Bill Nye's Cordwood

by Bill Nye

I thought that as soon as the hen got here and got her things off and got rested she would proceed to lay some of these here high-priced eggs which we read of in the Poultry-Keepers' Guide and American Eggist. But she seemed pensive, and when I tried to get acquainted with her she would cluck in a croupy tone of voice and go away.

The rooster was no doubt a fine-looking brute when he was shipped, but when he got here he strolled around with a preoccupied air and seemed to feel above us. He was a poker-dot rooster, with gray mane and tail, and he was no doubt refined, but I did not think he should feel above his business, for we are only plain people who are accustomed to the self-made American hen. He seemed bored all the time, and I could see by the way he acted that he pined to be back in Fremont, O., having his picture taken for the Poultry-Keepers' Guide and American Eggist. He still yearned for approbation. He was used to being made of, as your mother says, and it galled him to enter into our plain, humdrum home life.

I never saw such a haughty rooster in my life. Actually, when I got out to feed him in the morning he would give me a cold, arrogant look that hurt my feelings. I know I'm not what you would call an educated man nor a polished man, though I claim to have a son that is both of said things, but I hate to have a rooster crow over me because he has had better advantages and better breeding than I have. So there was no love lost between us, as you can see.

Directly I noticed that the hen began to have spells of vertigo. She would be standing in a corner of the hen retreat, reverting to her joyous childhood at Fremont, O., when all at once she would "fall senseless to the earth and there lie prone upon the sward," to use the words of a great writer whose address has been mislaid. She would remain in this comytoes condition for between five minutes, perhaps. Then she would rally a little, slowly pry open her large, mournful eyes, and seem to murmur "Where am I?"

I could see that she was evading the egg issue in every way and ignoring the great object for which she was created. With the ability to lay eggs worth from $4 to $5.75 per dozen delivered on the cars, I could plainly see that she proposed to roll up this great talent in a napkin and play the invalid act. I do not disguise the fact, Henry, that I was mad. I made a large rectangular affidavit in the inner temple of the horse-barn that this poker-dot hen should never live to say that I had sent her to the seashore for her health when she was eminently fitted by nature to please the public with her lay.

I therefore gave her two weeks to decide on whether she would contribute a few of her meritorious articles or insert herself into a chicken pie.

She still continued haughty to the last moment. So did her pardner. We therefore treated ourselves to a $9 dinner in April.

I then got some expensive eggs from the effete east. They were not robust eggs. They were layed during a time of great depression, I judge. So they were that way themselves also. They came by express, and were injured while being transferred at Chicago. No one has travelled over that line of railroad since.

I do not say that the eggs were bad, but I say that their instincts and their inner life wasn't what they ort to have been.

In early May I bought one of these inkybaters that does the work of ten setting hens. I hoped to head off the hen so far as possible, simply purchasing her literary efforts and editing them to suit myself. I cannot endure the society of a low-bred hen, and a refined hen seems to look down on me, and so I thought if I could get one of those ottymatic inkybaters I could have the whole process under my own control, and if the blooded hens wanted to go to the sanitarium and sit around there with their hands in their pockets while the great hungry world of traffic clamored for more spring chickens fried in butter they might do so and be doggoned.