16 THE CALL OF THE HEN. 



in every way, but the secret of the wonderful blossoms was 

 hen manure! 



"Once a month I half-filled a bucket with hen droppings, 

 poured a kettleful of boiling water on it, filling the bucket 

 with the water, stirred it with a stick, let it settle and cool, 

 and watered the plants with that liquid. I found that hen 

 droppings enrich the ground for almost all plants better than 

 anything; roses are the only exception that I have found, 

 they doing much better when fertilized with well-rotted cow 

 manure. 



"But to return to our hen. She gives 26 pounds' weight 

 of eggs, or sixteen dozen, valued at $4.96; she also gives 100 

 pounds of valuable fertilizer, worth here $10 a ton, or 50 

 cents per hen, which brings the amount of her earnings to 

 $5.40, and at the end of the year we still have the hen to eat 

 or sell at market value, about 75 cents or $1.00. If we eat 

 her, we have the feathers, which are easily saved and can be 

 sold or made into pillows, the bones pounded up and fed to 

 the other fowls. 



"Poultry pays, and pays better than a.ny other legitimate 

 business, considering the amount invested. Why then are 

 there any failures? I will tell you why: The failures are 

 not the fault of the good little hen. She will always do her 

 duty; she will always respond to the treatment she gets. 

 The failure are the people who care for the hen. The owners 

 are the failures, and not tKe fowls. 



"Success is what we all want to attain in whatever we 

 undertake; and, 'lest we forget' some of the things which 

 lead to success, may I repeat that there are three essentials 

 to egg-production? These are: Comfort, Exercise, and 

 Proper Food. I would like to review these." 



I wrote the lady that both of these articles were right. 

 Let us see if we can prove the statement. If the reader has 

 ever had any experience with cattle, he knows it would be 

 sheer folly to buy a herd of Polled Angus or Herefords for a 

 dairy farm, for they have been bred for years for beef, and 

 practically everything fed to them goes to meat; while it 

 would be just as foolish to buy a herd of Jersey cows and ex- 

 pect to make a living from them raising beef, as they have 



