The other room (_e_ in fig. 14.) should be supplied with rails and perches to serve as roosting-places (fig. 16.), and these rails are best of rough wood, as they afford a more secure resting-place for the fowls than if they were round and smooth. Fowls are very apt to crowd together in their roosting-places; and, when the rails are smooth so that the claws of the fowls cannot take a firm hold of them, the youngest and weakest of the fowls are very often pushed off. The roosting-places should be furnished with a sloping board with sticks nailed across, to enable the fowls to ascend to them. All the rooms of the hen-house should have windows filled in with wire lattice; and they should have shutters to close in cold weather. In some cases they have ceilings like those of a house, and in others they are left open to the beams of the roof. The principal thing to attend to is to keep them scrupulously clean, and the walls frequently whitewashed. The roosting-place should have the dung removed every morning, and in warm weather it should be washed out every day; even in winter, unless the weather is frosty, the floor should be washed once a week. Sometimes, instead of fixed rails for the fowls to rest upon, hanging bars are suspended from the roof; and sometimes the nests for laying in and for sitting are fixed, and in two rows one above the other. Where danger is apprehended from thieves, the door of the roosting-house is kept locked, it being provided with an opening for the fowls to pass through.
Poultry should never be fed where they roost, if it can possibly be avoided, and their food should generally be given to them in the open shed act apart for that purpose. In wet weather, however, they may be fed in the feeding-house (_a_ in fig. 14.), which has that name because it is the place where those fowls which are to be fattened are kept under coops (fig. 17.). For my own part I am no friend to fattening fowls artificially, as I think they are never half so good to eat as when they are indulged with moderate exercise, and kept in good condition by feeding them with barley, oats, or other grain, two or three times a day. When the poultry-yard adjoins a farm-yard, so that the fowls can be let out occasionally to pick up the grains that are scattered by the thresher, they become so plump and so well fitted for the table, that it is considered the highest praise that can be bestowed on poultry, to say that it eats as well as a barn-door fowl. When it is not practicable to admit poultry to the farm-yard, the fowls that are to be fattened should be kept in the feeding-house, and plenty of unthreshed straw should be given to them to peck at, so as to let them have constantly quite as much as they can eat, and yet be obliged to take exercise to get it; or, if more rapid feeding be required, they may be put under coops and fed with various kinds of food, either raw or cooked.