The day you drive your first nail into what is to be your chicken house you should start an account. Every item should go down, cost of materials, cost of stock, cost of feed. Economize where you can by utilizing vacant space for growing clover for summer feed and some root crop like mangolds for winter supply. Apples are fine in winter for hens. You can often get bushels of windfalls for the picking. Sunflowers are easy to grow and their heads hold a tremendous lot of chicken feed. Table scraps ground with a hand mill vary the hen's diet, but do avoid sloppy messes. There are two sides to every account. If you charge the chickens with what they cost you, it is only fair to yourself and to them to credit them with the eggs and meat they furnish, as well as with increase of stock, etc. [Illustration: Trap-nest open. The hen's weight shuts the door behind her] In every flock there are some idlers. They lay only a hundred or so eggs, they leave their eggs too long when sitting, or they never put on any weight. You want to be rid of all such. You can mark the bad sitters, and send them to the pot, as well as those whose habits are such as to make them a nuisance. But you need to know which fowls lay the biggest and best eggs and which lay the largest number. For market in our country where eggs are sold by the dozen it is numbers that count, but for breeding you want eggs of good size and shape. You also want to set the eggs of the good layers. These eggs taste no better in cake or omelet, but by careful selection you can breed a strain of extra good layers, right in your hen house. The device known as a trap-nest is the thing you will need if you go at it scientifically. You want it in winter, too, to prevent killing your best hens for potpie, while the idlers cheerfully eat your grain without recompense. The simpler the mechanism of the trap-nest the better. It must stand open until the hen enters, then close without frightening her. Most of them keep the hen a prisoner until you go and examine the nest, credit the hen by her leg-band number, and release her. By following the drawings in the bulletins of the New York and Maine Experiment Stations referred to in the list of bulletins on chickens you can construct your own trap-nests. [Illustration: Trap-nest closed after hen has gone in]