14 THE CALL OP THE HEN. 



were flowers galore all through the dark winter gloom and cold 

 frosty days. I loved my plants, took good care of them 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 kettlefull 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 drop- 

 pings enrich the ground for almost all plants better than any- 

 thing; roses are the only exception that I have found, they 

 doing much better when fertilized with well-rotted cow ma- 

 nure. 



But to return to our hen. She gives thirty 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 fifty 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, 1 to eat or sell at 

 market value, about 75 cents or $1.00. If w(e 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 any other legitimate 

 business considering the amount invested. Why then are there 

 any failures? I will tell you why. The failures are not the 

 i'ault of the good little hen. She will always do her duty; she 

 will always respond to the treatment she gets. The failures 

 are the people who care for the hen. The owners are the fail- 

 ures and not the fowls. 



Success is what we all want to attain in whatever we un- 

 dertake and "lest we forget" some of the things which lead to 

 success may I repeat that there are three essentials to egg pro- 

 duction. 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 Augus or Herefords for a 



