THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 201 
No inhabitants of a yard seem possessed of such a variety 
of expression and so copious a language as common poultry. 
Take a chicken of four or five days old, and hold it up to a 
window where there are flies, and it will immediately seize its 
prey, with little twitterings of complacency; but if you tender 
it a wasp or a bee, at once its note becomes harsh, and expres- 
sive of disapprobation and a sense of danger. 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 dis- 
burdened herself, than she rushes forth with a clamorous kind 
of joy, which the cock and the rest of his mistresses im- 
mediately 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 scream- 
ing about, and seems agitated as if possessed. ‘The father of 
the flock has also a considerable vocabulary; if he finds food, 
he calls a favorite 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 watchman 
that proclaims the divisions of the night. Thus the poet 
elegantly styles him: 
* the crested cock, whose clarion sounds 
The silent hours.” 
A neighboring 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 
