FOWLS. 105 



month old and stuff them, keeping a little rack of 

 fine hay beside them, which they will nibble at, and 

 by the termination of the second month they will be 

 ready for the table. Our plan is rather to go to an 

 old woman who has hatched them under her bed, 

 and buy a brood just advanced to jacket and trousers 

 about stubble-time, when they will at once take to 

 gormandising kindly on the sheaves' de'bris, and will 

 be ready to kill by the time the fields are picked. 

 Carrots cut small, or sliced swedes, alone will fatten 

 them, or barley-meal and milk ; but best, 'tis said, 

 of all, malt mixed with beer. 



"But in fatting of all water-fowl," writes our 

 sagacious friend, " you may observe that they usually 

 sit with their bills on their rumps, where they suck 

 out most of their moisture and fatness at a small 

 bunch of feathers, which you shall find standing 

 upright on their rumps, and always moist — with 

 which they trim their feathers, which makes them 

 oily and slippery more than other fowls' feathers 

 are, that the water may slip off them — which, if cut 

 away close, will make them fat in less time, and 

 with less meat, than otherwise." " Tell that to the 

 marines ! " I hear an impatient comment. Well, I 

 know but what I read, and I have presented you on 

 purpose with the original text. With this weeping 

 spring, then, and its incumbent plume, it may be as 

 well for you to make yourself acquainted, if you be 

 given to the nurture of geese. It is at least an in- 

 genious adaptation of native produce that is surely 

 worth trying. Midsummer, he tells us further, is a 

 hard time for the constitution of the goose. Can 



