58 COMMON SENSE 
house and yard of each of these models and try‘it fully. I-knew 
well enough that the first of July was in some respects a bad time to 
begin poultry keeping, but I also knew that.I had much to learn, 
and that it was more easy to experiment during the warm days of 
summer and early fall, than during the frosts of winter. Indeed, I 
afterwards found that if I had put off making a beginning until late in 
the fall, I would have lost just a year. 
Meantime our little broods kept coming out and were grad 
ually being dotted all over the grounds. The warm nights and 
pleasant days made it easy to provide shelter for them, and they 
were so far apart that, at first, we lost very few chickens by their 
straying into other coops than their own. I felt greatly encour- 
aged, for things went on swimmingly, but after a time I found that 
the business of rearing chickens ‘is not altogether made up of suc- 
cesses. 
