258 NATURAL HISTORY 



When a pullet is ready to lay, she intimates the event by a 

 joyous and easy soft note. Of all the occurrences of 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 concerned, 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 clucking 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 

 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 watch- 

 man 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 diminishing, hung a setting net adroitly between 

 the pile and the house, into which the caitiff dashed, and 

 was entangled. Eesentment suggested the law of retalia- 

 tion: 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 in- 

 spired 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 de- 

 sisted from buffeting their adversary till they had torn him 

 in a hundred pieces. 



