The rooms wherein dozens of infants had wailed at their nursing now resounded with the tapping of nascent chicks.  Distracted hens in coops occupied spots where formerly stood chairs supporting sedate agriculturists.  The chimney-corner and once-blazing hearth was now filled with inverted beehives, in which the hens laid their eggs; while out of doors the plots that each succeeding householder had carefully shaped with his spade were torn by the cocks in wildest fashion.

The garden in which the cottage stood was surrounded by a wall, and could only be entered through a door.

When Tess had occupied herself about an hour the next morning in altering and improving the arrangements, according to her skilled ideas as the daughter of a professed poulterer, the door in the wall opened and a servant in white cap and apron entered.  She had come from the manor-house.

“Mrs d’Urberville wants the fowls as usual,” she said; but perceiving that Tess did not quite understand, she explained, “Mis’ess is a old lady, and blind.”

“Blind!” said Tess.

Almost before her misgiving at the news could find time to shape itself she took, under her companion’s direction, two of the most beautiful of the Hamburghs in her arms, and followed the maid-servant, who had likewise taken two, to the adjacent mansion, which, though ornate and imposing, showed traces everywhere on this side that some occupant of its chambers could bend to the love of dumb creatures—­feathers floating within view of the front, and hen-coops standing on the grass.

In a sitting-room on the ground-floor, ensconced in an armchair with her back to the light, was the owner and mistress of the estate, a white-haired woman of not more than sixty, or even less, wearing a large cap.  She had the mobile face frequent in those whose sight has decayed by stages, has been laboriously striven after, and reluctantly let go, rather than the stagnant mien apparent in persons long sightless or born blind.  Tess walked up to this lady with her feathered charges—­one sitting on each arm.

“Ah, you are the young woman come to look after my birds?” said Mrs d’Urberville, recognizing a new footstep.  “I hope you will be kind to them.  My bailiff tells me you are quite the proper person.  Well, where are they?  Ah, this is Strut!  But he is hardly so lively to-day, is he?  He is alarmed at being handled by a stranger, I suppose.  And Phena too—­yes, they are a little frightened—­aren’t you, dears?  But they will soon get used to you.”

While the old lady had been speaking Tess and the other maid, in obedience to her gestures, had placed the fowls severally in her lap, and she had felt them over from head to tail, examining their beaks, their combs, the manes of the cocks, their wings, and their claws.  Her touch enabled her to recognize them in a moment, and to discover if a single feather were crippled or draggled.  She handled their crops, and knew what they had eaten, and if too little or too much; her face enacting a vivid pantomime of the criticisms passing in her mind.