Dear reader, did you ever wrestle with a hen that had a wild, uncontrollable desire to incubate? Did you ever struggle on, day after day, trying to convince her that her mission was to furnish eggs for your table instead of hovering all day on a door knob, trying to hatch out a litter of front doors?
William II. Root, of this place, who has made the hen a study, both in her home life and while lying in the embrace of death, has struck upon an argument which the average hen will pay more attention to than any other he has discovered in his researches.
He says the modern hen ignores almost everything when she once gets the notion that she has received a call to incubate. You can deluge her with the garden hose, or throw old umbrellas at her, or change her nest, but that don't count with the firm and stubborn hen. You can take the eggs out of the nest and put a blooded bull-dog or a nest of new-laid bumblebees in place of them, and she will hover over them as assiduously as she did before.
William H. Root's hen had shown some signs of this mania, so he took out the eggs and let her try her incubate on a horse rake awhile, just so she could kind of taper off gradual and not have her mind shattered. Then he tried her at hatching out four-tined forks, and at last her taste got so vitiated that she took the contract to furnish the country with bustles by hatching out an old hoop skirt that had gone to seed.
Mr. Boot then made an experiment. We were one of a board of scientists who assisted in the consultation. The owner of the hen got a strip of red flannel and tied it around her tail.
The hen seemed annoyed as soon as she discovered it, No hen cares to have a sash hung on her system that doesn't match her complexion. A seal-brown hen with a red flannel polonaise don't seem to harmonize, and she is aware of it just as much as anybody is.
That hen seemed to have thought of something all at once that had escaped her mind before, and so she went away.
She stepped about nine feet at a lick on the start and gained time as she proceeded. When she bumped her nose against the corner of the stable she changed her mind about her direction. She altered her course a little, but continued her rapid style of movement.
Her eyes began to look wild. She seemed to be losing her reason. She got so pretty soon that she did'nt recognize the faces of her friends. She passed Mr. Root without being able to distinguish him from a total stranger.
These peculiar movements were kept up during the entire afternoon, till the hen got so fatigued that she crawled into a length of old stovepipe, and the committee retired to prepare a report.