10 . DUCK DOLLARS 
tives. They really felt quite ashamed. The incubator was transported 
at night, so that nobody would see it and laugh at the Webers. They hid 
it away in an old shack back of the house, and for months kept it covered 
with old grain sacks. If they failed, they did not want anybody to know 
it. The shack was so low that they had to crawl in to reach the incu- 
bator in the corner. 
They tried the incubator first with hens’ eggs, putting in 600 at 
Christmas, 1888, and for a wonder, and much to their astonishment 
(for then they did not know the possibilities of an incu- 
Incubator bator), the thing worked; they got 280 chicks out of it, 
Worked Well selling them in the spring at favorable prices. Inex- 
perienced as Mr. Weber and his son John were, and handicapped by the 
incubator being in unsuitable quarters, having a widely fluctuating tem- 
perature, they “ got the hang” of the machine and made it go. Mean- 
time the ducks were laying all right, and so the next lot of eggs to go 
into the incubator was the duck eggs. They hatched out as well as the 
hens’ eggs, and so, the first year, 1889, 600 ducks were raised and mar- 
keted. After hatching the ducklings, the next handicap came from the 
brooders, which had been poorly constructed, and had wretched lamps. 
Leave the lamps lighted and burning well and they would smoke, or go 
out. Brooders were in their infancy then. 
The ducklings were taken to Boston twenty miles over the road and 
marketed after a personally-made bargain in which the buyer was met 
face to face. The first ducks weighed four pounds 
Remarkable apiece at ten weeks of age and sold for thirty cents a 
Profit pound, a total of $1.20, a good price. (To-day their 
ducklings weigh six and one-half pounds each. In August, 1911, they 
killed three for a special order which weighed twenty-four pounds. As 
nearly as the family could figure, it had cost only twenty cents to raise 
the duckling (no labor charge was reckoned then). Here was a remark- 
able profit staring this hard-working family in the face. If they could 
market 600 ducklings so profitably, why not more? The boys, William, 
Henry and David, were called home to help. The cows were sold off, 
for the milk farming was found to be an expensive way of employing 
one’s time, when several hundred per cent. profit could be made on 
ducks. 
At the end of the first year, forty-two females only were kept for 
layers. The eggs from these were run through the incubator again and 
2,900 ducks marketed the second year. Early difficulties conquered, new. 
troubles came up, but how could these discourage the family when a big 
profit awaited only the production of the ducklings? 
A new light was dawning in the brains of these experimenters, and 
it was eclipsing the bright chicken vision which they had read and heard 
Chickens so much about. During the first two years, when the 
Balipesd incubator was not working on the duck eggs, it was 
used for chickens; 600 chickens were raised the first 
year and 1,500 the second. The chickens then were dropped, as the more 
profitable ducks needed the room and time, and all were cleaned out 
with the exception of a few to provide eggs for table use. 
