The Natural History of Selborne 315 



their life that of laying seems to be the most important ; for no 

 sooner has a hen disburdened herself, than she rushes forth with a 

 clamorous kind of joy, which the cock and the rest of his mistresses 

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

 cerned, but catches from yard to yard, and spreads to every home- 

 stead 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 [clacking] 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 con- 

 cubine 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 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 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. 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 an hundred pieces. 



