hand, for the coming of feud and ill-blood. For the grudge between
the man of herbs and the man of live stock is no new thing; you will
find traces of it in the fourth chapter of Genesis. And one sunny
afternoon in late spring-time the feud came--came, as such things
mostly do come, with seeming aimlessness and triviality. One of the
Crick hens, in obedience to the nomadic instincts of her kind,
wearied of her legitimate scatching-ground, and flew over the low
wall that divided the holdings of the neighbours. And there, on the
yonder side, with a hurried consciousness that her time and
opportunities might be limited, the misguided bird scratched and
scraped and beaked and delved in the soft yielding bed that had been
prepared for the solace and well-being of a colony of seedling
onions. Little showers of earth-mould and root-fibres went spraying
before the hen and behind her, and every minute the area of her
operations widened. The onions suffered considerably. Mrs.
Saunders, sauntering at this luckless moment down the garden path,
in order to fill her soul with reproaches at the iniquity of the
weeds, which grew faster than she or her good man cared to remove
them, stopped in mute discomfiture before the presence of a more
magnificent grievance. And then, in the hour of her calamity, she
turned instinctively to the Great Mother, and gathered in her
capacious hands large clods of the hard brown soil that lay at her
feet. With a terrible sincerity of purpose, though with a
contemptible inadequacy of aim, she rained her earth bolts at the
marauder, and the bursting pellets called forth a flood of cackling
protest and panic from the hastily departing fowl. Calmness under
misfortune is not an attribute of either hen-folk or womenkind, and
while Mrs. Saunders declaimed over her onion bed such portions of
the slang dictionary as are permitted by the Nonconformist
conscience to be said or sung, the Vasco da Gama fowl was waking the