NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE 195 



ately adopt. The tumult is not confined to the family con- 

 cerned, 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 favorite 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, whose clarion sounds 

 The silent hours." 



A neighboring 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 suggested 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. Imagina- 

 tion 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 up- 

 braided, 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 

 1 See Spectator, Vol. VII., No. 512. G. W. 



