Now, my dear children, if you will be very quiet, I will tell you a true
story, which I sometimes tell my little daughter Fanny and her cousin
Grace, when they climb up on my knees just before going to bed.
On a farm near Fishkill, where Fanny's Aunt Jane lives, they raise a
great many chickens, turkeys, ducks, and geese. When I was a boy, ever
so many years ago, I used to have great fun hunting for eggs through the
hay and straw in the barns.
Well, last year one of the hens, instead of laying her eggs in the
hen-house or barn, like a well-mannered hen, stole off under a
wood-pile, and was not seen for three weeks, when she made her
appearance with a fine brood of chickens. To keep her from straying away
again, she was put into a coop. For several days, she was a good mother
to her children; but, after a week or so, she began to act very
strangely, and, when her children came near her, she would peck and
abuse them.
Would you believe it, children? in one day, this unmotherly hen had
pecked all but one of her chickens to death; and, when Aunt Jane found
this poor chap, he had but one eye, and all the toes were gone from one
foot; so that he had to stand on the other. At first, Aunt Jane thought
it would be a mercy to kill the little fellow, and put him out of pain;
but she finally determined that she would try to cure him.
So she took him into the kitchen, and made him quite comfortable in a
box half filled with cotton-batting, and placed near the stove. She gave
him cracked-corn to eat, and plenty of water to drink, and, after a
while, he got so strong, that he hopped out of the box, and was just as
jolly a chicken as he could be, with only one eye to see with, and only
one foot and the stump of another to walk on.
Still he would not go out and play with other chickens of his age, but
persisted in hanging around the kitchen. One morning, when Aunt Jane
went into the breakfast-room, she found him on the table, helping
himself from a dish of stewed potatoes. Such impudence could no longer
be tolerated: so the saucy little cripple was banished to the barnyard
to learn manners.
And what do you think became of the unmotherly hen? She lost all her
friends. She was despised and hated by everybody on the farm. She was
pointed at as "that cruel, speckled hen," until life became a burden to
her. She was not permitted to have any more chickens. When the cold
weather came, she was sent to a poor woman for a thanksgiving dinner;
and it is to be hoped that all the hens in the barnyard took warning
from her fate.
C.R.W.
LANSINGBURGH. N.Y.
[Illustration: Outline Drawing by MR. HARRISON WEIR, as a drawing
lesson.]