To his great joy, Charlie found, on inspection, that his grafts were not all destroyed. With the best intention in the world to do mischief, Ben, Jr., had not accomplished his intent. The clay had baked so hard around the scions, that he had broken part of them off, leaving a couple of buds; for Charlie had put one bud into the cleft of each stock, and they were coming through the clay.
“I don’t care a cent’s worth,” cried he, when he saw this; “in two years I can get scions from these.”
He found that the pears and cherries that had escaped Ben’s notice had most of them taken, and were starting finely.
You seldom find boys who have more to occupy their attention and take up their time than Charlie had. He had wintered eight ducks and a drake, and young ducks were everywhere, for he had kept the old ducks laying, and set the eggs under hens. He had fifty hens (for there was corn enough on Elm Island now), and troops of chickens. He also had four mongrel geese, the offspring of the wild gander and the tame goose, and six rabbits. He was raising two calves, intending to have a yoke of oxen, and there were two cosset lambs; one of the mother sheep had got cut off by the tide under the rocks on Griffin’s Island, and drowned; the other was mired, and the eagles had picked out her eyes. He had taught these cossets to drink cow’s milk. Ben, Jr., who was as bright and smart as he was mischievous, attended to feeding them, and they would follow him all around the premises; but even this was not all. Uncle Isaac, in building fence that spring, had found a partridge nest, with fifteen eggs; as the parent had not begun to sit on them, he brought them over to Charlie, well knowing his fondness for pets.
“If you can tame them when they hatch,” said he, “you will do what was never done before.”
The day before, little Ben had come upon a hen that had stolen her nest in the edge of the woods, and was just beginning to sit. He came into the house full of the matter to his mother, who, taking the hen from the nest, put her under a tub to break her from wanting to sit. As there was no other hen that wanted to sit, Charlie put the partridge eggs in the same nest, and put the hen on them, as he was afraid she would leave them if he put them in a new place: he intended to keep watch of her, and as soon as the eggs were pipped, to take the mother and young into the barn.
Whenever Charlie had a little leisure amid his numerous avocations, he enjoyed a great deal in watching the proceedings of his large family, commonly as they retired for the night, as he was generally about the barn, and more at leisure then.
Although Charlie is now verging on early manhood, resolute to grapple with danger, and yielding to no difficulties, yet he was peculiarly boyish in his tastes; this tendency, in part native, had been fostered by his isolated position, which compelled him to find enjoyment in different sources from boys in general; his pets were his companions. It is a great mistake to suppose that roughness is an attribute of courage. It was Nelson who said, as he was dying, to his comrade through whole days of bloodshed, “Kiss me, Hardy.”
Charlie had more moral and physical courage than Pete Clash, though he had never lost his childish innocence. He loved to see the hens calling their chickens together for the night, and collecting them under their wings, to see their little heads sticking out from under their mothers’ breasts, and chirping, as though saying, “Mother, it ain’t night yet; it ain’t time to go to bed;” or in another case, where the chickens had outgrown their swaddling-clothes, two of them roosting on their mother’s back. He also noticed the contrast between the hens, as they went to roost, and the swallows, whose nests were hung to the rafters and purlins, just above the high beams, on which they roosted. The hens seemed inspired with the very spirit of discord the moment the hour of retiring arrived. Madame Ebony, rejoicing in the dignity of age, and a grandmother, was shocked that a yellow-legged, last year’s late chick, that had not yet laid a litter of eggs, and those she had laid not but a trifle larger than potato balls, should presume to roost next to her, and began picking at her to drive her off the perch, while Mrs. Yellowlegs exclaimed, “I’m a married woman! I’m as good as you are any day in the year! I’ll call my husband!”
In the midst of this brawl, the white rooster, who prefers to do all the fighting himself, flies up, and knocks them both down into the barn floor, when every hen in the barn screams out at the top of her voice, “Served them right!”