Hens are not intrinsically handsome, but they abundantly prove the truth of the old adage, "Handsome is that handsome does." Lord Kaimes describes one kind of beauty as that founded on the relations of objects. And I am sure that the relation of a hen to a dozen fair, white, pure eggs, and the relation of those eggs to puddings and custards, and the twenty-five cents which they can have for the asking, make even an ungainly hen, like many heroines in novels, "not beautiful, but very interesting." "Twenty thousand dollars," said a connoisseur in such matters, "is a handsome feature in any lady's face." And the "cut-cut-cut-ca-D-A-H-cut" of a hen, whose word is as good as her bond for an egg a day, is a handsome feather in any bird's coat. Once, however, this trumpet of victory deceived me, though by no fault of the hen's. I heard it sounding lustily, and I ransacked the barn on tiptoe to discover the new-made nest and the exultant mater-familias. But instead of a white old hen with yellow legs, who had laid her master many eggs, there, on a barrel, stood brave Chanticleer, cackling away for dear life,—Hercules holding the distaff among his Omphales! Now—for there are many things to be learned from hens—mark the injustice of the tyrant man. From time immemorial, girls—at least country girls—have been taught that
"A whistling girl and a crowing hen
Always come to some bad end";
but not a word is said about a cackling rooster! Worse still, a crowing hen is so rare a thing that its very existence is problematical. I never heard of one out of that couplet. I have made diligent inquiry, but I have not been able to find any person who had heard, or who had ever seen or heard of any one who had heard, a crowing hen. But these very hands have fed, these very eyes seen, and these ears heard a cackling rooster! Where is manly impartiality, not to say chivalry? Why do men overlook the crying sins of their own sex, and expend all their energies in attempting to eradicate sins which never existed in the other?
I have lived among hens lately, and I know all about them. They are just like people. Not a few only, but the whole human race, are chicken-hearted.
Hens are fond of little mysteries. With tons of hay at their disposal, they will steal a nest in a discarded feeding-trough. With nobody in the world to harbor an evil thought against them, they will hide under the corn-stalks as carefully as if a sheriff were on their track. They will not go to their nests while you are about, but tarry midway and meditate profoundly on fixed fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute, till you are tired of watching and waiting, and withdraw. No, you did not know it all before. The world is in a state of Cimmerian darkness regarding hens. There were never any chickens hatched till three weeks from a week before Fast Day. How should you, my readers, know anything about them? Be docile, and I will enlighten you.
Hens must have a depression where the bump of locality should be, for they have no manner of tenderness for old haunts. "Where are the birds in last year's nests?" queries the poet; but he might have asked quite as pertinently, "Where are the birds in last month's nests?" Echo, if she were at all familiar with the subject, would reply, "The birds are all right, but where are the nests?" Hens very sensibly decide that it is easier to build a new house than to keep the old one in order; and having laid one round of eggs, off they go to erect, or rather to excavate, another dwelling. You have scarcely learned the way to their nook above the great beam when it is abandoned, and they betake themselves to a hole at the very bottom of the haystack. I wish I could tell you a story about a Hebrew prophet crawling under a barn after hen's eggs, and crawling out again from the musty darkness into sweet light with his clothes full of cobwebs, his eyes full of dust, his hands full of eggs, to find himself winking and blinking in the midst of a party of ladies and gentlemen who had come lion-hunting from a farre countrie. I cannot tell you, because it would be a breach of confidence; but I am going to edit my Sheikh's Life and Letters, if I live long enough, and he does not live too long, and then you shall have the whole story, with names, dates, and costumes.
Another very singular habit hens have, of dusting themselves. They do not seem to care for bathing, like canary-birds; but in warm afternoons, when they have eaten their fill, they like to stroll into the highway, where the dust lies ankle-deep in heaps and ridges, and settle down and stir and burrow in it till it has penetrated through all their inmost feathers, and so filled them, that, when they arise and shake themselves, they stand in a cloud of dust. I do not like this habit in the hens; yet I observe how a correspondence exists in all the Vertebrata; for do not fine ladies similarly dust themselves? They do not, indeed, sit in the road à la Turque. They box up the dust, and take it to their dressing-rooms, and, because Nature has not provided them with feathers, ingenuity more than supplies the deficiency with the softest of white down brushes, that harbor and convey the coveted dust. I doubt not through the races one resembling purpose runs; and many a stately matron and many a lovely maiden might truly say unto the hen, "Thou art my sister."
Did I say I knew all about hens? The half was not told you, for I am wise about chickens too. I know their tribe from "egg to bird," as the country people say, when they wish to express the most radical, sweeping acquaintance with any subject,—a phrase, by the way, whose felicity is hardly to be comprehended till experience has unfolded its meaning.
When hens have laid a certain number of eggs,—twelve or twenty,—they evince a strong disposition, I might almost say a determination, to sit.[D] In every such case, it is plain that they ought to be allowed to sit. It is a violation of Nature to souse them in cold water in order to make them change their minds; and I believe, with Marcus Antoninus, that nothing is evil which is according to Nature. But people want eggs, and they do not care for Nature; and the consequence is, that hens are obliged to undergo "heroic treatment" of various kinds. Sometimes it is the cold bath; sometimes it is the hospital. One I tied to the bottom of a post of the standards; but, eager to escape, and ignorant of the qualities of cord, she flew up over the top rail, and, the next time I entered the barn, presented the unpleasing spectacle of a dignified and deliberate fowl hanging in mid-air by one leg. Greatly alarmed, I hurried her down. Life was not extinct, except in that leg. I rubbed it tenderly till warmth was restored, and then it grew so hot that I feared inflammation would set in, and made local applications to reduce the tendency, wondering in my own mind whether, in case worse should come to worst, she could get on at all with a Palmer leg. The next morning the question became unnecessary, as she walked quite well with her own. The remaining hens were put in hospital till they signified a willingness to resume their former profitable habits,—except one who was arbitrarily chosen to be foster-mother of the future brood. Fifteen eggs, fair and fresh, reserved for the purpose, I counted out and put into her nest; and there she sat day after day and all day long, with a quietness, a silent, patient persistence, which I admired, but could not in the least imitate; for I kept continually poking under her and prying her up to see how matters stood. Many hens would have resented so much interference, but she knew it was sympathy, and not malice; besides, she was very good-natured, and so was I, and we stood on the best possible footing towards each other. A. G. says, "A hen's time is not much to her"; and in this case his opinion was certainly correct.
One morning I thought I heard a faint noise. Routing out the good old creature, that I might take observations, eggs still, and no chickens, were discernible, but the tiniest, little, silvery, sunny-hearted chirp that you ever heard, inside the eggs, and a little, tender pecking from every imprisoned chick, standing at his crystal door, and, with his faint, fairy knock, knock, knock, craving admission into the great world. Never can I forget or describe the sensations of that moment; and, as promise rapidly culminated in performance,—as the eggs ceased to be eggs, and analyzed themselves into shattered shells and chirping chickens,—it seemed as if I had been transported back to the beginning of creation. Right before my eyes I saw, in my hands I held, the mystery of life. These eggs, that had been laid under my very eyes as it were, that I had my own self hunted and found and confiscated and restored,—these eggs that I had broken and eaten a thousand times, and learned of a surety to be nothing but eggs,—were before me now; and, lo, they were eyes and feathers and bill and claws! Yes, little puff-ball, I saw you when you were hard and cold and had no more life than a Lima bean. I might have scrambled you, or boiled you, or made a pasch-egg of you, and you would not have known that anything was happening. If you had been cooked then, you would have been only an omelet; now you may be a fricassee. As I looked at the nest, so lately full only of white quiet, now swarming with downy life, and vocal with low, soft music,