Old B. gave up keeping 'hens a ycar'ago and our
friends up the road put their stock into the cooking pot one by one not so long after. It didn't pay to keep birds on a small scale, both said. A breakfast egg was worth only so much. It seemed reasonable to give up when, as they said, without accounting for labour, the food bill put the price of an egg to some- thing considerably higher than that ruling in the shops at the particular time. Now my friend D. is complaining that things are not economic and his circumstances are very much different, for he runs something like two hundred birds on deep litter and keeps careful account of everything. Once in a while we get eggs from D. When they were scarce we called at the farm often, but since they became plentiful our visits arc less frequent. The law of supply and demand made us pay more than sixpence for fresh eggs at one time, and now it brings eggs to less than fivepence. It seems hardly worth bothering about but a halfpenny on the wrong side may force D. to reduce his stock and scarcity will eventually adjust prices. There's a moral in ft all for both producer and consumer.
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