“You know very well what I mean,” said the Brown Hen. “I like the changes that I like, of course. Any fowl does. What I do not like is the changes that I don’t like.” She said this in a dignified and truly Hen-like manner, and then she walked off.
“All I hope,” said the White Cock, sadly, “is that we shall not be shut up in these places during the summer. One cannot tell what may happen. One must expect the worst. When I see the wire front of the scratching-shed, I fear that we shall be kept in.”
“Nonsense!” cried the Shanghai Cock. “Don’t be a Goose. The Man has begun to put a wire fence around a great yard outside, and there will be plenty of room to run there if we are to live here. I do not believe that we shall be shut in, in pleasant weather.”
“Come,” clucked the Barred Plymouth Rock Hen to her brood. “Come with me to the carriage house. It is time all good little Chickens were asleep.”
She was very happy over the pleasant things which she had heard said about the Man. Only a truly polite Hen could have kept from saying “I told you so,” all this time, but she had shut her bill tightly and kept back the words she wanted to say.
You remember that the Shanghai Cock had always liked the Barred Plymouth Rock Hen, and now he thought she should be told how they had come to feel about her friend, the Man. He was not used to saying pleasant things, but having praised the perches made it a little easier for him. You know saying one kind thing always makes it easier to say another. So he ran after her.
“Er-er! I don’t want the Farmer to come back,” he said. Then he thought that did not sound quite right and he tried again. “I’m not sorry he went away. I mean I’m glad that the Man came. All of us are now, except the Gander and the White Cock, and you don’t really care for them, do you?”
He looked at her lovingly with his round eyes, and the wind waved his drooping tail feathers. The Barred Plymouth Rock Hen thought that she had never seen him look so handsome. “I don’t care at all about them,” she replied quite honestly, “and I am glad that you and the others like the Man.”
She said “you” much more loudly than she said “the others,” and the Shanghai Cock must have known what she meant, for he stretched his neck, opened his bill, and gave such a crow as he was never known, before or since, to give at that hour of the day.
The Barred Plymouth Rock Hen went happily to her nest, and stayed awake long after her last Chicken was fast asleep. Even if one is grown-up and the mother of a family, even if one comes of a finer breed than one’s neighbors, he cannot be truly happy without their hearty liking. This Hen felt that she had it at last, and that just by doing the thing which she thought right, but which the other poultry had not liked at all at first. It is often so.