144 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE 



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 country- 

 man'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. 



