. "Run" seemed rather a word with him. I said, "Yes, by all means." He came round that evening and hewed down an apple-tree under the light of the moon to make room for the maybird-run, and in the morning he brought a large roll of wire-netting, and the next day he built a wooden house, and the day after that he brought his five maybirds, and the day after that he came round and asked for some cinders. He sprinkled these all over the enclosure, and I watched him while he worked. "What is that for?" I asked. "They want something to scratch in when they run about," he explained. "Exercise is what they need." "They seem to be scratching already, but they don't seem to be running," I said. "Wouldn't it have been better to put a cinder-track all round the edge and train them to run races round it?" He said that he hadn't thought of that, but I could try it if I liked. Then he gave me a bag of food, which he said was particularly efficacious for maybirds, and produced his bill.