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[Illustration: Painted by F. Winterhalter.]
H.M.G. Majesty, Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, IN THE ROBES OF THE MOST NOBLE ORDER OF THE GARTER. DAGUERREOTYPED BY THOMPSON, From the Portrait in possession of Geo. P. Burnham;
PRESENTED TO HIM BY HER MAJESTY, THE QUEEN, IN 1853
BOSTON: JAMES FRENCH AND COMPANY. NEW YORK: J.C. DERBY. PHILADELPHIA: T.B. PETERSON.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1855, by GEORGE P. BURNHAM, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.
STEREOTYPED BY HOBART & ROBBINS, New England Type and Stereotype Foundery, BOSTON.
TO THE Amateurs, Fanciers, and Breeders OF POULTRY, THE SUCCESSFUL AND UNFORTUNATE DEALERS, THROUGHOUT THE UNITED STATES; AND THE VICTIMS OF MISPLACED CONFIDENCE IN THE HEN TRADE, GENERALLY, I DEDICATE This Volume.
In preparing the following pages, I have had the opportunity to inform myself pretty accurately regarding the ramifications of the subject upon which I have written herein; and I have endeavored to avoid setting down "aught in malice" in this "_History of the_ HEN FEVER" in the United States.
I have followed this extraordinary _mania_ from its incipient stages to its final death, or its _cure_, as the reader may elect to term its conclusion. The first symptoms of the fever were exhibited in my own house at Roxbury, Mass., early in the summer of 1849. From that time down to the opening of 1855 (or rather to the winter of 1854), I have been rather intimately connected with the movement, if common report speaks correctly; and I believe I have seen as much of the tricks of this trade as one usually meets with in the course of a single natural life.
Now that the most serious effects of this (for six years) alarming epidemic have passed away from among us, and when "the people" who have been called upon to pay the cost of its support, and for the burial of its victims, can look back upon the scenes that have in that period transpired with a disposition cooled by experience, I have thought that a volume like this might prove acceptable to the hundreds and thousands of those who once "took an interest in the hen trade,"--who _may_ have been mortally wounded, or haply who have escaped with only a broken wing; and who will not object to learn how the thing has been done, and "who threw the bricks"!