HOUSE AND GARDEN 
May, 1915 
375 
head, the sides being not less than four 
feet high. Another is the problem of get¬ 
ting table scraps and water inside the yard 
without part of your colony taking French 
leave through the open door. The remedy 
is a double trough, with a lip outside for 
your scrap can and a lip inside for the 
hens, the footboard of the cage forming a 
central barrier down the length of the 
trough. 
Then there is that cute habit the fruitful 
hen has of laying an egg almost anywhere 
but beside that glass egg. which you have 
so artfully placed in a wooden box in the 
chicken house. This is a symptom that 
Biddy H. does not appreciate your location 
of that box. It is too public; too much 
in the glare and limelight; and the cure 
is to locate vour row of nests in the most 
secluded spot in the chicken house, in a 
dim, religious atmosphere, with a slanting 
hoard overhead to keep other fowls (or 
fools) from roosting in or on the nests. 
The best recipe for making hens lay is 
to leave them alone, and make them 
scratch gravel for a living. They are just 
a hit nervous when there are humans 
about, and would rather not lay that egg, 
thank you. until you have gone about your 
business. And if they get their corn for 
the picking, or from one of those sprink¬ 
lers that shower down a-plenty every time 
the hen pecks it, life becomes too easy a 
problem altogether to bother about laying 
any eggs. So I put down plenty of straw 
on the chicken yard floor, fed them whole 
corn, and they have to go down into the 
sand after the elusive kernel, thus intro¬ 
ducing the healthful element of work into 
an otherwise sedentary existence. 
Sanitation is another puzzler for the 
busy commuter and his hen house. You 
can use a dropping tray under the roosts 
and clean it at periodic intervals, or else 
have a cement floor, sanded, and the sand 
changed ever so often. I prefer the latter, 
as they dirty the chicken-house floor any¬ 
way, and you have both it and the tray to 
clean with the former scheme. In modern 
chickenhouses the tray is placed about 
three inches under the roosts—another 
reason why they do not lay — for if the 
hen had any say about it that roost would 
he the highest thing she could fly to. That 
primal instinct of preserving her own pre¬ 
cious skin governs everything the hen 
thinks and does, and sleeping directly over 
a platform, presumably not rat-proof, is 
nervous business; wherefore, for laying 
hens, put your roosts well up under the 
roof, with a footboard leading up near, 
hut not to the first rung. 
All of which doctrine was faithfully 
carried out in building my chicken wing 
of the barn, with results that fully justi¬ 
fied the time and labor involved in bring¬ 
ing it about. 
I had always rejoiced in pigeons on my 
boyhood place. They are a nuisance (and 
so are dogs, for that matter), but I love 
them and I meant to have them, in spite 
of the shrieks of protest from my better 
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THE HOME CORRESPONDENCE SCHOOL 
PT. 226. SPRINQFIELD, MASS. 
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