32 
NATURE NOTES. 
may be said on one occasion to have saved a hero’s life. When 
“ Philosopher Smith,” discoverer of the great tin mine here, first 
reached Mount Bischoff after many days of travelling through 
the trackless bush, he was tattered, forlorn and almost pro- 
visionless ; but having the good fortune to fall in with some 
porcupines, he lived upon them, discovered the metal, made his 
way back to civilisation, and a name in the annals of Tasmanian 
adventure. 
H. S. Dove. 
Mount Bischoff, Tasmania. 
SOME COMMONPLACE FOWLS. 
OME years ago my wife became a hen-wife. A sufficient 
hen-house being established, she purchased as a bar- 
gain, some half-a-dozen ordinary fowls, of mixed breed 
— touches of Spanish, of Brahma, of Dorking, traits 
of Andalusian, and faint traces of their far-off ancestor, the jungle 
fowl of Bengal. 
My children fed them well. Pepper, they were told, made 
hens lay, and they emptied the castor. Barley, maize, oats, 
bread, potatoes, scraps — never were fowls so fed. But they had 
magnificent constitutions. They stood it all and laid well. 
They became very tame — pets, in fact. Descriptive names were 
given them which explain themselves — Crookbeak, Longlegs, 
Stingy (which in East Anglia means ill-tempered), Hippety-hop. 
Longlegs and Crookbeak were tall, stately fowls of a giraffe- 
like build, placid in temperament. They would permit Jim-jam, 
the youngest but one of the household, to take hold of their tails 
and march them around the grass-plot. They are dead. 
Stingy is one of those restless, vicious, vital beings, with 
a store of energy which must find outlet — generally in being a 
complete nuisance to the quieter hens. She never can let the 
others alone for long, and races hens, who by goodhap have a 
tit-bit, round and round the hen-house till it makes one dizzy to 
look at her. She still survives. 
But it is of Hippety-hop I should like to speak. She has just 
died, amid universal regret. Hippety was a black hen, hump- 
backed, and lame, and quite a character. She never had all her 
feathers on at once. Our cockerel, a fine, well-built, upstanding 
bird, although of no particular breeding, often gazed at her in 
amaze, I suppose at her ugliness, but yet, like a good fellow, 
cherished her duly. Nature had compensated her for the lack 
of outward graces by many qualities, some admirable and some 
not, at least, from our point of view. She was a good layer, 
a diligent sitter, a devoted mother. Her pet weakness was 
worms. In picking up these — or indeed any kind of food — she 
