Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 January 1910 — DYED HER HEN'S TAILS. [ARTICLE]

DYED HER HEN'S TAILS.

ItalM Hn. Albers Colored WMt* Leckorna They Won’t Lay. Partly tor esthetic and partly tor practical reasons Mrs. Herman Albers of Flatlands dyed the tails of all her white leghorn hens purple and green and as soon as the hens discovered what had happened they began to run around In circles. Up to a late hour last night they had not stopped running long enough to lay an egg or to go to roost. Mrs. Albers Is the wife of a well-known sporting man; their home is 1331 S. 37th street, says the New York World. As for the esthetic and practical reasons: First, Mrs. Albers wears a green-and-purple striped apron when she goes out to feed the chickens and being a woman she loves color harmonies. She read in a poultry book, when she decided to go In for hens recently, that to succeed and get eggs when eggs are worth 60 cents a dozen the poultry woman “must have the hen in her heart” —that is, love the hen and have as much in common with it as possible. She thought that one good thing would be to have some similarity In costume. Mrs. Albers didn’t want to wear a white apron to match the tails in the hen yard, for it would get too mussy, so she made the tails match the apron. Her practical reason for using the dyes was to get a mark for quick identification when her hens BtTolled across the rodd to visit Neighbor Carey’s flock and made the serious mistake of laying their eggs in Neighbor Carey’s nests. The fifty leghorns were frescoed yesterday morning by Mrs. Albers and her husband after they had bagged the head of each hen to prevent the coloring from running into its eyes. The first hen that got her head free after the operation happened to see her tail reflected in the water pan. She immediately pecked off the bandage of the next hen, so that she could see her tall, too. ■ Then the first two removed the bandages from two more and so on through the flock. Then the run round began, either from pride or fright. To-day, if the hens are still running, Mrs. Albers still' hopes to slap each tail as it flashes by her with aTwhitewash brush.