The prices for chickens ranged from $12 or $15 a pair, to $25 or $30, and often $40 to $50, a pair. These rates were always willingly and freely paid, and the stock was, after a while, disseminated throughout the entire valley of the Mississippi; where the China fowls always did better than in our own climate.
It proved an expensive business to some of these gentlemen, most emphatically. But they always paid cheerfully, promptly, and liberally; and knew the Yankees they were dealing with, a good deal better than many of the sharpers supposed they did. For myself, I shall not permit this opportunity to pass without expressing my thanks to my numerous and generous Southern patrons, to whom I sent a great many hundred pairs of what were deemed "good birds," and to whom I am indebted, largely, for the trade I enjoyed for upwards of five years. I sincerely hope they made more money out of all this than I did; and I trust that their substance, as well as "their shadows, may never be less."
During this year, and far into 1854, the current of trade turned towards Great Britain; and John Bull was not very slow to appreciate the rare qualities of my "magnificent" and "extraordinary" birds; "the like of which," said a London journal, when the Queen's fowls first arrived, "was never before seen in England."
For upwards of a year, I had all this trade in my own way. Subsequently, some of the smaller dealers sent out a few pairs to London, but "the people" there could never be brought to believe those fowls were anything but mongrels; and, while these interlopers contrived to murder the trade there, they at the same time "cut off their own noses," for the future, with those who knew what poultry was, upon the other side of the Atlantic.
I had my shy at the Britons, seasonably!
But, a few months afterwards (as I shall show in a future chapter), through the mismanagement of an ambitious dealer in other fancy live-stock, the trade with England, from this side of the water, was completely ruined. Over two hundred American fowls were thrown suddenly upon the London market, and were finally sold there, at auction, for a very small sum; and we were subsequently unable (with all our chicken-eloquence) to make John Bull believe that even the Grey Shanghaes were any longer "scarce" with us, here!
CHAPTER XXV.
THE GREAT PAGODA HEN.
The most ridiculous and fulsome advertisements now occupied the columns of certain so-called agricultural papers in this country, particularly one or two of these sheets in New York State.