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I, however, digress. My tale does not primarily concern itself with the hen. If correctly told it will center on the egg. For ten years my father and mother struggled to make our chicken farm pay and then they gave up that struggle and began another. They moved into the town of Bidwell, Ohio, and embarked in the restaurant business. After ten years of worry with incubators that did not hatch, and with tiny—and in their own way lovely—balls of fluff that passed on into semi-naked pullethood and from that into dead henhood, we threw all aside and packing our belongings on a wagon drove down Griggs’s Road toward Bidwell, a tiny caravan of hope looking for a new place from which to start on our upward journey through life.

We must have been a sad-looking lot, not, I fancy, unlikerefugees fleeing from a battlefield. Mother and I walked in theroad. The wagon that contained our goods had been borrowed for theday from Mr. Albert Griggs, a neighbour. Out of its sides stuck thelegs of cheap chairs and at the back of the pile of beds, tables, andboxes filled with kitchen utensils was a crate of live chickens and ontop of that the baby carriage in which I had been wheeled about in myinfancy. Why we stuck to the baby carriage I don’t know. It wasunlikely other children would be born and the wheels were broken. People who have few possessions cling tightly to those they have. That is one of the facts that makes life so discouraging.

Father rode on top of the wagon. He was then a bald-headed manof forty-five, a little fat and from long association with mother andthe chickens he had become habitually silent and discouraged. Allduring our ten years on the chicken farm he had worked as a labourer onneighboring farms and most of the money he had earned had been spentfor remedies to cure chicken diseases, on Wilmer’s White WonderCholera Cure or Professor Bidlow’s Egg Producer or some otherpreparations that mother found advertised in the poultry papers. Therewere two little patches of hair on father’s head just above his ears. I remember that as a child I used to sit looking at him when he hadgone to sleep in a chair before the stove on Sunday afternoons in thewinter. I had at that time already begun to read books and havenotions of my own and the bald path that led over the top of his headwas, I fancied, something like a broad road, such a road as Caesarmight have made on which to lead his legions out of Rome and into thewonders of an unknown world. The tufts of hair that grew abovefather’s ears were, I thought, like forests. I fell into ahalf-sleeping, half-waking state and dreamed I was a tiny thing goingalong the road into a far beautiful place where there were no chickenfarms and where life was a happy eggless affair.

One might write a book concerning our flight from the chickenfarm into town. Mother and I walked the entire eight miles—she to be sure that nothing fell from the wagon and I tosee the wonders of the world. On the seat of the wagon beside fatherwas his greatest treasure. I will tell you of that.

On a chicken farm where hundreds and even thousands of chickenscome out of eggs surprising things sometimes happen. Grotesques areborn out of eggs as out of people. The thing does not oftenoccur—perhaps once in a thousand births. A chicken is, you see, bornthat has four legs, two pairs of wings, two heads or what not. Thethings do not live. They go quickly back to the hand of their makerthat has for a moment trembled. The fact that the poor little thingscould not live was one of the tragedies of life to father. He hadsome sort of notion that if he could but bring into henhood orroosterhood a five-legged hen or a two-headed rooster his fortunewould be made. He dreamed of taking the wonder about to county fairsand of growing rich by exhibiting it to other farm-hands.

At any rate he saved all the little monstrous things that hadbeen born on our chicken farm. They were preserved in alcohol and puteach in its own glass bottle. These he had carefully put into a boxand on our journey into town it was carried on the wagon seat besidehim. He drove the horses with one hand and with the other clung tothe box. When we got to our destination the box was taken down atonce and the bottles removed. All during our days as keepers of arestaurant in the town of Bidwell, Ohio, the grotesques in theirlittle glass bottles sat on a shelf back of the counter. Mothersometimes protested but father was a rock on the subject of histreasure. The grotesques were, he declared, valuable. People, hesaid, liked to look at strange and wonderful things.