276 HOME LIFE IN FLORIDA. 



true cause — and not then, until with our own eyes we saw 

 a sow and four of her young ones calruly devouring at one 

 time the same number of our chickens, which had strayed 

 a few inches outside the fence. 



But what could we do? We dared not kill the maraud- 

 ers ; they were of the most powerful family in the State. 

 The laws were made for them, not for us. If we could not 

 afford to have a fence built large enough to inclose several 

 acres outside the chicken-yard fence proper, so as to insure 

 our tender young pets from straying w^ithin the circle of 

 their ugly jaws, then we must not keep chickens at all, but 

 must do without their eggs, flesh, and guano, because a 

 neighbor chose to own pigs. He did not keep them, be it 

 observed ; the neighborhood did that ; he only killed and 

 ate them, after other people's chickens, potatoes, corn, cab- 

 bage, etc., had fattened them for him. 



So we were compelled to set aside other needed improve- 

 ments and exnend a considerable sum to erect a fence to 

 shut out the most free citizen of Florida from devouring 

 our own property on our own land ; we dare not touch a 

 hair of its long, lank body — that was sacred. 



But before that fence could be put up, and before all 

 vulnerable points in it could be repaired, eighty out of our 

 hundred chicks were gone — gone without redress. Every 

 one of the little Houdans was among the missing, lost in a 

 general massacre of the innocents ; but we knew where 

 each little body was buried. 



More Houdan eggs were set, and, while they were in pro- 

 cess of hatching, one of the two hens flew over the fence 

 and fell a victim to the rage of the baffled slaughterer of 

 the innocents. Then the other hen and the cock drooped 

 and died without apparent cause, "i^t least," we thought, 

 *' there are the two nests of Houdans to come," poor little 

 ''orphlings! " 



