240 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 



the rest of his mistresses immediately adopt. The tumult is not 

 confined to the family concerned, but catches from yard to yard, 

 and spreads to every homestead within hearing, till at last the 

 whole village is in an uproar. As soon as a hen becomes a 

 mother her new relation demands a new language ; she then runs 

 clocking and screaming about, and seems agitated as if possessed. 

 The father of the flock has also a considerable vocabulary ; if he 

 finds food, he calls a favourite concubine to partake ; and if a 

 bird of prey passes over, with a warning voice he bids his family 

 beware. The gallant chanticleer has, at command, his amorous 

 phrases and his terms of defiance. But the sound by which he is 

 best known is his crowing : by this he has been distinguished in 

 all ages as the countryman's clock or larum, as the watchman 

 that proclaims the divisions of the night. Thus the poet elegantly 

 styles him : 



" the crested cock, \vhoseclarion sounds 



The silent hours." 



A neighbouring gentleman one summer had lost most of his 

 chickens by a sparrow-hawk, that came gliding down between a 

 faggot pile and the end of his house to the place where the coops 

 stood. The owner, inwardly vexed to see his flock thus diminished, 

 hung a setting-net adroitly between the pile and the house, into 

 which the caitiff dashed, and was entangled. Resentment sug- 

 gested the law of retaliation; he therefore clipped the hawk's 

 wings, cut off his talons, and, fixing a cork on his bill, threw him 

 down among the brood-hens. Imagination cannot paint the 

 scene that ensued; the expressions that fear, rage, and revenge 

 inspired, were new, or at least such as had been unnoticed before : 

 the exasperated matrons upbraided, they execrated, they insulted, 

 they triumphed. In a word, they never desisted from buffeting 

 their adversary till they had torn him in a hundred pieces. 



NOTE TO LETTER XLIII. 



1 Several species of fish utter sounds while dying. The gurnard utters a 



croak, the bream a gasping sound ; but these sounds are accidental and not 

 natural. 



