We hasten to assure the reader that we don't mean that kind of "chicken" at all. In the first place, we don't know anything about them. We are too virtuous—also too poor. It is true that occasionally, when forced by our professional duties to investigate the night-life of great cities, we have seen poultry of this sort gaily cavorting about and—but we are growing prolix. Let it suffice to state that this article is written about the sort of chicken that goes garbed in feathers—hen feathers, we mean, not ostrich plumes.
It is really extraordinary how many people in town keep chickens. The love of things rural seems to die hard in the urban breast. Unable to go out in the early dawn and chew straws while he gazes placidly at his hay field or his hog lot, the city man keeps hens.
First of all he purchases a whole library of hen literature. He discovers that there are about seven hundred breeds, and that each one is ideal for his purposes. Finally he buys four hens and a rooster which can trace back their ancestry through two hundred generations or more of aristocratic hendom. No common pullets for the city man who is going in for poultry—nothing but the real blue bloods at about forty dollars apiece.
He has previously built a strictly up-to-date hen-house—steam heat, hot and cold water, nursery, tiled bathroom, maid's quarters, and all the rest. If he is a very kind-hearted man, he may even put in a gramophone and hang comic pictures on the walls. They say it is very important that hens should be kept in a cheerful state of mind. Personally, we have always had our doubts about a chicken having any mind at all. But that's what the books say, and who are we that we should venture to dispute with a book?
Of course, these chickens don't lay. Purse-proud and aristocratic chickens of this sort never do. They have no incentive. Why should they go to the trouble of laying eggs and having a family when they can get everything a hen's heart desires without it? Besides, the late hours they keep tend to a low birth-rate.
The Downer, however, gets it into his poor numb noodle that the food isn't right. He starts experimenting, and once you start experimenting with hen-feed you are headed for bankruptcy and the bug-buggy. The only thing that saves you is that the chickens die in time—chickens that are fed everything from canary seed to lobster and champagne are apt to die young.
Is the owner discouraged?—usually, no. Ten to one he goes out and buys another half dozen members of the poultry peerage. The only difference is that this time he gets a different family, Brown Leghorns instead of Black Minorcas, for instance. But the result is always the same.
Occasionally, of course, a hen will forget herself and the social exigencies of city life and will lay an egg. Now and then they are even known to have a chicken—in extreme cases, two or three. But families of this unfashionable size are extremely rare. At a moderate estimate—allowing only a reasonable interest on capital invested, the house, hens, food, etc.—the eggs cost three dollars and a half each, and the baby chickens six and a quarter. But every time one arrives the proud owner goes about for days telling all his friends what a convenience and economy it is to grow your own eggs and spring chickens right there on the premises.
There is something pathetic about the way the moral character of chickens deteriorates in town. We have often wondered, in fact, why the parsons do not draw stern ethical lessons for their sermons from the way decent, well-behaved country chickens take to evil courses in large cities.
Time and time again we have seen innocent and energetic young roosters from the farm come into our neighborhood—rather a respectable neighborhood, too, as neighborhoods go—nice, young roosters of good habits, who always got up at the proper time in the morning and went to bed early o'nights and crowed with fidelity and discretion.