LAYING AND SITTING. 33 



these barren birds can often be made very useful ; for a couple 

 of dummy eggs will tempt many of them to sit almost at any 

 time, if put in the pan at the right intervals ; and they thus 

 become very handy as feeders, since they will, when the time is 

 up, take young ones and feed them as if they had hatched 

 themselves. 



Soon after matching — generally ranging from one to three 

 weeks, according to age and time of year — the cock will begin 

 to drive the hen towards her nest, and seem uneasy whenever 

 she is away from it. That is a sign laying is near, and in fact 

 the eggs generally appear in from two to five days after. Two 

 are laid; the first usually about five or six o'clock in the 

 afternoon, the hen standing more or less over it all the next 

 day and night, and laying the second egg about two o'clock 

 on the third day. The young hatch on the eighteenth day 

 from the laying of the second egg. Very rarely three eggs 

 are laid, and we have heard qf one or two cases in which four 

 have appeared, but the rule of a pair is rarely broken. These 

 two are in three cases out of four a cock and hen, but by no 

 means always so, as usually supposed; about twenty-five per 

 cent, being pairs of one sex or the other. When one is a hen 

 it is generally the last of the two, and as such likely to be 

 stunted in growth from the earlier hatching of the first, which 

 has had a start by the hen standing over it before the other 

 was laid, and thus gets fed and becomes larger and stronger 

 before the hen is hatched. To avoid this, laying should be 

 watched for every evening, and the first egg taken away and 

 replaced by a nest-egg of bone or a waste pigeon's egg, to be 

 replaced the evening the second is laid. This plan will save or 

 improve many a hen that otherwise would be dwarfed in 

 rearing. It may here be noted that pigeons never eat their 

 eggs, so that the breakage of a waste one, should it occur, need 

 cause no fear of bad habits in this respect. 



Weakly hens are liable to be egg-boUnd or have difficulty 

 D 



