"It's an outrage! It isn't fair! We've been cheated!" Henrietta Hen's nearest neighbors clamored. But nobody paid any attention to them.
As for Henrietta, she didn't quite know how to act. She had intended, when she left home, to do a good deal of strutting back and forth in her pen, with now and then a pause to preen herself, to make sure that she looked her best. But somehow she no longer cared to put on grand airs, as of old. She remembered that some of the other hens at the fair had been haughty and proud and had smoothed their feathers, declaring boldly that they expected to win the first prize.
Henrietta had heard it said that fine feathers don't make fine birds. And she knew at last what that meant. It meant that gay clothes and lofty ways and boastful talk were of no account at all.
So Henrietta tried to behave as if nothing unusual had happened. She told her chicks that they were going home that evening, and that she would be glad to be back on the farm again, among plain home-folks.
At last Johnnie Green and his father came to load Henrietta and her family into the wagon.
"Well," said the old horse Ebenezer to Henrietta. "Did you enjoy the races?"
"I didn't have a chance to see them," she replied.
"That's a pity," he told her. And then he asked her, "What's that blue tag hanging from your pen?"
"That—" said Henrietta—"that means that my chicks won the first prize."
"She helped win it herself," cried old dog Spot, who was yelping about the wagon. "Our little speckled hen was the best hen at the fair!"