LITMIR.BIZ

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through the want of pupils. “It’s the pupils as pay,” said Mrs. Skinner.

      Mr. Skinner, when he appeared, was a large-faced man, with a lisp and a squint that made him look over the top of your head, slashed slippers that appealed to Mr. Bensington’s sympathies, and a manifest shortness of buttons. He held his coat and shirt together with one hand and traced patterns on the black-and-gold tablecloth with the index finger of the other, while his disengaged eye watched Mr. Bensington’s sword of Damocles[13], so to speak, with an expression of sad detachment. “You don’t want to run thith[14] Farm for profit. No, Thir. Ith all the thame, Thir. Ekthperimenth! Prethithely.”

      He said they could go to the farm at once. He was doing nothing at Dunton Green except a little tailoring. “It ithn’t the thmart plathe I thought it wath, and what I get ithent thkarthely worth having,” he said, “tho that if it ith any convenienth to you for uth to come…”

      And in a week Mr. and Mrs. Skinner were installed in the farm, and the jobbing carpenter from Hickley-brow was diversifying the task of erecting runs and henhouses with a systematic discussion of Mr. Bensington.

      “I haven’t theen much of ’im yet,” said Mr. Skinner. “But as far as I can make ’im out ’e theems to be a thtewpid o’ fool.”

      “I thought ’e seemed a bit Dotty,” said the carpenter from Hickleybrow.

      “’E fanthieth ’imself about poultry,” said Mr. Skinner. “O my goodneth! You’d think nobody knew nothin’ about poultry thept ’im.”

      “’E looks like a ’en,” said the carpenter from Hickleybrow; “what with them spectacles of ’is.”

      Mr. Skinner came closer to the carpenter from Hickleybrow, and spoke in a confidential manner, and one sad eye regarded the distant village, and one was bright and wicked. “Got to be meathured every blethed day – every blethed ’en, ’e thays. Tho as to thee they grow properly. What oh… eh? Every blethed ’en – every blethed day.”

      And Mr. Skinner put up his hand to laugh behind it in a refined and contagious manner, and humped his shoulders very much – and only the other eye of him failed to participate in his laughter. Then doubting if the carpenter had quite got the point of it, he repeated in a penetrating whisper; “Meathured!”

      “’E’s worse than our old guvnor; I’m dratted if ’e ain’t[15],” said the carpenter from Hickleybrow.

      II

      Experimental work is the most tedious thing in the world (unless it be the reports of it in the Philosophical Transactions), and it seemed a long time to Mr. Bensington before his first dream of enormous possibilities was replaced by a crumb of realisation. He had taken the Experimental Farm in October, and it was May before the first inklings of success began. Herakleophorbia I and II and III had to be tried, and failed; there was trouble with the rats of the Experimental Farm, and there was trouble with the Skinners. The only way to get Skinner to do anything he was told to do was to dismiss him. Then he would nib his unshaven chin – he was always unshaven most miraculously and yet never bearded – with a flattened hand, and look at Mr. Bensington with one eye, and over him with the other, and say, “Oo, of courthe, Thir – if you’re theriouth!”

      But at last success dawned. And its herald was a letter in the long slender handwriting of Mr. Skinner.

      “The new Brood are out,” wrote Mr. Skinner, “and don’t quite like the look of them. Growing very rank – quite unlike what the similar lot was before your last directions was given. The last, before the cat got them, was a very nice, stocky chick, but these are Growing like thistles. I never saw. They peck so hard, striking above boot top, that am unable to give exact Measures as requested. They are regular Giants, and eating as such. We shall want more corn very soon, for you never saw such chicks to eat. Bigger than Bantams. Going on at this rate, they ought to be a bird for show, rank as they are. Plymouth Rocks[16] won’t be in it. Had a scare last night thinking that cat was at them, and when I looked out at the window could have sworn I see her getting in under the wire. The chicks was all awake and pecking about hungry when I went out, but could not see anything of the cat. So gave them a peck of corn, and fastened up safe. Shall be glad to know if the Feeding to be continued as directed. Food you mixed is pretty near all gone[17], and do not like to mix any more myself on account of the accident with the pudding. With best wishes from us both, and soliciting continuance of esteemed favours,

“Respectfully yours,“ALFRED NEWTON SKINNER.”

      The allusion towards the end referred to a milk pudding with which some Herakleophorbia II had got itself mixed with painful and very nearly fatal results to the Skinners.

      But Mr. Bensington, reading between the lines saw in this rankness of growth the attainment of his long sought goal. The next morning he alighted at Urshot station, and in the bag in his hand he carried, sealed in three tins, a supply of the Food of the Gods sufficient for all the chicks in Kent.

      It was a bright and beautiful morning late in May, and his corns were so much better that he resolved to walk through Hickleybrow to his farm. It was three miles and a half altogether, through the park and villages and then along the green glades of the Hickleybrow preserves. The trees were all dusted with the green spangles of high spring, the hedges were full of stitchwort and campion and the woods of blue hyacinths and purple orchid; and everywhere there was a great noise of birds – thrushes, blackbirds, robins, finches, and many more – and in one warm corner of the park some bracken was unrolling, and there was a leaping and rushing of fallow deer.

      These things brought back to Mr. Bensington his early and forgotten delight in life; before him the promise of his discovery grew bright and joyful, and it seemed to him that indeed he must have come upon the happiest day in his life. And when in the sunlit run by the sandy bank under the shadow of the pine trees he saw the chicks that had eaten the food he had mixed for them, gigantic and gawky, bigger already than many a hen that is married and settled and still growing, still in their first soft yellow plumage (just faintly marked with brown along the back), he knew indeed that his happiest day had come.

      At Mr. Skinner’s urgency he went into the runs but after he had been pecked through the cracks in his shoes once or twice he got out again, and watched these monsters through the wire netting. He peered close to the netting, and followed their movements as though he had never seen a chick before in his life.

      “Whath they’ll be when they’re grown up ith impothible to think[18],” said Mr. Skinner.

      “Big as a horse,” said Mr. Bensington.

      “Pretty near,” said Mr. Skinner.

      “Several people could dine off a wing!” said Mr. Bensington. “They’d cut up into joints like butcher’s meat.”

      “They won’t go on growing at thith pathe though,” said Mr. Skinner.

      “No?” said Mr. Bensington.

      “No,” said Mr. Skinner. “I know thith thort. They begin rank, but they don’t go on, bleth you! No.”

      There was a pause. “Itth management,” said Mr. Skinner modestly.

      Mr. Bensington turned his glasses on him suddenly.

      “We got ’em almoth ath big at the other plathe,” said Mr. Skinner, with his better eye piously uplifted and letting himself go a little; “me and the mithith.”

      Mr. Bensington made his usual general inspection of the premises, but he speedily returned to the new run. It was, you know, in truth ever so much more than he had dared to expect. The course of science is so tortuous and so slow; after the clear promises and before the practical realisation arrives there comes almost always year after year of intricate contrivance, and here – here was the Foods of the Gods arriving after less

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