232 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 



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 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 ot 

 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 billj 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, the^y 

 never desisted from buffeting their adversary till they had 

 torn him in a hundred pieces. 



