



Produced by David Newman, Chuck Greif, Janet Blenkinship
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net











  Among the Farmyard People

  BY

  Clara Dillingham Pierson

  Author of "Among the Meadow People," and "Forest People".


  Illustrated by F. C. GORDON


  [Illustration]


  NEW YORK
  Copyright by
  E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY
  31 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET
  1899




TO THE CHILDREN

_Dear Little Friends:_

I want to introduce the farmyard people to you, and to have you call
upon them and become better acquainted as soon as you can. Some of them
are working for us, and we surely should know them. Perhaps, too, some
of us are working for them, since that is the way in this delightful
world of ours, and one of the happiest parts of life is helping and
being helped.

It is so in the farmyard, and although there is not much work that the
people there can do for each other, there are many kind things to be
said, and even the Lame Duckling found that he could make the Blind
Horse happy when he tried. It is there as it is everywhere else, and I
sometimes think that although the farmyard people do not look like us or
talk like us, they are not so very different after all. If you had seen
the little Chicken who wouldn't eat gravel when his mother was reproving
him, you could not have helped knowing his thoughts even if you did not
understand a word of the Chicken language. He was thinking, "I don't
care! I don't care a bit! So now!" That was long since, for he was a
Chicken when I was a little girl, and both of us grew up some time ago.
I think I have always been more sorry for him because when he was
learning to eat gravel I was learning to eat some things which I did not
like; and so