Chapter 4

See how, in Bedford jail, John Bunyan turned to good account the lessons learned in barn-yards. "'Yet again,' said he, 'observe and look.' So they gave heed and perceived that the hen did walk in a fourfold method towards her chickens. 1. She had a _common call_, and that she hath all day long; 2. She had a _special call_, and that she had but sometimes; 3. She had a _brooding note_; and, 4. She had an _outcry_. 'Now,' said he, 'compare this hen to your king, and these chickens to his obedient ones. For, answerable to her, himself has his methods which he walketh in towards his people: by his _common call_ he gives nothing; by his _special call_ he always has something to give; he has also a _brooding voice_ for them that are under his wing; and he has an _outcry_ to give the alarm when he seeth the enemy come. I chose, my darlings, to lead you into the room where such things are, because you are women, and they are easy for you.'" Kind Mr. Interpreter!

To personal fear, as I have intimated, the hen-mother is a stranger; but her power is not always equal to her pluck. One week ago this very day,--ah, me! this very hour,--the cat ran by the window with a chicken in her mouth. Cats are a separate feature in country establishments. In the city I have understood them to lead a nomadic, disturbed, and somewhat shabby life. In the country they attach themselves to special localities and prey upon the human race. We have three steady and several occasional cats quartered upon us. One was retained for the name of the thing,--called derivatively Maltesa, and Molly "for short." One was adopted for charity,--a hideous, saffron-hued, forlorn little wretch, left behind by a Milesian family, called, from its color, Aurora, contracted into Rory O'More. The third was a fierce black-and-white unnamed wild creature, of whom one never got more than a glimpse in her savage flight. Cats are tolerated here from a tradition that they catch rats and mice, but they don't. We catch the mice ourselves and put them in a barrel, and put a cat in after them; and then she is frightened out of her wits. As for rats, they will gather wherever corn and potatoes congregate, cats or no cats. It is said in the country, that, if you write a polite letter to rats, asking them to go away, they will go. I received my information from one who had tried the experiment, or known it to be tried, with great success. Standing ready always to write a letter on the slightest provocation, you may be sure I did not neglect so good an opportunity. The letter acknowledged their skill and sagacity, applauded their valor and their perseverance, but stated, that, in the present scarcity of labor, the resident family were not able to provide more supplies than were necessary for their own immediate use and for that of our brave soldiers, and they must therefore beg the Messrs. Rats to leave their country for their country's good. It was laid on the potato-chest, and I have never seen a rat since!

While I have been penning this quadrupedic episode, you may imagine Molly, formerly Maltesa, as Kinglake would say, bearing off the chicken in triumph to her domicile. But the alarm is given, and the whole plantation turns out to rescue the victim or perish in the attempt. Molly takes refuge in a sleigh, but is ignominiously ejected. She rushes _per saltum_ under the corn-barn, and defies us all to follow her. But she does not know that in a contest strategy may be an overmatch for swiftness. She is familiar with the sheltering power of the elevated corn-barn, but she never conjectures to what base uses a clothes-pole may come, until one plunges into her sides. As she is not a St. Médard Convulsionist, she does not like it, but strikes a bee-line for the piazza, and rushes through the lattice-work into the darkness underneath. We stoop to conquer, and she hurls Greek fire at us from her wrathful eyes, but cannot stand against a reinforcement of poles which vex her soul. With teeth still fastened upon her now unconscious victim, she leaves her place of refuge, which indeed was no refuge for her, and gallops through the yard and across the field; but an unseen column has flanked her, and she turns back only to fall into the hands of the main army,--too late, alas! for the tender chick, who has picked his last worm and will never chirp again. But his death is speedily avenged. Within the space of three days, Molly, formerly Maltesa, is taken into custody, tried, convicted, sentenced, remanded to prison in an old wagon-box, and transported to Botany Bay, greatly to the delight of Rory O'More, formerly Aurora, who, in the presence of her overgrown contemporary, was never suffered to call her soul her own, much less a bone or a crust. Indeed, Molly never seemed half so anxious to eat, herself, as she was to bind Rory to total abstinence. When a plate was set for them, the preliminary ceremony was invariably a box on the ear for poor Rory, or a grab on the neck, from Molly's spasmodic paw, which would not release its hold till armed intervention set in and enforced a growling neutrality. In short, like the hens, these cats held up a mirror to human nature. They showed what men and women would be, if they were--cats; which they would be, if a few modifying qualities were left out. They exhibit selfishness and greed in their pure forms, and we see and ought to shun the unlovely shapes. Evil propensities may be hidden by a silver veil, but they are none the less evil and bring forth evil fruit. Let cats delight to snarl and bite, but let men and women be generous and beneficent.

Little chickens, tender and winsome as they are, early discover the same disposition. When one of them comes into possession of the fore-quarter of a fly, he does not share it with his brother. He does not even quietly swallow it himself. He clutches it in his bill and flies around in circles and irregular polygons, like one distracted, trying to find a corner where he can gormandize alone. It is no matter that not a single chicken is in pursuit, nor that there is enough and to spare for all. He hears a voice we cannot hear, telling him that the Philistines be upon him. And every chicken snatches his morsel and radiates from every other as fast as his little legs can carry him. His selfishness overpowers his sense,--which is, indeed, not a very signal victory, for his selfishness is very strong and his sense is very weak. It is no wonder that Hopeful was well-nigh moved to anger, and queried, "Why art thou so tart, my brother?" when Christian said to him, "Thou talkest like one upon whose head is the shell to this very day." To be compared to a chicken is disparaging enough; but to be compared to a chicken so very young that he has not yet quite divested himself of his shell must be, as Pet Marjorie would say, "what Nature itself can't endure." A little chicken's greedy crop blinds his eyes to every consideration except that of the insect squirming in his bill. He is beautiful and round and full of cunning ways, but he has no resources for an emergency. He will lose his reckoning and be quite out at sea, though only ten steps from home. He never knows enough to turn a corner. All his intelligence is like light, moving only in straight lines. He is impetuous and timid, and has not the smallest presence of mind or sagacity to discern between friend and foe. He has no confidence in any earthly power that does not reside in an old hen. Her cluck will he follow to the last ditch, and to nothing else will he give heed. I am afraid that the Interpreter was putting almost too fine a point upon it, when he had Christiana and her children "into another room, where was a hen and chickens, and bid them observe awhile. So one of the chickens went to the trough to drink, and every time she drank she lift up her head and her eyes towards heaven. 'See,' said he, 'what this little chick doth, and learn of her to acknowledge whence your mercies come, by receiving them with looking up.'" Doubtless the chick lift her eyes towards heaven, but a close acquaintance with the race would put anything but acknowledgment in the act. A gratitude that thanks Heaven for favors received and then runs into a hole to prevent any other person from sharing the benefit of those favors is a very questionable kind of gratitude, and certainly should be confined to the bipeds that wear feathers.

Yet, if you take away selfishness from a chicken's moral make-up, and fatuity from his intellectual, you have a very charming little creature left. For, apart from their excessive greed, chickens seem to be affectionate. They have sweet social ways. They huddle together with fond caressing chatter, and chirp soft lullabies. Their toilet performances are full of interest. They trim each other's bills with great thoroughness and dexterity, much better indeed than they dress their own heads,--for their bungling, bungling little claws make sad work of it. It is as much as they can do to stand on two feet, and they naturally make several revolutions when they attempt to stand on one. Nothing can be more ludicrous than their early efforts to walk. They do not really walk. They sight their object, waver, balance, decide, and then tumble forward, stopping all in a heap as soon as the original impetus is lost, generally some way ahead of the place to which they wished to go. It is delightful to watch them as drowsiness films their round, bright, black eyes, and the dear old mother croons them under her ample wings, and they nestle in perfect harmony. How they manage to bestow themselves with such limited accommodations, or how they manage to breathe in a room so close, it is difficult to imagine. They certainly deal a staggering blow to our preconceived notions of the necessity of oxygen and ventilation, but they make it easy to see whence the Germans derived their fashion of sleeping under feather-beds. But breathe and bestow themselves they do. The deep mother-heart and the broad mother-wings take them all in. They penetrate her feathers, and open for themselves unseen little doors into the mysterious, brooding, beckoning darkness. But it is long before they can arrange themselves satisfactorily. They chirp, and stir, and snuggle, trying to find the warmest and softest nook. Now an uneasy head is thrust out, and now a whole tiny body, but it soon reënters in another quarter, and at length the stir and chirr grow still. You see only a collection of little legs, as if the hen were a banyan-tree, and presently even they disappear, she settles down comfortably, and all are wrapped in a slumberous silence. And as I sit by the hour, watching their winning ways, and see all the steps of this sleepy subsidence, I can but remember that outburst of love and sorrow from the lips of Him who, though He came to earth from a dwelling-place of ineffable glory, called nothing unclean because it was common, found no homely detail too trivial or too homely to illustrate the Father's love, but from the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, the lilies of the field, the stones in the street, the foxes in their holes, the patch on a coat, the oxen in the furrow, the sheep in the pit, the camel under his burden, drew lessons of divine pity and patience, of heavenly duty and delight. Standing in the presence of the great congregation, seeing, as never man saw, the hypocrisy and the iniquity gathered before Him,--seeing too, alas! the calamities and the woe that awaited this doomed people, a god-like pity overbears His righteous indignation, and cries out in passionate appeal, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!"

* * * * *

The agriculturist says that women take care of young chickens much better than men. I do not know how that may be, but I know that my experiments with chickens have been attended with a success so brilliant that unfortunate poultry-fanciers have appealed to me for assistance. I have even taken ailing chickens from the city to board. A brood of nineteen had rapidly dwindled down to eleven when it was brought to me, one even then dying. His little life ebbed away in a few hours; but of the remaining ten, nine, now in the third week of their abode under my roof, have recovered health, strength, and spirits, and bid fair to live to a good old age, if not prematurely cut off. One of them, more feeble than the others, needed and received especial attention. Him I tended through dreary days of east wind and rain in a box on the mantel-piece, nursing him through a severe attack of asthma, feeding and amusing him through his protracted convalescence, holding him in my hand one whole Sunday afternoon to relieve him of home-sickness and hen-sickness, and being rewarded at last by seeing animation and activity come back to his poor sickly little body. He will never be a robust chicken. He seems to have a permanent distortion of the spine, and his crop is one-sided; and if there is any such thing as blind staggers, he has them. Besides, he has a strong and increasing tendency not to grow. This, however, I reckon a beauty rather than a blemish. It is the one fatal defect in chickens that they grow. With them, youth and beauty are truly inseparable terms. The better they are, the worse they look. After they are three weeks old, every day detracts from their comeliness. They lose their plump roundness, their fascinating, soft down, and put out the most ridiculous little wings and tails and hard-looking feathers, and are no longer dear, tender chicks, but small hens,--a very uninteresting Young America. It is said, that, if you give chickens rum, they will not grow, but retain always their juvenile size and appearance. Under our present laws it is somewhat difficult, I suppose, to obtain rum, and I fear it would be still more difficult to administer it. I have concluded instead to keep some hen sitting through the summer, and so have a regular succession of young chickens. The growth of my little patient was not arrested at a sufficiently early stage to secure his perpetual good looks, and, as I intimated, he will never, probably, be the Windship of his race; but he has found his appetite, he is free from acute disease, he runs about with the rest, under-sized, but bright, happy, and enterprising, and is therefore a well-spring of pleasure. Indeed, in view of the fact that I have unquestionably saved his life, we talk seriously of opening a _Hôtel des Invalides_, a kind of Chicken's Home, that the benefits which he has received may be extended to all his unfortunate brethren who stand in need.

FOOTNOTES:

[D] I say _sit_ out of regard to the proprieties of the occasion; but I do not expose myself to ridicule by going about among the neighbors and talking of a _sitting_ hen! Everywhere, but in the "Atlantic," hens _set_.

HARPOCRATES.

"The rest is silence."--HAMLET.

I.

The message of the god I seek In voice, in vision, or in dream,-- Alike on frosty Dorian peak, Or by the slow Arcadian stream: Where'er the oracle is heard, I bow the head and bend the knee; In dream, in vision, or in word, The sacred secret reaches me.

II.

Athwart the dim Trophonian caves, Bat-like, the gloomy whisper flew; The lisping plash of Paphian waves Bathed every pulse in fiery dew: From Phoebus, on his cloven hill, A shaft of beauty pierced the air, And oaks of gray Dodona still Betrayed the Thunderer's presence there.

III.

The warmth of love, the grace of art, The joys that breath and blood express, The desperate forays of the heart Into an unknown wilderness,-- All these I know: but sterner needs Demand the knowledge which must dower The life that on achievement feeds, The grand activity of power.

IV.

What each reveals the shadow throw Of something unrevealed behind; The Secret's lips forever close To mock the secret undivined: Thence late I come, in weary dreams The son of Isis to implore, Whose temple-front of granite gleams Across the Desert's yellow floor.

V.

Lo! where the sand, insatiate, drinks The steady splendor of the air, Crouched on her heavy paws, the Sphinx Looks forth with old, unwearied stare! Behind her, on the burning wall, The long processions flash and glow: The pillared shadows of the hall Sleep with their lotus-crowns below.

VI.

A square of dark beyond, the door Breathes out the deep adytum's gloom: I cross the court's deserted floor, And stand within the awful room. The priests repose from finished rite; No echo rings from pavements trod; And sits alone, in swarthy light, The naked child, the temple's god.

VII.

No sceptre, orb, or mystic toy Proclaims his godship, young and warm: He sits alone, a naked boy, Clad in the beauty of his form. Dark, solemn stars, of radiance mild, His eyes illume the golden shade, And sweetest lips that never smiled The finger hushes, on them laid.

VIII.

Oh, never yet in trance or dream That falls when crowned desire has died, So breathed the air of power supreme, So breathed, and calmed, and satisfied! Did then those mystic lips unclose, Or that diviner silence make A seeming voice? The flame arose, The deity his message spake:

IX.

"If me thou knowest, stretch thy hand And my possessions thou shalt reach: I grant no help, I break no band, I sit above the gods that teach. The latest-born, my realm includes The old, the strong, the near, the far,-- Serene beyond their changeful moods, And fixed as Night's unmoving star.

X.

"A child, I leave the dance of Earth To be my hornèd mother's care: My father Ammon's Bacchic mirth, Delighting gods, I may not share. I turn from Beauty, Love, and Power, In singing vale, on laughing sea; From Youth and Hope, and wait the hour When weary Knowledge turns to me.

XI.

"Beneath my hand the sacred springs Of Man's mysterious being burst, And Death within my shadow brings The last of life, to greet the first. There is no god, or grand or fair, On Orcan or Olympian field, But must to me his treasures bear, His one peculiar secret yield.

XII.

"I wear no garment, drop no shade Before the eyes that all things see; My worshippers, howe'er arrayed, Come in their nakedness to me. The forms of life like gilded towers May soar, in air and sunshine drest,-- The home of Passions and of Powers,-- Yet mine the crypts whereon they rest.

XIII.

"Embracing all, sustaining all, Consoling with unuttered lore, Who finds me in my voiceless hall Shall need the oracles no more. I am the knowledge that insures Peace, after Thought's bewildering range; I am the patience that endures; I am the truth that cannot change!"

DELY'S COW.

I went down to the farm-yard one day last month, and as I opened the gate I heard Pat Malony say, "Biddy! Biddy!" I thought at first he was calling a hen, but then I remembered the hens were all shut into the poultry-house that day, to be sorted, and numbered, and condemned: so I looked again, thinking perhaps Pat's little lame sister had strayed up from the village and gone into the barn after Sylvy's kittens, or a pigeon-egg, or to see a new calf; but, to my surprise, I saw a red cow, of no particular beauty or breed, coming out of the stable-door, looking about her as if in search of somebody or something; and when Pat called again, "Biddy! Biddy! Biddy!" the creature walked up to him across the yard, stretched out her awkward neck, sniffed a little, and cropped from his hand the wisp of rowen hay he held, as composedly as if she were a tame kitten, and then followed him all round the yard for more, which I am sorry to say she did not get. Pat had only displayed her accomplishments to astonish me, and then shut her in her stall again. I afterward hunted out Biddy's history, and here it is.

On the Derby turnpike, just before you enter Hanerford, everybody that ever travelled that road will remember Joseph German's bakery. It was a red brick house, with dusty windows toward the street, and just inside the door a little shop, where Mr. German retailed the scalloped cookies, fluted gingerbread, long loaves of bread, and scantly filled pies, in which he dealt, and which were manufactured in the long shop, where in summer you caught glimpses of flour-barrels all a-row, and men who might have come out of those barrels, so strewed with flour were all their clothes,--paper-cap and white apron scarcely to be distinguished from the rest of the dress, as far as color and dustiness went. Here, too, when her father drove out the cart every afternoon, sitting in front of the counter with her sewing or her knitting, Dely German, the baker's pretty daughter, dealt out the cakes and rattled the pennies in her apron-pocket with so good a grace, that not a young farmer came into Hanerford with grain or potatoes or live stock, who did not cast a glance in at the shop-door, going toward town, and go in on his return, ostensibly to buy a sheet of gingerbread or a dozen cookies for his refreshment on the drive homeward. It was a curious thing to see how much hungrier they were on the way home than coming into town. Though they might have had a good dinner in Hanerford, that never appeased their appetites entirely, while in the morning they had driven their slow teams all the way without so much as thinking of cakes and cheese! So by the time Dely was seventeen, her black eyes and bright cheeks were well known for miles about, and many a youth, going home to the clean kitchen where his old mother sat by the fire knitting, or his spinster sister scolded and scrubbed over his muddy boot-tracks, thought how pretty it would look to see Dely German sitting on the other side, in her neat calico frock and white apron, her black hair shining smooth, and her fresh, bright face looking a welcome.

But Dely did not think about any one of them in a reciprocal manner; she liked them all pretty well, but she loved nobody except her father and mother, her three cats and all their kittens, the big dog, the old horse, and a wheezy robin that she kept in a cage, because her favorite cat had half killed it one day, and it never could fly any more. For all these dumb things she had a really intense affection: as for her father and mother, she seemed to be a part of them; it never occurred to her that they could leave her, or she them; and when old Joe German died one summer day, just after Dely was seventeen, she was nearly distracted. However, people who must work for their living have to get over their sorrows, practically, much sooner than those who can afford time to indulge them; and as Dely knew more about the business and the shop than anybody but the foreman, she had to resume her place at the counter before her father had been buried a week. It was a great source of embarrassment to her rural admirers to see Dely in her black frock, pale and sober, when they went in; they did not know what to say; they felt as if their hands and feet had grown very big all at once, and as if the cents in their pockets never could be got at, at which they turned red and hot and got choked, and went away, swearing internally at their own blundering shyness, and deeper smitten than ever with Dely, because they wanted to comfort her so very much, and didn't know how!