To personal fear, as I have intimated, the hen-mother is a stranger; but her power is not always equal to her pluck. One week ago this very day,—ah, me! this very hour,—the cat ran by the window with a chicken in her mouth. Cats are a separate feature in country establishments. In the city I have understood them to lead a nomadic, disturbed, and somewhat shabby life. In the country they attach themselves to special localities and prey upon the human race. We have three steady and several occasional cats quartered upon us. One was retained for the name of the thing,—called derivatively Maltesa, and Molly "for short." One was adopted for charity,—a hideous, saffron-hued, forlorn little wretch, left behind by a Milesian family, called, from its color, Aurora, contracted into Rory O'More. The third was a fierce black-and-white unnamed wild creature, of whom one never got more than a glimpse in her savage flight. Cats are tolerated here from a tradition that they catch rats and mice, but they don't. We catch the mice ourselves and put them in a barrel, and put a cat in after them; and then she is frightened out of her wits. As for rats, they will gather wherever corn and potatoes congregate, cats or no cats. It is said in the country, that, if you write a polite letter to rats, asking them to go away, they will go. I received my information from one who had tried the experiment, or known it to be tried, with great success. Standing ready always to write a letter on the slightest provocation, you may be sure I did not neglect so good an opportunity. The letter acknowledged their skill and sagacity, applauded their valor and their perseverance, but stated, that, in the present scarcity of labor, the resident family were not able to provide more supplies than were necessary for their own immediate use and for that of our brave soldiers, and they must therefore beg the Messrs. Rats to leave their country for their country's good. It was laid on the potato-chest, and I have never seen a rat since!
While I have been penning this quadrupedic episode, you may imagine Molly, formerly Maltesa, as Kinglake would say, bearing off the chicken in triumph to her domicile. But the alarm is given, and the whole plantation turns out to rescue the victim or perish in the attempt. Molly takes refuge in a sleigh, but is ignominiously ejected. She rushes per saltum under the corn-barn, and defies us all to follow her. But she does not know that in a contest strategy may be an overmatch for swiftness. She is familiar with the sheltering power of the elevated corn-barn, but she never conjectures to what base uses a clothes-pole may come, until one plunges into her sides. As she is not a St. Médard Convulsionist, she does not like it, but strikes a bee-line for the piazza, and rushes through the lattice-work into the darkness underneath. We stoop to conquer, and she hurls Greek fire at us from her wrathful eyes, but cannot stand against a reinforcement of poles which vex her soul. With teeth still fastened upon her now unconscious victim, she leaves her place of refuge, which indeed was no refuge for her, and gallops through the yard and across the field; but an unseen column has flanked her, and she turns back only to fall into the hands of the main army,—too late, alas! for the tender chick, who has picked his last worm and will never chirp again. But his death is speedily avenged. Within the space of three days, Molly, formerly Maltesa, is taken into custody, tried, convicted, sentenced, remanded to prison in an old wagon-box, and transported to Botany Bay, greatly to the delight of Rory O'More, formerly Aurora, who, in the presence of her overgrown contemporary, was never suffered to call her soul her own, much less a bone or a crust. Indeed, Molly never seemed half so anxious to eat, herself, as she was to bind Rory to total abstinence. When a plate was set for them, the preliminary ceremony was invariably a box on the ear for poor Rory, or a grab on the neck, from Molly's spasmodic paw, which would not release its hold till armed intervention set in and enforced a growling neutrality. In short, like the hens, these cats held up a mirror to human nature. They showed what men and women would be, if they were—cats; which they would be, if a few modifying qualities were left out. They exhibit selfishness and greed in their pure forms, and we see and ought to shun the unlovely shapes. Evil propensities may be hidden by a silver veil, but they are none the less evil and bring forth evil fruit. Let cats delight to snarl and bite, but let men and women be generous and beneficent.
Little chickens, tender and winsome as they are, early discover the same disposition. When one of them comes into possession of the fore-quarter of a fly, he does not share it with his brother. He does not even quietly swallow it himself. He clutches it in his bill and flies around in circles and irregular polygons, like one distracted, trying to find a corner where he can gormandize alone. It is no matter that not a single chicken is in pursuit, nor that there is enough and to spare for all. He hears a voice we cannot hear, telling him that the Philistines be upon him. And every chicken snatches his morsel and radiates from every other as fast as his little legs can carry him. His selfishness overpowers his sense,—which is, indeed, not a very signal victory, for his selfishness is very strong and his sense is very weak. It is no wonder that Hopeful was well-nigh moved to anger, and queried, "Why art thou so tart, my brother?" when Christian said to him, "Thou talkest like one upon whose head is the shell to this very day." To be compared to a chicken is disparaging enough; but to be compared to a chicken so very young that he has not yet quite divested himself of his shell must be, as Pet Marjorie would say, "what Nature itself can't endure." A little chicken's greedy crop blinds his eyes to every consideration except that of the insect squirming in his bill. He is beautiful and round and full of cunning ways, but he has no resources for an emergency. He will lose his reckoning and be quite out at sea, though only ten steps from home. He never knows enough to turn a corner. All his intelligence is like light, moving only in straight lines. He is impetuous and timid, and has not the smallest presence of mind or sagacity to discern between friend and foe. He has no confidence in any earthly power that does not reside in an old hen. Her cluck will he follow to the last ditch, and to nothing else will he give heed. I am afraid that the Interpreter was putting almost too fine a point upon it, when he had Christiana and her children "into another room, where was a hen and chickens, and bid them observe awhile. So one of the chickens went to the trough to drink, and every time she drank she lift up her head and her eyes towards heaven. 'See,' said he, 'what this little chick doth, and learn of her to acknowledge whence your mercies come, by receiving them with looking up.'" Doubtless the chick lift her eyes towards heaven, but a close acquaintance with the race would put anything but acknowledgment in the act. A gratitude that thanks Heaven for favors received and then runs into a hole to prevent any other person from sharing the benefit of those favors is a very questionable kind of gratitude, and certainly should be confined to the bipeds that wear feathers.
Yet, if you take away selfishness from a chicken's moral make-up, and fatuity from his intellectual, you have a very charming little creature left. For, apart from their excessive greed, chickens seem to be affectionate. They have sweet social ways. They huddle together with fond caressing chatter, and chirp soft lullabies. Their toilet performances are full of interest. They trim each other's bills with great thoroughness and dexterity, much better indeed than they dress their own heads,—for their bungling, bungling little claws make sad work of it. It is as much as they can do to stand on two feet, and they naturally make several revolutions when they attempt to stand on one. Nothing can be more ludicrous than their early efforts to walk. They do not really walk. They sight their object, waver, balance, decide, and then tumble forward, stopping all in a heap as soon as the original impetus is lost, generally some way ahead of the place to which they wished to go. It is delightful to watch them as drowsiness films their round, bright, black eyes, and the dear old mother croons them under her ample wings, and they nestle in perfect harmony. How they manage to bestow themselves with such limited accommodations, or how they manage to breathe in a room so close, it is difficult to imagine. They certainly deal a staggering blow to our preconceived notions of the necessity of oxygen and ventilation, but they make it easy to see whence the Germans derived their fashion of sleeping under feather-beds. But breathe and bestow themselves they do. The deep mother-heart and the broad mother-wings take them all in. They penetrate her feathers, and open for themselves unseen little doors into the mysterious, brooding, beckoning darkness. But it is long before they can arrange themselves satisfactorily. They chirp, and stir, and snuggle, trying to find the warmest and softest nook. Now an uneasy head is thrust out, and now a whole tiny body, but it soon reënters in another quarter, and at length the stir and chirr grow still. You see only a collection of little legs, as if the hen were a banyan-tree, and presently even they disappear, she settles down comfortably, and all are wrapped in a slumberous silence. And as I sit by the hour, watching their winning ways, and see all the steps of this sleepy subsidence, I can but remember that outburst of love and sorrow from the lips of Him who, though He came to earth from a dwelling-place of ineffable glory, called nothing unclean because it was common, found no homely detail too trivial or too homely to illustrate the Father's love, but from the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, the lilies of the field, the stones in the street, the foxes in their holes, the patch on a coat, the oxen in the furrow, the sheep in the pit, the camel under his burden, drew lessons of divine pity and patience, of heavenly duty and delight. Standing in the presence of the great congregation, seeing, as never man saw, the hypocrisy and the iniquity gathered before Him,—seeing too, alas! the calamities and the woe that awaited this doomed people, a god-like pity overbears His righteous indignation, and cries out in passionate appeal, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!"
The agriculturist says that women take care of young chickens much better than men. I do not know how that may be, but I know that my experiments with chickens have been attended with a success so brilliant that unfortunate poultry-fanciers have appealed to me for assistance. I have even taken ailing chickens from the city to board. A brood of nineteen had rapidly dwindled down to eleven when it was brought to me, one even then dying. His little life ebbed away in a few hours; but of the remaining ten, nine, now in the third week of their abode under my roof, have recovered health, strength, and spirits, and bid fair to live to a good old age, if not prematurely cut off. One of them, more feeble than the others, needed and received especial attention. Him I tended through dreary days of east wind and rain in a box on the mantel-piece, nursing him through a severe attack of asthma, feeding and amusing him through his protracted convalescence, holding him in my hand one whole Sunday afternoon to relieve him of home-sickness and hen-sickness, and being rewarded at last by seeing animation and activity come back to his poor sickly little body. He will never be a robust chicken. He seems to have a permanent distortion of the spine, and his crop is one-sided; and if there is any such thing as blind staggers, he has them. Besides, he has a strong and increasing tendency not to grow. This, however, I reckon a beauty rather than a blemish. It is the one fatal defect in chickens that they grow. With them, youth and beauty are truly inseparable terms. The better they are, the worse they look. After they are three weeks old, every day detracts from their comeliness. They lose their plump roundness, their fascinating, soft down, and put out the most ridiculous little wings and tails and hard-looking feathers, and are no longer dear, tender chicks, but small hens,—a very uninteresting Young America. It is said, that, if you give chickens rum, they will not grow, but retain always their juvenile size and appearance. Under our present laws it is somewhat difficult, I suppose, to obtain rum, and I fear it would be still more difficult to administer it. I have concluded instead to keep some hen sitting through the summer, and so have a regular succession of young chickens. The growth of my little patient was not arrested at a sufficiently early stage to secure his perpetual good looks, and, as I intimated, he will never, probably, be the Windship of his race; but he has found his appetite, he is free from acute disease, he runs about with the rest, under-sized, but bright, happy, and enterprising, and is therefore a well-spring of pleasure. Indeed, in view of the fact that I have unquestionably saved his life, we talk seriously of opening a Hôtel des Invalides, a kind of Chicken's Home, that the benefits which he has received may be extended to all his unfortunate brethren who stand in need.
FOOTNOTES:
[D] I say sit out of regard to the proprieties of the occasion; but I do not expose myself to ridicule by going about among the neighbors and talking of a sitting hen! Everywhere, but in the "Atlantic," hens set.