The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth | Page 8

the Gods sufficient for all the
chicks in Kent.
It was a bright and beautiful morning late in May, and his corns were
so much better that he resolved to walk through Hickleybrow to his
farm. It was three miles and a half altogether, through the park and

villages and then along the green glades of the Hickleybrow preserves.
The trees were all dusted with the green spangles of high spring, the
hedges were full of stitchwort and campion and the woods of blue
hyacinths and purple orchid; and everywhere there was a great noise of
birds--thrushes, blackbirds, robins, finches, and many more--and in one
warm corner of the park some bracken was unrolling, and there was a
leaping and rushing of fallow deer.
These things brought back to Mr. Bensington his early and forgotten
delight in life; before him the promise of his discovery grew bright and
joyful, and it seemed to him that indeed he must have come upon the
happiest day in his life. And when in the sunlit run by the sandy bank
under the shadow of the pine trees he saw the chicks that had eaten the
food he had mixed for them, gigantic and gawky, bigger already than
many a hen that is married and settleds and still growing, still in their
first soft yellow plumage (just faintly marked with brown along the
back), he knew indeed that his happiest day had come.
At Mr. Skinner's urgency he went into the runs but after he had been
pecked through the cracks in his shoes once or twice he got out again,
and watched these monsters through the wire netting. He peered close
to the netting, and followed their movements as though he had never
seen a chick before in his life.
"Whath they'll be when they're grown up ith impothible to think," said
Mr. Skinner.
"Big as a horse," said Mr. Bensington.
"Pretty near," said Mr. Skinner.
"Several people could dine off a wing!" said Mr. Bensington. "They'd
cut up into joints like butcher's meat."
"They won't go on growing at thith pathe though," said Mr. Skinner.
"No?" said Mr. Bensington.

"No," said Mr. Skinner. "I know thith thort. They begin rank, but they
don't go on, bleth you! No."
There was a pause.
"Itth management," said Mr. Skinner modestly.
Mr. Bensington turned his glasses on him suddenly.
"We got 'em almoth ath big at the other plathe," said Mr. Skinner, with
his better eye piously uplifted and letting himself go a little; "me and
the mithith."
Mr. Bensington made his usual general inspection of the premises, but
he speedily returned to the new run. It was, you know, in truth ever so
much more than he had dared to expect. The course of science is so
tortuous and so slow; after the clear promises and before the practical
realisation arrives there comes almost always year after year of intricate
contrivance, and here--here was the Foods of the Gods arriving after
less than a year of testing! It seemed too good--too good. That Hope
Deferred which is the daily food of the scientific imagination was to be
his no more! So at least it seemed to him then. He came back and stared
at these stupendous chicks of his, time after time.
"Let me see," he said. "They're ten days old. And by the side of an
ordinary chick I should fancy--about six or seven times as big...."
"Itth about time we artht for a rithe in thkrew," said Mr. Skinner to his
wife. "He'th ath pleathed ath Punth about the way we got thothe chickth
on in the further run--pleathed ath Punth he ith."
He bent confidentially towards her. "Thinkth it'th that old food of hith,"
he said behind his hands and made a noise of suppressed laughter in his
pharyngeal cavity....
Mr. Bensington was indeed a happy man that day. He was in no mood
to find fault with details of management. The bright day certainly
brought out the accumulating slovenliness of the Skinner couple more

vividly than he had ever seen it before. But his comments were of the
gentlest. The fencing of many of the runs was out of order, but he
seemed to consider it quite satisfactory when Mr. Skinner explained
that it was a "fokth or a dog or thomething" did it. He pointed out that
the incubator had not been cleaned.
"That it asn't, Sir," said Mrs. Skinner with her arms folded, smiling
coyly behind her nose. "We don't seem to have had time to clean it not
since we been 'ere...."
He went upstairs to see some rat-holes that Skinner said would justify a
trap--they certainly were enormous--and discovered that the room in
which the Food of the Gods was mixed with meal and bran was in a
quite