July 1. 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER. 
219 
seated at their meals. Then she sat with her children 
round her, and called upon them to hear her words; and 
her son, now a man in the decline of life, spoke with deep 
1 feeling of the impression they all received at those times of 
special instruction applied so afl'ectingly to their hearts. 
The family had some distant connections, who lived not 
very far from their home, but whose ways and habits were 
not like those of the mother’s household. They were 
! people of substance and respectability; but they did not 
; consider from whence “ all blessings flow,” because they did 
not use them in the manner the Giver of them all has taught 
| us. There is a scriptural rule by which we may and must 
be guided in everything; and if we neglect it, sorrow will 
overtake us one day soon. 
j The mother had often noticed the waste and extravagauce 
i going on in her connections’ house; and it had shocked and 
grieved her. She had seen bread thrown into the liog-tub, 
which was good and fit for food, and might have nourished 
many a poor person, and broken meat of various kinds flung 
away and sinfully wasted too. She had drawn her children’s 
attention to this unlawful practice, and pointed out the 
wickedness of so abusing the gifts of God; for destroying or 
wasting anything that is good for food is a sin, aud we have 
a strong and striking example of the way in which we should 
take care of every hit that is broken, or left at our meals, 
when our Heavenly Pattern said, “ gather up the fragments 
that remain, that nothing be lost.” 
In the course of time the wasteful family removed to 
another neighbourhood, and little was heard of them for 
some few years; but one day, the wise and fond mother, on 
taking her place among her children at meal time, addressed 
them in a very solemn way. She reminded them of their 
friends who had been so long absent; she spoke of their 
! former habits of careless waste, and of the fears she herself 
j had always felt and expressed for the consequences of such 
l sinfulness ; and then she told them that she had just heard 
this very family were now reduced to such deep poverty, that 
they actually had not bread of their own to eat. All their 
riches had fled away, in what manner I do not know, but 
they were gone ; and the very portions of loaves, and pieces 
of meat that had been thrown on the dunghill, or to the 
pigs, would now be received by these, very persons with joy 
j and thankfulness. This w'as a fruitful subject for an anxious 
! mother to enlarge upon, with a large family of boys aud 
girls before her, who were to he parents, men of business, 
householders, managers of families, in days to come, and 
who felt that upon her teaching, by God’s help aud blessing, 
the welfare of generations yet unborn might hang. 
This circumstance made a strong and deep impression 
U 2 >on the children. It was a consequence and a judgment, 
taking place so evidently before their eyes, that it caught 
and fixed their attention; and by the way in which the 
account was given to us, it would appear that it remained 
almost as fresh now as when it first took place. 
The minds of children are very open to impressions; and 
more good might be done by improving to them such events 
as happen around them than by almost any other means; 
because a young mind is always caught by a story, and a 
picture, and a story of real life may, therefore, convey a 
clearer and more profitable lesson than a long, uninteresting 
exhortation, which too often passes away and is remembered 
no more. “Precept upon precept, line upon line" is needed, 
both for old and young; but a fact, and an anecdote fasten 
upon us, and very often strike home to the heart. 
To be wasteful is not liberality, nor is it mean to he 
careful of that which we possess. Our blessed Saviour’s 
precept and example sets forth the golden mean. He 
dealt with an unsparing hand bread to the hungry multi¬ 
tude, “ as much as they would.” Then, “ when they were 
I filled,” hut not until then, “ He said unto His disciples, 
j gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost." 
When we throw away, or suffer to be improperly or 
needlessly consumed, fragments of food that might do 
i good even to one little hungry child, let us remember how 
| we have been enjoined to take care that nothing he lost. 
And let us also follow the same perfect Pattern, in hoarding 
' up nothing, but what we have freely received, as freely give. 
Let us break our bread, and distribute according to that we 
have to those that lack, as well as take heed that nothing he 
lost; for Jesus Christ did both. And we who are poor, 
frail creatures, must take care not to run into one extreme 
to avoid the other; but remember that “ There is that 
scattereth yet increaseth ; and there is that withholdeth I 
more than is meet, but it tendeth to poverty.” 
Many simple, scriptural lessons might the humblest 
mother teach, if her heart was set to obey the commandments 
of God, and if her children's souls were of as much value to 
her as their hungry bodies. It needs not to be a “ scholar ” 
to point out the way that leadeth unto eternal life, and the 
path of God’s commandments. We can hear, if we cannot I 
read, and the will will find out a way to acquaint ourselves 
and others with the revealed Will of God. 
Let Christian mothers take courage, and not faint at the 
difficult duties they have to do; and let worldly mothers take 
notice of the wise and blessed means this mother used to 
strike the minds of her little ones. Let us all remember that - 
the “ meat which perisheth,” needful as it is for the body, and 
bound as we are to use it to the glory of God, and the good 
of men, is as nothing compared to that “ which endureth 
unto eternal life; ” and that as our blessed Saviour first 
taught, and then fed the people, so must we do by the souls 
committed to our charge. 
GAME, AND POLAND FOWLS. 
In following the order observed by the compilers of the 
prize list for the Birmingham Poultry Exhibition, passing 
over the Malay, which has already been noticed in the pages 
of The Coxiage Gardener, we place the Game fowl next 
upon the list. This might, perhaps, he more readily 
described by disposition than by appearance, for the well 
known fighting propensities of this race are so powerful, 
that even among the young chickens their eyes and lives 
are endangered by it at an incredibly early age. This ex¬ 
ceedingly troublesome quality occasions their exclusion from 
most poultry yards, although they are frequently good layers, 
and their somewhat small, but prettily tinted, eggs, are rich 
in flavour: the hens are celebrated as good sitters and 
spirited, careful mothers. 
Now that this pugnacious disposition is, to the honour of 
civilisation, no longer cherished for sport, their spirit is a 
characteristic which has no advantage, but is, on the con¬ 
trary, a great nuisance and inconvenience appeitaming to 
this pretty kind of fowl. In size they are rather small, 
weighing from four pounds to five-and-a-half. Their colours 
are as various as they well can be; not to enter into all the 
technicalities of piles, pole-cats, cuckoos, &e. Ac., they are 
butt’, yellow, red, brown, grey, and, I believe, sometimes 
black. The form of the cock is peculiarly slender and up- 
right, with a fine flowing tail, bold bearing, small head, i 
single comb, bright fiery eye, and white or yellow beak. The 
plumage should be long, glossy, crisp to the touch, and sit¬ 
ting close to the fowl. The fowls should have a ruddy ap¬ 
pearance about the head, with the legs white, or inclining to 
yellow; beak aud legs should agree in colour. 
On account of the celebrity of this kind of fowl, many 
rules respecting the breeding of them have been laid down ; 
such as to mate an old cock with pullets, or mature liens 
with a young cock; to give the gentleman only a small 
number of companions; to let there be no relationship 
between the cock and the hens ; to divide into groups which 
are well matched in plumage, and to let the advantage of 
size be on the part of the hens. If this kind of attention 
were bestowed on stock fowls in general, I believe we should 
meet with fewer degenerate specimens of choice sorts than 
we do by a great number. A game cock is sometimes dis¬ 
posed to take a dislike to some one of his hens in particular. 
I once knew a pretty hen whose life fell a sacrifice to some 
such unaccountable fit of aversion on the part of the cock. 
The game fowl is said to he more subject to roup than other 1 
kinds of poultry. 
It is omitted to mention, at any rate for the present, the 
golden and silver spangled and pencilled Hamburgh fowls, 
in hopes that the appeal in The Cottage Gardener, 
May 27th, may be responded to, and that some amateur of 
these kinds will favour its readers with a description of 
them. 
The different varieties of the Poland fowls, black, silver 
spangled and golden spangled, are both beautiful and rare ; 
it is very difficult to obtain them pure bred and handsome. 
