People sometimes talk about the quiet of the country. I should like to
know where they find it. I never saw any in this part of the world. The
country seems to me to be the place of all places where everything is
going on. Especially in Spring one becomes almost distracted. What is
Spring in the city? Dead bricks under your feet; dead rocks all around
you. There are beautiful things in the shop-windows, but they never do
anything. It is just the same as it was yesterday and as it will be
to-morrow. I suppose a faint sense of warmth and fragrance does
settle down into the city's old cold heart, and at a few
breathing-holes--little irregular patches, lovely, but minute, called
"Central Park," or "Boston Common"--Nature comes up to blow. And there
are the Spring bonnets. Still, as a general thing, I should not think it
could make much difference whether it were June or January.
But Spring in the country,--O season rightly named!--a goddess-queen
glides through the heavens and the earth, and all that is therein
springs up to meet her and do obeisance. We, gross and heavy, blind and
deaf, are slow to catch the flutter of her robes, the music of her
footfall, the odor of her breath; the shine of her far-off coming. We
call it cold and Winter still. We huddle about the fires and wonder if
the Spring will never come; and all the while, lo, the Spring is here!
Ten thousand watching eyes, ten thousand waiting ears, laid along the
ground, have signalled the royal approach. Ten thousand times ten
thousand voices sound the notes of preparation. Everywhere there is
hurrying and scurrying. Every tiny, sleeping germ of animal and
vegetable life springs to its feet, wide awake, and girded for the race.
Now you must be wide awake too, or you will be ignominiously left behind
among the baggage.
The time of the singing of birds is come, and the time of the cackling
of homely, honest barn-yard fowls, who have never had justice done them.
Why do we extol foreign growths and neglect the children of the soil?
Where is there a more magnificent bird than the Rooster? What a lofty
air! What a spirited pose of the head! Note his elaborately scalloped
comb, his stately steppings, the lithe, quick, graceful motions of his
arching neck. Mark his brilliant plumage, smooth and lustrous as satin,
soft as floss silk. What necklace of a duchess ever surpassed in beauty
the circles of feathers which he wears, layer shooting over layer, up
and down, hither and thither, an amber waterfall, swift and soundless as
the light, but never disturbing the matchless order of his array? What
plume from African deserts can rival the rich hues, the graceful curves,
and the palm-like erectness of his tail? All his colors are tropical in
depth and intensity. With every quick motion the tints change as in a
prism, and each tint is more splendid than the last; green more
beautiful than any green, except that of a duck's neck; brown
infiltrated with gold, and ranging through the whole gamut of its
possibilities. I am not sure that this last is correct in point of
expression, but it is correct in point of sense, as any one who ever saw
a red rooster will bear witness.
Hens are not intrinsically handsome, but they abundantly prove the truth
of the old adage, "Handsome is that handsome does." Lord Kaimes
describes one kind of beauty as that founded on the relations of
objects. And I am sure that the relation of a hen to a dozen fair,
white, pure eggs, and the relation of those eggs to puddings and
custards, and the twenty-five cents which they can have for the asking,
make even an ungainly hen, like many heroines in novels, "not beautiful,
but very interesting." "Twenty thousand dollars," said a connoisseur in
such matters, "is a handsome feature in any lady's face." And the
"cut-cut-cut-ca-D-A-H-cut" of a hen, whose word is as good as her bond
for an egg a day, is a handsome feather in any bird's coat. Once,
however, this trumpet of victory deceived me, though by no fault of the
hen's. I heard it sounding lustily, and I ransacked the barn on tiptoe
to discover the new-made nest and the exultant _mater-familias_. But
instead of a white old hen with yellow legs, who had laid her master
many eggs, there, on a barrel, stood brave Chanticleer, cackling away
for dear life,--Hercules holding the distaff among his Omphales!
Now--for there are many things to be learned from hens--mark the
injustice of the tyrant man. From time immemorial, girls--at least
country girls--have been taught that
"A whistling girl and a crowing hen
Always come to some bad end";
but not a word is said about a cackling rooster! Worse still, a crowing
hen is so rare a thing that its very existence is problematical. I never
heard of one out of that couplet. I have made diligent inquiry, but I
have not been able to find any person who had heard, or who had ever
seen or heard of any one who had heard, a crowing hen. But these very
hands have fed, these very eyes seen, and these ears heard a cackling
rooster! Where is manly impartiality, not to say chivalry? Why do men
overlook the crying sins of their own sex, and expend all their energies
in attempting to eradicate sins which never existed in the other?
I have lived among hens lately, and I know all about them. They are just
like people. Not a few only, but the whole human race, are
chicken-hearted.
Hens are fond of little mysteries. With tons of hay at their disposal,
they will steal a nest in a discarded feeding-trough. With nobody in the
world to harbor an evil thought against them, they will hide under the
corn-stalks as carefully as if a sheriff were on their track. They will
not go to their nests while you are about, but tarry midway and meditate
profoundly on fixed fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute, till you
are tired of watching and waiting, and withdraw. No, you did not know it
all before. The world is in a state of Cimmerian darkness regarding
hens. There were never any chickens hatched till three weeks from a week
before Fast Day. How should you, my readers, know anything about them?
Be docile, and I will enlighten you.
Hens must have a depression where the bump of locality should be, for
they have no manner of tenderness for old haunts. "Where are the birds
in last year's nests?" queries the poet; but he might have asked quite
as pertinently, "Where are the birds in last month's nests?" Echo, if
she were at all familiar with the subject, would reply, "The birds are
all right, but where are the nests?" Hens very sensibly decide that it
is easier to build a new house than to keep the old one in order; and
having laid one round of eggs, off they go to erect, or rather to
excavate, another dwelling. You have scarcely learned the way to their
nook above the great beam when it is abandoned, and they betake
themselves to a hole at the very bottom of the haystack. I wish I could
tell you a story about a Hebrew prophet crawling under a barn after
hen's eggs, and crawling out again from the musty darkness into sweet
light with his clothes full of cobwebs, his eyes full of dust, his hands
full of eggs, to find himself winking and blinking in the midst of a
party of ladies and gentlemen who had come lion-hunting from a farre
countrie. I cannot tell you, because it would be a breach of confidence;
but I am going to edit my Sheikh's Life and Letters, if I live long
enough, and he does not live too long, and then you shall have the whole
story, with names, dates, and costumes.
Another very singular habit hens have, of dusting themselves. They do
not seem to care for bathing, like canary-birds; but in warm afternoons,
when they have eaten their fill, they like to stroll into the highway,
where the dust lies ankle-deep in heaps and ridges, and settle down and
stir and burrow in it till it has penetrated through all their inmost
feathers, and so filled them, that, when they arise and shake
themselves, they stand in a cloud of dust. I do not like this habit in
the hens; yet I observe how a correspondence exists in all the
Vertebrata; for do not fine ladies similarly dust themselves? They do
not, indeed, sit in the road _a la Turque_. They box up the dust, and
take it to their dressing-rooms, and, because Nature has not provided
them with feathers, ingenuity more than supplies the deficiency with the
softest of white down brushes, that harbor and convey the coveted dust.
I doubt not through the races one resembling purpose runs; and many a
stately matron and many a lovely maiden might truly say unto the hen,
"Thou art my sister."
Did I say I knew all about hens? The half was not told you, for I am
wise about chickens too. I know their tribe from "egg to bird," as the
country people say, when they wish to express the most radical, sweeping
acquaintance with any subject,--a phrase, by the way, whose felicity is
hardly to be comprehended till experience has unfolded its meaning.
When hens have laid a certain number of eggs,--twelve or twenty,--they
evince a strong disposition, I might almost say a determination, to
sit.[D] In every such case, it is plain that they ought to be allowed to
sit. It is a violation of Nature to souse them in cold water in order to
make them change their minds; and I believe, with Marcus Antoninus, that
nothing is evil which is according to Nature. But people want eggs, and
they do not care for Nature; and the consequence is, that hens are
obliged to undergo "heroic treatment" of various kinds. Sometimes it is
the cold bath; sometimes it is the hospital. One I tied to the bottom of
a post of the standards; but, eager to escape, and ignorant of the
qualities of cord, she flew up over the top rail, and, the next time I
entered the barn, presented the unpleasing spectacle of a dignified and
deliberate fowl hanging in mid-air by one leg. Greatly alarmed, I
hurried her down. Life was not extinct, except in that leg. I rubbed it
tenderly till warmth was restored, and then it grew so hot that I feared
inflammation would set in, and made local applications to reduce the
tendency, wondering in my own mind whether, in case worse should come to
worst, she could get on at all with a Palmer leg. The next morning the
question became unnecessary, as she walked quite well with her own. The
remaining hens were put in hospital till they signified a willingness to
resume their former profitable habits,--except one who was arbitrarily
chosen to be foster-mother of the future brood. Fifteen eggs, fair and
fresh, reserved for the purpose, I counted out and put into her nest;
and there she sat day after day and all day long, with a quietness, a
silent, patient persistence, which I admired, but could not in the least
imitate; for I kept continually poking under her and prying her up to
see how matters stood. Many hens would have resented so much
interference, but she knew it was sympathy, and not malice; besides, she
was very good-natured, and so was I, and we stood on the best possible
footing towards each other. A. G. says, "A hen's time is not much to
her"; and in this case his opinion was certainly correct.
One morning I thought I heard a faint noise. Routing out the good old
creature, that I might take observations, eggs still, and no chickens,
were discernible, but the tiniest, little, silvery, sunny-hearted chirp
that you ever heard, inside the eggs, and a little, tender pecking from
every imprisoned chick, standing at his crystal door, and, with his
faint, fairy knock, knock, knock, craving admission into the great
world. Never can I forget or describe the sensations of that moment;
and, as promise rapidly culminated in performance,--as the eggs ceased
to be eggs, and analyzed themselves into shattered shells and chirping
chickens,--it seemed as if I had been transported back to the beginning
of creation. Right before my eyes I saw, in my hands I held, the mystery
of life. These eggs, that had been laid under my very eyes as it were,
that I had my own self hunted and found and confiscated and
restored,--these eggs that I had broken and eaten a thousand times, and
learned of a surety to be nothing but eggs,--were before me now; and,
lo, they were eyes and feathers and bill and claws! Yes, little
puff-ball, I saw you when you were hard and cold and had no more life
than a Lima bean. I might have scrambled you, or boiled you, or made a
pasch-egg of you, and you would not have known that anything was
happening. If you had been cooked then, you would have been only an
omelet; now you may be a fricassee. As I looked at the nest, so lately
full only of white quiet, now swarming with downy life, and vocal with
low, soft music,
"I felt a newer life in every gale."
Oh, no one can tell, till he has chickens of his own, what delicious
emotions are stirred in the heart by their downy, appealing tenderness!
Swarming, however, as the nest seemed, it soon transpired that only
seven chickens had transpired. Eight eggs still maintained their
integrity. I remarked to the hen, that she would better keep on awhile
longer, and I would take the seven into the house, and provide for them.
She assented, having, justly enough, all confidence in my sagacity; and
I put them into a warm old worsted hood, and brought them into the
house. But the hood was not a hen, though it was tucked around them
almost to the point of suffocation; and they filled the house with
dolorous cries,--"yapping" it is called in the rural districts. Nothing
would soothe them but to be cuddled together in somebody's lap, and
brooded with somebody's hand. Then their shrill, piercing shrieks would
die away into a contented chirp of heartfelt satisfaction. I took a
world of comfort in those chickens,--it is so pleasant to feel that you
are really making sentient beings happy. The tiny things grew so
familiar and fond in a few hours that they could hardly tell which was
which,--I or the hen. They would all fall asleep in a soft, stirring
lump for five seconds, and then rouse up, with no apparent cause, but as
suddenly and simultaneously as if the drum had beat a reveille, and go
foraging about in the most enterprising manner. One would snap at a
ring, under the impression that it was petrified dough, I suppose; and
all the rest would rush up determinedly to secure a share in the prize.
Next they would pounce upon a button, evidently thinking it curd; and
though they must have concluded, after a while, that it was the hardest
kind of coagulated milk on record, they were not restrained from
renewing the attack in squads at irregular intervals. When they first
broke camp, we put soaked and sweetened cracker into their bills; but
they developed such an appetite, that, in view of the high price of
sugar, we cut off their allowance, and economized on Indian meal and
bread-water. Every night they went to the hen, and every morning they
came in to me; and still Dame Partlett sat with stolid patience, and
still eight eggs remained. I concluded, at length, to let the eggs take
their chance with another hen, and restore the first to freedom and her
chickens. But just as I was about to commence operations, some one
announced, that, if eggs are inverted during the process of incubation,
the chickens from them will be crazy. Appalled at the thought of a brood
of chickens laboring under an aberration of mind, yet fired with the
love of scientific investigation, I inverted one by way of experiment,
and placed it in another nest. The next morning, when I entered the
barn, Biddy stretched out her neck, and declared that there was no use
in waiting any longer, and she was determined to leave the place, which
she accordingly did, discovering, to my surprise, two little dead,
crushed, flattened chickens, Poor things! I coaxed them on a shingle,
and took them into the house to show to a person whose name has been
often mentioned in these pages, and who, in all experimental matters,
considers my testimony good for nothing without the strongest
corroborative evidence. Notice now the unreasoning obstinacy with which
people will cling to their prejudices in the face of the most palpable
opposing facts.
"Where did these come from?" I asked.
"Probably the hen trod on them and killed them," he said.
"But there were seven whole eggs remaining, and the insane one was in
another nest."
"Well, he supposed some other hen might have laid in the nest after the
first had begun to sit. They often did."
"No, for I had counted them every day."
Here, then, was an equation to be produced between fifteen original eggs
on one side, and seven whole eggs, seven live chickens, two dead
chickens, and another egg on the other. My theory was, that two of the
eggs contained twins.
"But no," says Halicarnassus,--"such a thing was never known as two live
chickens from one egg.
"But these were dead chickens," I affirmed.
"But they were alive when they pecked out. They could not break the
shell when they were dead."
"But the two dead chickens may have been in the same shell with two live
ones, and, when the live ones broke the shell, the dead ones dropped
out."
"Nonsense!"
"But here are the facts, Mr. Gradgrind,--seven live chickens, two dead
chickens, seven whole eggs, and another egg to be accounted for, and
only fifteen eggs to account for them."
Yet, as if a thing that never happened on our farm is a thing that never
can happen, oblivious of the fact that "a pair of chickens" is a common
phrase enough,--simply because a man never saw twin chickens, he
maintains that there cannot be any such thing as twin chickens. This,
too, in spite of one egg I brought in large enough to hold a brood of
chickens. In fact, it does not look like an egg; it looks like the keel
of a man-of-war.
The problem remains unsolved. But never, while I remember my addition
table, can you make me believe that seven whole----But the individual
mentioned above is so sore on this point, that, the moment I get as far
as that, he leaves the room, and my equation remains unstated.
There is a great deal of human nature in hens. They have the same
qualities that people have, but unmodified. A human mother loves her
children, but she is restrained by a sense of propriety from tearing
other mothers' children in pieces. A hen has no such checks; her
motherhood exists without any qualification. Her intense love for her
own brood is softened by no social requirements. If a poor lost waif
from another coop strays into her realm, no pity, no sympathy springing
from the memory of her own offspring, moves her to kindness; but she
goes at it with a demoniac fury, and would peck its little life out, if
fear did not lend it wings. She has a self-abnegation great as that of
human mothers. Her voracity and timidity disappear. She goes almost
without food herself, that her chicks may eat. She scatters the dough
about with her own bill, that it may be accessible to the little bills,
or, perhaps, to teach them how to work. The wire-worms, the bugs, the
flies, all the choice little tidbits that her soul loves, she divides
for her chicks, reserving not a morsel for herself. All their gambols
and pranks and wild ways she bears with untiring patience. They hop up
by twos and threes on her back. They peck at her bill. One saucy little
imp actually jumped up and caught hold of the little red lappet above
her beak, and, hanging to it, swung back and forth half a dozen times;
and she was evidently only amused, and reckoned it a mark of precocity.
Yet, with all her intense, absorbing parental love, she has very serious
deficiencies,--deficiencies occasioned by the same lack of modification
which I have before mentioned. Devoted to her little ones, she will
scratch vigorously and untiringly to provide them food, yet fails to
remember that they do not stand before her in a straight line out of
harm's way, but are hovering around her on all sides in a dangerous
proximity. Like the poet, she looks not forward nor behind. If they are
beyond reach, very well; if they are not, all the same; scratch,
scratch, scratch in the soil goes her great, strong, horny claw, and up
flies a cloud of dust, and away goes a poor unfortunate, whirling
involuntary somersets through the air without the least warning. She is
a living monument of the mischief that may be done by giving undue
prominence to one idea. I only wonder that so few broken heads and
dislocated joints bear witness to the falseness of such philosophy. I am
quite sure, that, if _I_ should give the chickens such merciless
impulses, they would not recover from the effects so speedily. Unlike
human mothers, too, she has no especial tenderness for invalids. She
makes arrangements only for a healthy family. If a pair of tiny wings
droop, and a pair of tiny legs falter, so much the worse for the poor
unlucky owner; but not one journey the less does Mother Hen take. She is
the very soul of impartiality; but there is no cosseting. Sick or well,
chick must run with the others, or be left behind. Run they do, with a
remarkable uniformity. I marvel to see the perfect understanding among
them all. Obedience is absolute on the one side, and control on the
other, and without a single harsh measure. It is pure Quaker discipline,
simple moral suasion. The specks understand her every word, and so do
I--almost. When she is stepping about in a general way,--and hens always
step,--she has simply a motherly sort of cluck, that is but a general
expression of affection and oversight. But the moment she finds a worm
or a crumb or a splash of dough, the note changes into a quick, eager
"Here! here! here!" and away rushes the brood pell-mell and topsy-turvy.
If a stray cat approaches, or danger in any form, her defiant, menacing
"C-r-r-r-r!" shows her anger and alarm.
See how, in Bedford jail, John Bunyan turned to good account the lessons
learned in barn-yards. "'Yet again,' said he, 'observe and look.' So
they gave heed and perceived that the hen did walk in a fourfold method
towards her chickens. 1. She had a _common call_, and that she hath all
day long; 2. She had a _special call_, and that she had but sometimes;
3. She had a _brooding note_; and, 4. She had an _outcry_. 'Now,' said
he, 'compare this hen to your king, and these chickens to his obedient
ones. For, answerable to her, himself has his methods which he walketh
in towards his people: by his _common call_ he gives nothing; by his
_special call_ he always has something to give; he has also a _brooding
voice_ for them that are under his wing; and he has an _outcry_ to give
the alarm when he seeth the enemy come. I chose, my darlings, to lead
you into the room where such things are, because you are women, and they
are easy for you.'" Kind Mr. Interpreter!
To personal fear, as I have intimated, the hen-mother is a stranger; but
her power is not always equal to her pluck. One week ago this very
day,--ah, me! this very hour,--the cat ran by the window with a chicken
in her mouth. Cats are a separate feature in country establishments. In
the city I have understood them to lead a nomadic, disturbed, and
somewhat shabby life. In the country they attach themselves to special
localities and prey upon the human race. We have three steady and
several occasional cats quartered upon us. One was retained for the name
of the thing,--called derivatively Maltesa, and Molly "for short." One
was adopted for charity,--a hideous, saffron-hued, forlorn little
wretch, left behind by a Milesian family, called, from its color,
Aurora, contracted into Rory O'More. The third was a fierce
black-and-white unnamed wild creature, of whom one never got more than a
glimpse in her savage flight. Cats are tolerated here from a tradition
that they catch rats and mice, but they don't. We catch the mice
ourselves and put them in a barrel, and put a cat in after them; and
then she is frightened out of her wits. As for rats, they will gather
wherever corn and potatoes congregate, cats or no cats. It is said in
the country, that, if you write a polite letter to rats, asking them to
go away, they will go. I received my information from one who had tried
the experiment, or known it to be tried, with great success. Standing
ready always to write a letter on the slightest provocation, you may be
sure I did not neglect so good an opportunity. The letter acknowledged
their skill and sagacity, applauded their valor and their perseverance,
but stated, that, in the present scarcity of labor, the resident family
were not able to provide more supplies than were necessary for their own
immediate use and for that of our brave soldiers, and they must
therefore beg the Messrs. Rats to leave their country for their
country's good. It was laid on the potato-chest, and I have never seen a
rat since!
While I have been penning this quadrupedic episode, you may imagine
Molly, formerly Maltesa, as Kinglake would say, bearing off the chicken
in triumph to her domicile. But the alarm is given, and the whole
plantation turns out to rescue the victim or perish in the attempt.
Molly takes refuge in a sleigh, but is ignominiously ejected. She rushes
_per saltum_ under the corn-barn, and defies us all to follow her. But
she does not know that in a contest strategy may be an overmatch for
swiftness. She is familiar with the sheltering power of the elevated
corn-barn, but she never conjectures to what base uses a clothes-pole
may come, until one plunges into her sides. As she is not a St. Medard
Convulsionist, she does not like it, but strikes a bee-line for the
piazza, and rushes through the lattice-work into the darkness
underneath. We stoop to conquer, and she hurls Greek fire at us from her
wrathful eyes, but cannot stand against a reinforcement of poles which
vex her soul. With teeth still fastened upon her now unconscious victim,
she leaves her place of refuge, which indeed was no refuge for her, and
gallops through the yard and across the field; but an unseen column has
flanked her, and she turns back only to fall into the hands of the main
army,--too late, alas! for the tender chick, who has picked his last
worm and will never chirp again. But his death is speedily avenged.
Within the space of three days, Molly, formerly Maltesa, is taken into
custody, tried, convicted, sentenced, remanded to prison in an old
wagon-box, and transported to Botany Bay, greatly to the delight of Rory
O'More, formerly Aurora, who, in the presence of her overgrown
contemporary, was never suffered to call her soul her own, much less a
bone or a crust. Indeed, Molly never seemed half so anxious to eat,
herself, as she was to bind Rory to total abstinence. When a plate was
set for them, the preliminary ceremony was invariably a box on the ear
for poor Rory, or a grab on the neck, from Molly's spasmodic paw, which
would not release its hold till armed intervention set in and enforced a
growling neutrality. In short, like the hens, these cats held up a
mirror to human nature. They showed what men and women would be, if they
were--cats; which they would be, if a few modifying qualities were left
out. They exhibit selfishness and greed in their pure forms, and we see
and ought to shun the unlovely shapes. Evil propensities may be hidden
by a silver veil, but they are none the less evil and bring forth evil
fruit. Let cats delight to snarl and bite, but let men and women be
generous and beneficent.
Little chickens, tender and winsome as they are, early discover the same
disposition. When one of them comes into possession of the fore-quarter
of a fly, he does not share it with his brother. He does not even
quietly swallow it himself. He clutches it in his bill and flies around
in circles and irregular polygons, like one distracted, trying to find
a corner where he can gormandize alone. It is no matter that not a
single chicken is in pursuit, nor that there is enough and to spare for
all. He hears a voice we cannot hear, telling him that the Philistines
be upon him. And every chicken snatches his morsel and radiates from
every other as fast as his little legs can carry him. His selfishness
overpowers his sense,--which is, indeed, not a very signal victory, for
his selfishness is very strong and his sense is very weak. It is no
wonder that Hopeful was well-nigh moved to anger, and queried, "Why art
thou so tart, my brother?" when Christian said to him, "Thou talkest
like one upon whose head is the shell to this very day." To be compared
to a chicken is disparaging enough; but to be compared to a chicken so
very young that he has not yet quite divested himself of his shell must
be, as Pet Marjorie would say, "what Nature itself can't endure." A
little chicken's greedy crop blinds his eyes to every consideration
except that of the insect squirming in his bill. He is beautiful and
round and full of cunning ways, but he has no resources for an
emergency. He will lose his reckoning and be quite out at sea, though
only ten steps from home. He never knows enough to turn a corner. All
his intelligence is like light, moving only in straight lines. He is
impetuous and timid, and has not the smallest presence of mind or
sagacity to discern between friend and foe. He has no confidence in any
earthly power that does not reside in an old hen. Her cluck will he
follow to the last ditch, and to nothing else will he give heed. I am
afraid that the Interpreter was putting almost too fine a point upon it,
when he had Christiana and her children "into another room, where was a
hen and chickens, and bid them observe awhile. So one of the chickens
went to the trough to drink, and every time she drank she lift up her
head and her eyes towards heaven. 'See,' said he, 'what this little
chick doth, and learn of her to acknowledge whence your mercies come, by
receiving them with looking up.'" Doubtless the chick lift her eyes
towards heaven, but a close acquaintance with the race would put
anything but acknowledgment in the act. A gratitude that thanks Heaven
for favors received and then runs into a hole to prevent any other
person from sharing the benefit of those favors is a very questionable
kind of gratitude, and certainly should be confined to the bipeds that
wear feathers.
Yet, if you take away selfishness from a chicken's moral make-up, and
fatuity from his intellectual, you have a very charming little creature
left. For, apart from their excessive greed, chickens seem to be
affectionate. They have sweet social ways. They huddle together with
fond caressing chatter, and chirp soft lullabies. Their toilet
performances are full of interest. They trim each other's bills with
great thoroughness and dexterity, much better indeed than they dress
their own heads,--for their bungling, bungling little claws make sad
work of it. It is as much as they can do to stand on two feet, and they
naturally make several revolutions when they attempt to stand on one.
Nothing can be more ludicrous than their early efforts to walk. They do
not really walk. They sight their object, waver, balance, decide, and
then tumble forward, stopping all in a heap as soon as the original
impetus is lost, generally some way ahead of the place to which they
wished to go. It is delightful to watch them as drowsiness films their
round, bright, black eyes, and the dear old mother croons them under her
ample wings, and they nestle in perfect harmony. How they manage to
bestow themselves with such limited accommodations, or how they manage
to breathe in a room so close, it is difficult to imagine. They
certainly deal a staggering blow to our preconceived notions of the
necessity of oxygen and ventilation, but they make it easy to see whence
the Germans derived their fashion of sleeping under feather-beds. But
breathe and bestow themselves they do. The deep mother-heart and the
broad mother-wings take them all in. They penetrate her feathers, and
open for themselves unseen little doors into the mysterious, brooding,
beckoning darkness. But it is long before they can arrange themselves
satisfactorily. They chirp, and stir, and snuggle, trying to find the
warmest and softest nook. Now an uneasy head is thrust out, and now a
whole tiny body, but it soon reenters in another quarter, and at length
the stir and chirr grow still. You see only a collection of little legs,
as if the hen were a banyan-tree, and presently even they disappear, she
settles down comfortably, and all are wrapped in a slumberous silence.
And as I sit by the hour, watching their winning ways, and see all the
steps of this sleepy subsidence, I can but remember that outburst of
love and sorrow from the lips of Him who, though He came to earth from a
dwelling-place of ineffable glory, called nothing unclean because it was
common, found no homely detail too trivial or too homely to illustrate
the Father's love, but from the birds of the air, the fish of the sea,
the lilies of the field, the stones in the street, the foxes in their
holes, the patch on a coat, the oxen in the furrow, the sheep in the
pit, the camel under his burden, drew lessons of divine pity and
patience, of heavenly duty and delight. Standing in the presence of the
great congregation, seeing, as never man saw, the hypocrisy and the
iniquity gathered before Him,--seeing too, alas! the calamities and the
woe that awaited this doomed people, a god-like pity overbears His
righteous indignation, and cries out in passionate appeal, "O Jerusalem,
Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are
sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together,
even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!"
* * * * *
The agriculturist says that women take care of young chickens much
better than men. I do not know how that may be, but I know that my
experiments with chickens have been attended with a success so brilliant
that unfortunate poultry-fanciers have appealed to me for assistance. I
have even taken ailing chickens from the city to board. A brood of
nineteen had rapidly dwindled down to eleven when it was brought to me,
one even then dying. His little life ebbed away in a few hours; but of
the remaining ten, nine, now in the third week of their abode under my
roof, have recovered health, strength, and spirits, and bid fair to live
to a good old age, if not prematurely cut off. One of them, more feeble
than the others, needed and received especial attention. Him I tended
through dreary days of east wind and rain in a box on the mantel-piece,
nursing him through a severe attack of asthma, feeding and amusing him
through his protracted convalescence, holding him in my hand one whole
Sunday afternoon to relieve him of home-sickness and hen-sickness, and
being rewarded at last by seeing animation and activity come back to his
poor sickly little body. He will never be a robust chicken. He seems to
have a permanent distortion of the spine, and his crop is one-sided; and
if there is any such thing as blind staggers, he has them. Besides, he
has a strong and increasing tendency not to grow. This, however, I
reckon a beauty rather than a blemish. It is the one fatal defect in
chickens that they grow. With them, youth and beauty are truly
inseparable terms. The better they are, the worse they look. After they
are three weeks old, every day detracts from their comeliness. They lose
their plump roundness, their fascinating, soft down, and put out the
most ridiculous little wings and tails and hard-looking feathers, and
are no longer dear, tender chicks, but small hens,--a very uninteresting
Young America. It is said, that, if you give chickens rum, they will not
grow, but retain always their juvenile size and appearance. Under our
present laws it is somewhat difficult, I suppose, to obtain rum, and I
fear it would be still more difficult to administer it. I have concluded
instead to keep some hen sitting through the summer, and so have a
regular succession of young chickens. The growth of my little patient
was not arrested at a sufficiently early stage to secure his perpetual
good looks, and, as I intimated, he will never, probably, be the
Windship of his race; but he has found his appetite, he is free from
acute disease, he runs about with the rest, under-sized, but bright,
happy, and enterprising, and is therefore a well-spring of pleasure.
Indeed, in view of the fact that I have unquestionably saved his life,
we talk seriously of opening a _Hotel des Invalides_, a kind of
Chicken's Home, that the benefits which he has received may be extended
to all his unfortunate brethren who stand in need.