"One word, one word!" insisted the chairman.
"I can't!" said Daniel.
But they were importunate and unyielding, that enthusiastic committee.
"Gentlemen!" said the honorable senator, at last, amid the din. "Ladies and gentlemen!" he continued, as a monster upon feathered stilts, at his elbow, shrieked out an unearthly crow, that drowned the sound of his voice instanter,—"Ladies and gentlemen, really—I—would—but the noise and confusion is so great, that I cannot be heard!"—and a roar followed this capital hit, that drowned, for the moment, at least, even the rattling, crashing, bellowing, squeaking music of the feathered bipeds around him.
The exhibition lasted three days. Unheard-of prices were asked, and readily paid, for all sorts of fowls; most of those sold being mongrels, however. As high as thirteen dollars was paid by one man (who soon afterwards became an inmate of a lunatic asylum) for a single pair of domestic fowls. It was monstrous, ridiculous, outrageous, exclaimed every one, when this fact—the absolute paying down of thirteen round dollars, then the price of two barrels of good wheat flour—was announced as having been squandered for a single pair of chickens.
I sold some fowls at that show. I didn't buy any there, I believe.
The receipts at the gates paid the expenses of the exhibition, and left a small surplus in the hands of somebody,—I never knew who,—but who took good care of the money, I have not a doubt; as most of the officers at that time were, like myself, "poor, but honest."
By the time this fair closed, the pulse of the "dear people" had come to be rather rapid in its throbs, and the fever was evidently on the increase. Fowls were in demand. Not good ones, because nothing was then said by the anxious would-be purchasers about quality. Nobody had got so far as that, then. They wanted fowls only,—hens and cocks,—to which they themselves gave a name.
Some fancied one breed, or variety, and some another; but anything that sported feathers,—from the diminutive Bantam to the stork-shaped Chinaman,—everything was being sought after by "amateurs" and "fanciers" with a zest, and a readiness to pay for, that did honor to the zeal of the youthful buyers, and a world of good to the hearts of the quiet breeders and sellers, who began first to get posted up, and inured to the disease.
I was an humble and modest member of this latter class. I kept and raised only pure breeds of fowls.