632 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



spirit and made no resistance. Then tlie other hens began to eat 

 the paste off her feathers, and the poor bird would deliberately 

 walk up to her former subjects and stand patiently to be eaten 

 clean. In time she recovered her beauty, but never her lost rank. 



Nations, shorn of their prestige or territory in one quarter, 

 often " seek compensation " in another, where their neighbors are 

 weak ; and brutes in human form, after being whipped in a drunken 

 fight by other men, sometimes soothe their wounded pride by beat- 

 ing their wives at home. So it is with poultry. A cock, chased 

 by one of higher rank, will often vent his spite upon the first half- 

 grown cockerel that comes within his reach, and even bully hens 

 around until he recovers from his own humiliation. From that 

 allied weakness which makes men bluster most when in greatest 

 fear, hens that are weak enough at other times, are savage toward 

 young roosters, sure soon to become their masters. They chase 

 them with noisy fury, and try in every way to intimidate them, 

 carefully avoiding a trial of strength, however, as long as possible. 

 When it comes, they collapse into shrieking submission, with 

 laughable suddenness. When a hen simply ignores a young cock- 

 erel, he usually encounters much more serious resistance, and 

 sometimes has to fight hard for victory. 



Hens are harder to deceive, in some respects, than many 

 women. They flock up to a rooster with eager freedom, when he 

 is eating busily in silence, while they are very shy of heeding his 

 most artful invitations to a feast, real or imaginary. When he 

 eats they know there is something good, and that he is not think- 

 ing of entrapping them ; but when he shakes his head up and 

 down, picking up morsels in his beak and calling as a hen calls 

 her chickens, they understand the amorous and deceitful ways of 

 their lord too well to approach him rashly. Some cocks play com- 

 paratively few tricks, and they are much more trusted than oth- 

 ers which are as insincere as seductive. Neither is the average 

 fowl easily humbugged, on the other hand, by attempts to conceal 

 a real feast. It is amusing to observe the calm, careless manner 

 of a hen which has caught a mouse, as she walks off toward a 

 secluded spot, making the same contented, nothing-to-do noise 

 which is her ordinary note of idleness. This, of course, happens 

 only when there is a chance that no other hen saw the mouse 

 caught. But usually some quick-witted sister will at once " smell 

 a mouse,'' and steal quietly up behind, not infrequently announc- 

 ing her coming by snatching at the coveted dainty. The poultry- 

 yard is always on the alert for a valuable discovery on the part 

 of one of its inmates, and ready to put a sort of highway-robber 

 socialism into practice at a moment's notice. 



The foregoing plain statements of fact are but a few of the 

 many proofs which the writer has seen of the existence in com- 



