They were starting with the twelve fowls the Dunks had left on the estate. Now if one hen in one year brought up three clutches of chickens, how many would that make? Hermie, with shining eyes, cried thirty-nine; but Bart, who had seen mortality among chickens, refused to put down more than twenty.
’Very well,’ said Hermie, ’count twenty, if you like, only I know it will be thirty-nine, I shall be so careful of them. Twelve hens with twenty chickens each—that will be—that will be—what are twelve twenties, Miss Browne?’
’Two hundred and forty,’ replied the lady, amazed herself that it could be so much, ’two hundred and forty! Why, I have never seen so many together in my life.’
Bart wrote down the figures two hundred and forty.
’Fowls grow up in six months,’ Hermie said. ’Lizzie says so, and her mother used to keep fowls. The _Journal_ says—I read it this morning—that fowls generally lay two hundred eggs a year.’
’Very well,’ said Hermie. ’Please, Miss Browne, what are two hundred and forty times one hundred and fifty?’
’My dear,’ gasped Miss Browne, ’I—I really need a pencil for that.’
Bart offered his stump, and Miss Browne was five minutes working the sum, so sure was she she must have made an astounding mistake somewhere.
’It—it certainly comes to thirty-six thousand,’ she said at last.
’Would you please multiply it by a shilling a dozen, and say what it comes to,’ was Hermie’s further request.
Miss Browne again took a surprising time to do the simple sum.
’That is for the first year,’ Hermie said; ’but now would you please work it out on this big piece of paper, and see what we should get the second year. Two hundred and forty fowls——’
’And the twelve you began with, too,’ said Roly.
’We won’t count them, we’ll allow for them dying, too,’ she said. ’Two hundred and forty fowls with, say, twenty chickens each in the year. What’s that?’
’And they lay one hundred and fifty eggs a year.’
Miss Browne looked quite shaken at the result her arithmetic produced—seven hundred and twenty thousand eggs! Three thousand pounds!
The excitement made her work out the results of the third year, and she was weeping when the sun came out—sixty thousand pounds. She was weeping for her grey spoiled life. Exquisite dresses, travel, health, even marriage, and little children of her own, would have been all possible, had she worked these sums years and years ago, and set to work with twelve fowls.
