“Do I know?” said he, pausing to loosen some mud from one of his feet (he did not understand the feelings of a mother, or he would have answered at once). “I saw the Man bring a basketful of Chickens over this way a while ago. He got them from the cellar. The door was open and I stood on it. Of course I was not hanging around to find out what he was doing. I simply happened to be there, you understand.”
“Yes, we understand all about it,” said the Hens, who knew the White Cock as well as anybody.
“I happened to be there,” he repeated, “and I saw the Man take the Chickens out of the fat table. There was no Hen in sight. It must be a machine for hatching Chickens. I think it is dreadful if the Chickens on this farm have to be hatched in a cellar, without Hens. Everything is going wrong since the Farmer left.”
The Barred Plymouth Rock Hen and her caller looked at each other without speaking. They remembered hearing the White Cock talk in that way before the Farmer left. He was one of those fowls who are always discontented.
“I am going back to my nest,” said the visiting Hen. “Perhaps the Man will bring me some Chickens too.”
The Barred Plymouth Rock Hen sat on her nest in the carriage house, eating and drinking when she wished, and cuddling her children under her feathers. She was very happy, and thought it a beautiful world. “I would rather have had them gray,” she said to herself, “but if they couldn’t be gray, I prefer white. They are certainly Plymouth Rock Chickens anyway, and the color does not matter, if they are good.”
She stood up carefully and took a long look at her family. “I couldn’t have hatched out a better brood myself,” she said. “It is a queer thing for tables to take to hatching Chickens, but if that is the way it is to be done on this farm, it will save me a great deal of time and be a good thing for my legs. It is lucky that this Man came here. The Farmer who left would never have thought of making a table sit on eggs and hatch them.”
