Tales of a Poultry Farm

by Clara Dillingham Pierson

The Hens who had Chickens were now kept in the second pen from this, and so were quite safe from prowling Weasels and other hunters. In the front pen, you see, there were only full-grown fowls, and morning was a busy time for most of the laying Hens. The gate was not opened until the sun was well up, and by that time many of the Hens had laid in one of the cosy nests under the perches, nests which were so well roofed over that not even a pin-feather could have dropped into them from above. They were so very comfortable that even the Hens who did not lay before leaving the pen were soon glad to come strolling back to it, instead of fluttering and scrambling to some lonely corner of the hayloft in the barn.

On the first morning that the fowls were shut in there, a very queer thing happened. The first Hen to go on a nest exclaimed, “Why, who was here ahead of me?”

Nobody answered, and the Hen asked again.

At last the Speckled Hen said, “I think you are the first one to lay this morning.”

“The first one!” exclaimed the Black Hen, for it was she, as she backed out onto the floor again. “You must not expect me to believe that I am the first when there is an egg in the nest already.” As she spoke she pointed in with her bill, and the others came crowding around.

There lay a fine, large, and quite shiny egg. While they were still looking and wondering which Hen had laid it, the Brown Hen discovered that there was an egg in each of the six other nests. She was so excited that for a minute she could hardly cackle. The Black Hen began to look angry, and stood her feathers on end and shook herself in a way that she had when she was much displeased. She was not a good-natured Hen.

“You think that you are very smart,” she said, “but I think that you are very silly. Every fowl here knows that I always like to be the first on the nest in the morning, and yet seven of you must have laid in the night to get ahead of me. I don’t mind having an egg in the nest. Every Hen likes to find at least one there. It is the mean way in which you tried to prevent my getting ahead of the rest of you.”

The Hens insisted that they never took their feet from the perches all night long, and the Speckled Hen, who was a very kind little person, tried to show the Black Hen that it was all a mistake of some sort. “Perhaps they were laid in there yesterday,” said she, “only we did not notice them when we came in.”

The Cocks kept still, although they looked very knowing. They did not want to offend any of the Hens by taking sides. At last the Brown Hen spoke. It always seemed that she made some trouble every time she opened her bill. “I remember,” said she, “that there was not an egg there when I went to roost last night. The last thing I did before flying up onto my perch was to look in all the nests and try to decide which I preferred.”