At this time, a single dealer in the egg-trade, at Philadelphia, sent to the New York market, daily, one hundred barrels of eggs; while the value of eggs shipped from Dublin to Liverpool and London was more than five millions of dollars for the year 1848.
In addition to these facts, frequent allusions were made to the enormous quantities required for other markets, in the interior, to supply which the number of laying hens must be kept good, and increased, as the demand for the eggs was constantly augmenting, and the business, "if skilfully and judiciously managed" (said the agricultural papers), _must_ prove immensely profitable to those who engage in it.
If "skilfully and judiciously managed"! This was good advice. But no one could inform "the people" how this management was to be effected. In the mean time, every sort of experiment was resorted to, by amateurs and fanciers and humbugs (who had been humbugged), to "improve" the breeds of poultry, and to produce new fowls that would lay two or three or four eggs for one, as compared with the old-fashioned birds.
We knew one beginner who had purchased a pretty little place a few miles from the city, who contracted the fever, and "suffered" badly, but who was cured by the following curious result of his early experiments. Eggs were scarce (genuine ones), and, after considerable searching, he finally procured of some one in Boston a clutch of "fancy" eggs, for which he paid big figures, but which did not _turn out_ exactly what he anticipated; and so _he_ concluded, after a time, that the hen fever was a rascally hum. (He didn't procure these eggs of _me_, be it understood. _I_ never had any but _genuine_ ones!)
He purchased what he was assured were pure "Cochin-China" eggs. (Perhaps they were--who knows?) And after waiting patiently for six long weeks for the "curious" eggs to hatch, he found six young _ducks_ in his coop, one morning!--So much for his knowledge of eggs!
But this was not so bad as was the case of one of his neighbors, however, who paid a round price for half a dozen choice eggs, queer-looking speckled eggs--small, round, "outlandish" eggs--which he felt certain would produce _rare_ chicks, and which he was very cautious in setting under his very best hen.