The Diary of a Goose Girl by Kate Douglas Wiggin

I have been studying _The Young Poultry Keeper's Friend_ of late. If there is anything I dislike and deplore, it is the possession of knowledge which I cannot put to practical use. Having discovered an interesting disease called Scaly Leg in the July number, I took the magazine out into the poultry-yard and identified the malady on three hens and a cock. Phoebe joined me in the diagnosis and we treated the victims with a carbolic lotion and scrubbed them with vaseline.

As Phoebe and I grow wise in medical lore the case of Cannibal Ann assumes a different aspect. As the bibulous man quaffs more and more flagons of beer and wine when his daily food is ham, salt fish, and cabbage, so does the hen avenge her wrongs of diet and woes of environment. Cannibal Ann, herself, has, so far as we know, been raised in a Christian manner and enjoyed all the advantages of modern methods; but her maternal parent may have lived in some heathen poultry-yard which was asphalted or bricked or flagged, so that she was debarred from scratching in Mother Earth and was forced to eat her own shells in self- defence.