As good or ill luck would have it, Harry had a half-holiday, and proposed gallantly to escort his mother round the offices, offering her his arm for the purpose. The two proceeded, chatting easily, the best of friends, past the kitchen garden, the paddock where the Guernsey cow and her calf fed, the shed where the pony phaeton stood, and the stable which held the curate’s cob, and his wife and Harry’s ponies. The pair came in course of time opposite the door of the well-ordered hen-house, or the hennery, as some ladies of Mrs. Bloomfield’s acquaintance, ambitious of euphemism, preferred to term it. There was an unusual commotion about the place; the door, with its crescent hole for hens to enter or issue at pleasure, had been forced ajar, and at the very moment when Mrs. Bloomfield and her son appeared on the scene it was driven still more violently open. There rushed out a loudly protesting, terrified hen-mother, with all her black feathers ruffled, and some of them half pulled out, hanging by the tips of the pens. Behind her tore along Flora, not subdued and decorous, as we have seen her, but inflamed with riot and in hot pursuit. Her jaws were dripping yellow with the yolks of eggs, to which was added, in horrid significance, a fringe of the fluffy down which is the covering of recently hatched chickens.
The sight struck Mrs. Bloomfield and Harry dumb. She had too much feeling for her son, as the master of Flora, to say a word to him at first. He could not bring forward a syllable in defence of the dog, caught red-handed, or yellow and feathery jawed—which came to the same thing—in this instance.
Though Mrs. Bloomfield said nothing, she let her hand, which had been resting lightly on Harry’s jacket sleeve, tighten its grasp. Thus she marched the boy to the house. Flora, who had taken guilt to herself, stopped short in her headlong career, let the plundered and insulted hen go, and slunk at a safe distance after the mother and son to the parsonage.
“Now, Harry, what have you to say for yourself and that brute of yours?” asked Mrs. Bloomfield, in the tone of a righteous and relentless judge.
“I had nothing to do with it, mother,” cried Harry in desperation; “and Flo is only a dog.”
“Flo is only a dog,” echoed his mother severely; “and those who should know better, and keep her to the injury of poor helpless fowls, and the destruction of as fine a brood of chickens as cook ever set, have the more to answer for. Harry, Flora goes this very night.”
“Mother, it is the first time,” pled Harry faintly.
“The first and the last,” said his mother. “I have heard that a taste for eggs, not to say chickens, is never eradicated in a dog.”
“Oh no, mother, you are wrong there,” cried Harry eagerly. “Tom Cartright’s Juno was as destructive a beast to turkeys and geese, even to lambs, when he was half-grown——”