"Oh, that doesn't make any difference to those cursed chickens," he replied bitterly. "They would just as soon crow in the middle of the night as at any other time—sooner, if they thought it would spoil a chap's evening out. I believe they do it on purpose."
He said a friend of his, the ghost of a man who had killed a water- rate collector, used to haunt a house in Long Acre, where they kept fowls in the cellar, and every time a policeman went by and flashed his bull's-eye down the grating, the old cock there would fancy it was the sun, and start crowing like mad; when, of course, the poor ghost had to dissolve, and it would, in consequence, get back home sometimes as early as one o'clock in the morning, swearing fearfully because it had only been out for an hour.
I agreed that it seemed very unfair.
"Oh, it's an absurd arrangement altogether," he continued, quite angrily. "I can't imagine what our old man could have been thinking of when he made it. As I have said to him, over and over again, 'Have a fixed time, and let everybody stick to it—say four o'clock in summer, and six in winter. Then one would know what one was about.'"
"How do you manage when there isn't any cock handy?" I inquired.
He was on the point of replying, when again he started and listened. This time I distinctly heard Mr. Bowles's cock, next door, crow twice.
"There you are," he said, rising and reaching for his hat; "that's the sort of thing we have to put up with. What IS the time?"
I looked at my watch, and found it was half-past three.
"I thought as much," he muttered. "I'll wring that blessed bird's neck if I get hold of it." And he prepared to go.
"If you can wait half a minute," I said, getting out of bed, "I'll go a bit of the way with you."