IN THE POULTRY YARD. 183 
manent plant, I felt that I had not lost anything. It is in the 
valuation of the stock and plant, however, that the fallacy of 
most statements in regard to financial undertakings lies concealed. 
If we only have the opportunity to adjust this feature, it is easy to 
show a good balance sheet, and this may perhaps be one reason 
for the prevalent tendency to “water” stocks. If the stock of any 
enterprise has doubled in amount, it would seem to the unsophis- 
ticated, that the property has actually doubled in value while in 
fact it may have depreciated. A very slight addition to the 
valuation of each of 3,000 chickens would change the bal- 
ance from the loss side to that of profit, and this is easily done 
on paper. : 
In the preceding pages, I have given my plans, methods and 
many of the ultimate results. To give a minute detail of all the 
haps and mishaps would swell this work into a large volume, and 
I will, therefore, merely offer a summary of my progress each sea- 
son, and give the balance sheet of the third year, at which time I 
had my yards and system fully under way. 
On the last day of December of my first year, I found that I 
had more than half the number of hens that I had set out to keep, 
and in addition, I had a great many birds that might be converted 
into cash as soon as the spring came. It was not, therefore, a difficult 
matter to make the number up to 1,000 first class hens during the 
next six months. My earliest hatches of the following season 
gave me 150 good pullets; from my second hatch, at the end of 
March, I had 213, so that I needed only about 150 more to com- 
plete.my quota. ‘These were raised in May without any special 
effort, so that when the 1oth of June came again, [ had 1,000 
good birds, though, of course, one half of them were quite young. 
Besides these, I had a large number of cockerels and culls, which 
could be disposed of in the fall. 
The supply of eggs usually begins to fall off towards the end of 
May and the first of June, but my fall-reared pullets were now in 
the full tide of egg-laying, and as I was now just commencing my 
new system of crate-delivery, this came very opportunely. 
Although the supply of fresh-laid eggs undoubtedly diminishes 
