They preferred cake, fresh bread, hot boiled potatoes, doted on tender bits of meat, but would gobble up anything and everything, more voracious and less fastidious than the ordinary hog of commerce.

Bags of corn were consumed in a flash, "shorts" were never long before their eager gaze, they went for every kind of nourishment provided for the rest of the menagerie.

A goat is supposed to have a champion appetite and digestion, but a duck--at least one of my ducks--leaves a goat so far behind that he never could regain his reputation for omniverosity.

They were too antique to be eaten themselves--their longevity entitled them to respect; they could not be disposed of by the shrewdest market man to the least particular of boarding-house providers; I could only regard them with amazement and horror and let them go on eating me out of house and home and purse-strings.
But at last I knew.

I asked an honest man from afar, who called to sell something, why those ducks would not lay a single egg.