lining and cannot get out. If you place a wet sponge in the egg 

 chamber and let the moisture soften the inner shell, he will be able to 

 break through. When the egg is opened he comes out all slimy and 

 wet, the ugliest little thing you ever saw. However, in fifteen minutes 

 he is dry and fluffy and looking about with bright little eyes. If you 

 tap on the glass door of the egg chamber with your jackknife he will 

 come toward you. 



Leave the little chicks in the incubator for twenty-four hours. I 

 like to have chicks hatch on the twentieth morning. If they hang on 

 for two to three days you have not kept the average temperature high 

 enough. 



ARTIFICIAL BROODING. 



While the chicks are hatching, get the brooder ready. In start- 

 ing the brooder light it up a day or two before you want to use it. 

 It will be more comfortable for the chicks and the poultryman, too> 

 if the brooder is in a house or a barn or shed, out of the rain and 

 snow. All brooders have a small exercising place. The floor of this 

 place should be covered with an inch or two of sandy loam. If you 

 want to keep your brooders nice and clean place papers on the floor 

 and the sand over them, and put an inch of chaff on the sand. You 

 should also have a water fountain into which no straw and dirt can 

 be scattered. You can have a little feed hopper and get the chicks 

 accustomed to the hopper system of feeding. 



If you have to take the little chickens any distance from the in- 

 cubator to the brooder, take a market basket, line with flannel, place 

 the little chickens carefully in it and cover them up. Carry them 

 quickly to the brooder. You should have the temperature of the 

 brooder at ninety degrees, two and one-half inches above the floor, the 

 height of a little chicken. 



When you place the little chickens under the hover they will be 

 quiet for a while, but will soon become inquisitive, and you will want 

 to feed them. Do not feed them for two days, or they may get digest- 

 ive troubles. They do not need food for seventy-two hours, or cer- 

 tainly for forty-eight hours, but if you are tender-hearted and must 

 feed them, do not do so for at least twenty-four hours, because those 

 little chicks are provided by nature each with a lunch basket. Just 

 before the chicken leaves the egg, he draws in the yolk, which pro- 

 vides food enough for almost a whole week. 



The little chicks come out in the sunshine and enjoy it, but when 

 a cloud comes up they do not know w r here to go. The hover doesn't 

 cluck; you can't make it cluck. The biggest, brightest chicks crowd 

 together and pile up. The others crowd around them and the ones 

 beneath are suffocated. The hand of the mother would have saved 

 these little orphans. If you push them back into the hover half a 

 dozen times they will learn to go there themselves. 



Keep the chicks out of the brooder as much as you can after the 

 first day. It is nice to have the brooder in the house, but if you must 

 have it out of doors, a irood plan is to have a yard covered by a hot- 

 bed sash, connected with the brooder. 



