It was enough almost to break one's heart to see a great broad-beamed, full-busted husky hen promenading round the chicken run, eating her head off, gadding with her sister idlers, wasting the precious golden hours of daylight in idle social pursuits and at intervals saying to herself: “Lay an egg? Well, I guess not! Why should I entail a strain on my nervous system and deny myself the pleasures of the gay life for the sake of these people? If they were able to pay four dollars for me, sight unseen, they are sufficiently affluent to buy their own eggs. Am I right? I'll say I am!” You could look at her expression and tell what she was thinking. And then when you went and made the rounds of the empty and untenanted nests you knew that you had correctly fathomed the workings of her mind. We tried every known argument on those hens in an effort to make them see the error of their ways and the advantages of eggs. We administered to them meat scraps and fresh carrots and rutabagas and sifted gravel and ground-up oyster shells; the only result was to make them finicky and particular regarding their diet. No longer were they satisfied with the things we ate ourselves; no, they must have special dishes; they wished to be pampered like invalids. We bought for them large quantities of costly chick feed--compounds guaranteed to start the most confirmed spinster hen to laying her head off. So far as I might observe, this, too, was of no avail. The more confirmed imbibers of the special dishes merely developed lumpy dropsical figures and sat about in shady spots and brooded in a morbid way as though they had heavy loads on their minds. We killed one of them as a sacrifice to scientific investigation and cut her open, and lo, she was burdened inside with half-developed yolks--a case, one might say, of mislaid eggs. In desperation I even thought of invoking the power of mental suggestion on them. Possibly it might help to hang up a picture of a lady sturgeon in the henhouse? Or would it avail to shoo them into a group and read aloud to them the begat chapter in the Old Testament?