258 
NATURAL HISTORY 
When a pullet is ready to lay, slie 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 disburthened 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 oflfhis 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. 
