But I have a far darker tale to tell. There lived in a neat little house on a lawn a gold and red bantam cock with two golden brown hens. The darker was his favourite wife, but the three lived harmoniously, and the hens laid an egg daily.
Fifteen of these eggs were hatched out under a common barn-door fowl. She had no breeding and no tail; her colour was an undertone of black, irregularly sprinked with grey. She was cooped with the chickens about a hundred yards from the bantams, and screened from them by a shrubbery.
About this time the favourite bantam hen found an attractive heap of faggots: thither she repaired daily to lay an egg. When she had laid a dozen she sat down to hatch them. She had chosen her place well, for her golden brown feathers showed hardly at all against the wrinkled, russet leaves.
While she sat peacefully hidden the cock had heard the hen and chickens call; and, strolling to the other side of the shrubbery, discovered his fifteen children with their foster-mother. Thenceforward, from morning till night, he squatted near the coop, leaving the little favourite wife in her æsthetic bower, and the paler little wife to her own neat house.
It might be thought that paternal instinct kept him there, the joy of seeing his young family grow daily more like their mothers and himself; the dawning hope of the time when he should scratch for the young hens and pull the tail feathers out of the little cocks.
Not so; he was enchained by the attractions of that large, common, tailless fowl. Doubtless he thought her a fine large hen; so she was, quite four times his size. Perhaps he admired her figure, and thought her colouring a unique beauty.
Certain it is that just when the little hen was leading out a tiny family, the bantam cock, deserting his two wives and his twenty-seven children, fled with the common hen into the woods.
There they lived in a wild and wicked romance. People passing through the wood at evening might see a very small gold cock and a very large speckled hen sitting side by side on the branch of a tree; or in the morning might catch sight of the pair digging for a precarious livelihood in the grass at the covert edge; glancing round with guilty eyes and fleeing for safety into the bushes.
At last disillusionment came; it was sure to come. The cock went home.