"I felt a newer life in every gale."
Oh, no one can tell, till he has chickens of his own, what delicious emotions are stirred in the heart by their downy, appealing tenderness!
Swarming, however, as the nest seemed, it soon transpired that only seven chickens had transpired. Eight eggs still maintained their integrity. I remarked to the hen, that she would better keep on awhile longer, and I would take the seven into the house, and provide for them. She assented, having, justly enough, all confidence in my sagacity; and I put them into a warm old worsted hood, and brought them into the house. But the hood was not a hen, though it was tucked around them almost to the point of suffocation; and they filled the house with dolorous cries,—"yapping" it is called in the rural districts. Nothing would soothe them but to be cuddled together in somebody's lap, and brooded with somebody's hand. Then their shrill, piercing shrieks would die away into a contented chirp of heartfelt satisfaction. I took a world of comfort in those chickens,—it is so pleasant to feel that you are really making sentient beings happy. The tiny things grew so familiar and fond in a few hours that they could hardly tell which was which,—I or the hen. They would all fall asleep in a soft, stirring lump for five seconds, and then rouse up, with no apparent cause, but as suddenly and simultaneously as if the drum had beat a reveille, and go foraging about in the most enterprising manner. One would snap at a ring, under the impression that it was petrified dough, I suppose; and all the rest would rush up determinedly to secure a share in the prize. Next they would pounce upon a button, evidently thinking it curd; and though they must have concluded, after a while, that it was the hardest kind of coagulated milk on record, they were not restrained from renewing the attack in squads at irregular intervals. When they first broke camp, we put soaked and sweetened cracker into their bills; but they developed such an appetite, that, in view of the high price of sugar, we cut off their allowance, and economized on Indian meal and bread-water. Every night they went to the hen, and every morning they came in to me; and still Dame Partlett sat with stolid patience, and still eight eggs remained. I concluded, at length, to let the eggs take their chance with another hen, and restore the first to freedom and her chickens. But just as I was about to commence operations, some one announced, that, if eggs are inverted during the process of incubation, the chickens from them will be crazy. Appalled at the thought of a brood of chickens laboring under an aberration of mind, yet fired with the love of scientific investigation, I inverted one by way of experiment, and placed it in another nest. The next morning, when I entered the barn, Biddy stretched out her neck, and declared that there was no use in waiting any longer, and she was determined to leave the place, which she accordingly did, discovering, to my surprise, two little dead, crushed, flattened chickens, Poor things! I coaxed them on a shingle, and took them into the house to show to a person whose name has been often mentioned in these pages, and who, in all experimental matters, considers my testimony good for nothing without the strongest corroborative evidence. Notice now the unreasoning obstinacy with which people will cling to their prejudices in the face of the most palpable opposing facts.
"Where did these come from?" I asked.
"Probably the hen trod on them and killed them," he said.
"But there were seven whole eggs remaining, and the insane one was in another nest."
"Well, he supposed some other hen might have laid in the nest after the first had begun to sit. They often did."
"No, for I had counted them every day."
Here, then, was an equation to be produced between fifteen original eggs on one side, and seven whole eggs, seven live chickens, two dead chickens, and another egg on the other. My theory was, that two of the eggs contained twins.
"But no," says Halicarnassus,—"such a thing was never known as two live chickens from one egg.