Hens

The Hens are a flock of twelve Light Sussex pullets whose brief stay at Skeldale House turns Siegfried Farnon’s hope for a dependable supply of fresh eggs into a comic domestic failure. Their story moves from empty nesting boxes to repeated escapes and, finally, to a new home where they produce ten eggs a day. The contrast makes the flock more than a failed farm project: their unruly presence exposes the distance between Siegfried’s brisk plans and the practical care the birds require, while giving Tristan an unexpected source of amusement.

Purchase and Expectations

Siegfried Farnon’s response to an idea was immediate. Within forty-eight hours, ten pigs had arrived in the sty and twelve Light Sussex pullets were pecking behind the hen-house wire. He was especially pleased with the hens, admiring their strain and their imminent laying age. He anticipated a slow beginning followed by plenty of eggs, with the appeal of a warm, fresh egg from the nest completing his vision of domestic abundance.

Tristan did not share his brother’s enthusiasm for the flock as egg producers. He was sometimes found outside the hen house, looking bored and tossing bread crusts over the wire; the account offers no sign that he followed the regular feeding or balanced diet recommended by experts. His interest was instead in the hens as individual birds: their unusual clucks and peculiar gaits amused him. That attention was personal rather than practical, and the difference between the brothers’ approaches soon became visible in the empty nesting boxes.

Escape and Roaming

As the weeks passed without eggs, Siegfried grew increasingly irritable. He suspected the seller had deceived him about the strain, and his daily inspection of the empty nesting boxes became an anxious ritual. The hens’ disappearance from the boxes was not the only surprise awaiting him. One afternoon Tristan called the narrator into the garden to look at unusually colored, large birds perched in the elm branches and in a neighbor’s apple trees. After inviting a guess, he revealed that the apparent exotic visitors were their own hens, which had left the hen house.

Seven birds were visible in the trees. The other five were found over the wall in the next garden, pecking among the cabbages. The crumbling mortar between the bricks provided footholds for the observers to look into the neighboring plot, but getting the flock back into its enclosure was less simple: it took a long time. The recovery did not solve the problem. The hens had grown tired of life under Tristan and repeatedly ranged farther afield in search of food, so the tedious task of rounding them up had to be repeated several times a day.

Neighbors and Household Conflict

At first the neighbors treated the wandering birds as a joke. They phoned to report that children were rounding up the hens and asked the household to collect them. Over time, their amusement wore thin; Siegfried eventually faced painful conversations in which the birds were described as a serious nuisance. Their roaming thus turned a private disappointment over missing eggs into a problem for the surrounding community, with Siegfried bearing the consequences of a flock that Tristan had not kept contained.

After one particularly unpleasant interview, Siegfried decided the hens had to go. His frustration fell on Tristan, whom he blamed both for the lack of eggs and for the birds’ excursions across the countryside. Tristan withdrew quietly from the outburst. The episode sharpens the contrast between Siegfried’s expectation that a simple assignment should produce a clear result and the disorder that has accumulated around it: no eggs, escaped hens, and neighbors no longer willing to laugh. The flock’s behavior is not simply a backdrop to the brothers’ argument; it is the concrete cause that keeps turning an optimistic plan into fresh domestic and social trouble.

New Home and Retrospective Irony

A fortnight later, the hens’ departure seemed to have become old news. Then Siegfried told Tristan that he had given them to Mrs. Dale, an old-age pensioner who lived in Brown’s Yard. She was delighted with them and gave them hot mash morning and evening; she was collecting ten eggs a day. The same flock that had produced none under the Skeldale House arrangement was now supplying eggs in abundance.

The reversal changes the meaning of the earlier failure. Siegfried’s belief that the hens themselves were poor layers is undercut by their success in Mrs. Dale’s care, while their former roaming and the household’s failure to manage them remain part of the story. Siegfried’s excitement over the daily total rose into another near-scream, and the narrator hurried away from the dining room, passing the empty hen house while Siegfried could still be heard inside. That final image leaves the venture’s practical result in plain view: the hens are gone, their former enclosure is empty, and their success elsewhere has made the household’s defeat all the more pointed.