One official gave frequent dinner parties to his friends, and was said
to use as many as five or six chickens a day, though I cannot vouch for
that--it seems excessive. He certainly, sometimes, commandeered as many
as fourteen or more at one time. There was a story of a great cake which
he had made for some festival, into the composition of which entered one
hundred and four eggs from our farm. To neither chickens nor eggs had
he, of course, any title more legitimate than have you who read these
lines. He had a large and hungry household, and many guests--among them,
commonly, such government inspectors as were sent down from Washington,
to see whether he and his fellow officials were honestly discharging
their functions.
As for the tuberculous patients, I was never able to find any of them
who had eaten chicken from the farm, or any part of one. Some chicken
soup was at one time ordered for a patient by the doctor; a prisoner (a
famous physician), a deputy of the doctor, happened to be at the
tuberculosis camp when the soup arrived from the kitchen. It consisted
of some warm water with the shank--not the drumstick, but the shank and
foot--of a fowl in it. This aroused his interest, and twice again he was
present when a chicken soup prescribed appeared at the camp. On both
occasions--he stands ready so to testify under oath--he found the same
foot and shank in it, but nothing else recalling chicken.
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