the street to see it. The violent bellowing of little Skelmersdale seems to have been the first announcement of anything out of the way. Miss Durgan of the Post Of

know the keen insistence of the hungry hen! There was Plymouth Rock in these bird

s not altogether taken

ence upon secrecy, rumo

ing had been about the

ied, "it's wh

and rushed out of the door at once. Almost simultaneously Mr. Skelmersdale himself appeared down the village, gripping a watering-pot

ossession of Master Skelmersdale. She halted through one instant's indecision and then turned for the open gates of Fulcher's yard. That instant

Skelmersdale had thrown, and fluttered wildly over Mrs. Glue's cottage and so into the doctor's field, whil

something much more manly, and ran, whirling his

curate, as though giant hens w

and out it shot in a gracious curve within a foot or so of Master Skelmersdale's head and through the gla

he roof of Fulcher's stables, put her foot through a weak place in the tiles, and descended, so to speak, out of the infinite into the contemplative quiet of Mr. Bumps the paralytic-who, it is now proved beyond all cavil, did, on this

itchen garden into the doctor's field, to which rendezvous the fifth also came at last, clucking dis

ve of the doctor's bees, and after that they set off in a gawky, jerky, feathery, fitful sort of way across the fields towards Urshot, and Hickleybrow Street

flappish and whangable articles in hand-to commence the scooting of the giant hens. They drove them into Urshot, where there was a Rural Fete, and Urshot took them as the crowning glory of a happy day. They began to be shot at near Findon Beeches, but at first only with a rook rifle. Of course birds of that

proprietor at Tunbridge Wells, who lured them into a cage, rendered vacant