268 LANGUAGE OF FOWLS. 



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 clucking and scream- 

 ing 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 par- 

 take ; and if a bird of prey passes over, with a warning 

 voice, he bids his family beware. The gallant chan- 

 ticleer 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 dis- 

 tinguished 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, whose clarion 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 fagot pile and the end of 

 his house to the place where the coops stood. The 

 owner, inwardly vexed to see his flock thus diminish- 

 ing, hung a setting net adroitly between the pile and 

 the house, into which the caitiff dashed, and was 

 entangled. Resentment suggested the law of re- 

 taliation ; 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 can-- 

 not 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. 



