Carpentering was far easier after this, yet progress was not what you could call rapid. The ladder was short, and I had to reach up painfully; but I should not mind my arms aching, I informed my companion, if it were not, that, having to look up so, all the splinters and dust and débris that my hammer struck from the old boards marched straight into my eyes.
"You might keep your eyes shut," suggested he.
"But then," I responded, "I could not see how to strike."
"Never mind," said he, tenderly; "you would hit just as well."
"Oh, that way madness lies!"
The upshot of it was, that H. bestirred himself, and turned that barn into a marvel of art. It had been a barn: it became a villa. An immense wooden sarcophagus,—only nobody had ever been deposited in it,—perhaps it was a horse-trough,—he set up "on end," and made a three-story house of it. Fresh, sweet-smelling hay he piled on each floor, and scooped out such attractive little nests that a hen of a domestic turn of mind would go there and lay, just for the fun of it, you might suppose. Then the porticos, and the palisades, and the sliding-doors, and the galleries, and the hospital, and the vistas, and the inner and outer courts, every arrangement that heart of hen could wish, both for seclusion and for society,—why, those fowls might have dreamt they dwelt in marble halls every night of their lives, and not have been very far out of the way. And the summer residences that he made for them,—little Gothic cottages built for a single family, with all the modern conveniences, and a good many more improvised on the spot, and with this signal advantage over similar structures at Newport and Nahant,—that you can take them under your arm, and carry them wherever you please.
Before finally leaving my hen-coop, will a generous public pardon me for recurring to the subject of crowing hens? It may possibly be remembered that in a late number of this magazine I hazarded a doubt as to the existence of any such lusus naturæ. Since that time proof has accumulated upon me from different quarters that crowing hens do exist. But let it be noted that the gist of my remarks was the inconsistency of the tyrant man. Now let us see whether an admission of the disputed fact relieves him from the guilt charged upon him.
Observe once more the couplet,
"A whistling girl and a crowing hen
Always come to some bad end,"—
a couplet which, I affirm without fear of contradiction, endeavors to affix a stigma upon the character of crowing hens: for what sinister and ulterior purpose I scornfully refrain from designating. Fourteen crowing hens have reported themselves to me: one from Maine, two from New Hampshire, three from Massachusetts, one each from Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina, and four from Pennsylvania. Of these fourteen,