Searching for their animate or inanimate bodies, we "scoop" one
from under the tool-house, chance upon two more who are being harried and
pecked by the big geese in the lower meadow, and discover one sailing by
himself in solitary splendour in the middle of the deserted pond, a look
of evil triumph in his bead-like eye. Still we lack one young duckling,
and he at length is found dead by the hedge. A rat has evidently seized
him and choked him at a single throttle, but in such haste that he has
not had time to carry away the tiny body.
"Poor think!" says Phoebe tearfully; "it looks as if it was 'it with some
kind of a wepping. I don't know whatever to do with the rats, they're
gettin' that fearocious!"
Before I was admitted into daily contact with the living goose (my
previous intercourse with him having been carried on when gravy and
stuffing obscured his true personality), I thought him a very Dreyfus
among fowls, a sorely slandered bird, to whom justice had never been
done; for even the gentle Darwin is hard upon him. My opinion is
undergoing some slight modifications, but I withhold judgment at present,
hoping that some of the follies, faults, vagaries, and limitations that I
observe in Phoebe's geese may be due to Phoebe's educational methods,
which were, before my advent, those of the darkest ages.
CHAPTER IV
July 9th.
By the time the ducks and geese are incarcerated for the night, the
reasonable, sensible, practical-minded hens--especially those whose
mentality is increased and whose virtue is heightened by the
responsibilities of motherhood--have gone into their own particular rat-
proof boxes, where they are waiting in a semi-somnolent state to have the
wire doors closed, the bricks set against them, and the bits of sacking
flung over the tops to keep out the draught.
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