borde una gallina ya ahogada.
This favored hen naturally became an object of special care, and it seems to have become the ancestress of an illustrious breed which kings did not disdain to have set before them at table.
We can fancy this gallina resucitada laying now and then an egg, as Hawthorne says of the Pyncheon hens, “not for any pleasure of her own, but that the world might not absolutely lose so admirable a breed.” Brillat-Savarin pretended that the redeeming merit of the Jesuits was the discovery and introduction of the turkey into Europe.[[201]] Had he only known of this race of hens, rendered meet for the palates of princes by their great founder, they might have had an additional title to his approbation. Father Prout, speaking of the Jesuits being accused of having a hand in every political disturbance for the last three hundred years, compares them to Mother Carey’s chickens, which always make their appearance in a storm, and, for this reason, give rise to a belief among sailors that it is the fowl that has raised the tempest! How ominous, then, was this Spanish hen of Manresa! We could not find out whether there are any scions of this time-honored race still living in their ancestral coops, or whether they were all suppressed with the order as dangerous to the state; but we do know that six of the breed—three pollos and three pollas—in a line direct from the famous hen, were, in the beginning of the year 1603 (the miracle of the Pozo, it must be remembered, took place in 1522), sent to her Catholic majesty, Queen Margaret of Austria, who received them with as many demonstrations of pleasure as would have been consistent with royal etiquette in Spain.
We trust no supposititious egg was ever smuggled into the nest of this illustrious gallina to deteriorate the breed. Père Vanière, a learned French Jesuit of note in the last century, has described in an able Latin poem, part of which has been translated by Delille, the sorrows of a poor old hen when she found, for instance, that she had hatched a brood of ducks, which became the torment of her life by their inclination for water. As Hood has it:
“The thing was strange—a contradiction
It seemed of nature and her works,
For little chicks beyond conviction
To float without the aid of corks.”
Imagine, then, the woes of this maternal hen, in her new-fledged pride of race, should any Moorish or Guinea fowl taint her ennobled Spanish blood!
There is a hotel at Manresa, called the Chicken, of about the same stamp as the San Domingo, though Mr. Bayard Taylor, whose experience in such matters transcends ours, satisfied himself that, “although the Saint has altogether a better sound than the Chicken, the Chicken is really better than the Saint!”