Rensselaer Union, Volume 6, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 June 1874 — A Composition on Chickens. [ARTICLE]

A Composition on Chickens.

BY A LOUISVILLE BOY

Most usually it takes two eggs for to make a chicken, because, if you will pul eighteen eggs under a hen, only about nine of ’em will hatch. A hen is so careless and stubborn that most likely she won’t cover her eggs all over, and so they get chilled; then they are everlastingly gone up. Also, the rats will rob a nest; so that, if you get half of a brood, it is a tol’able crop, and you should be thankful. Then, I think, it stands to reason this ought to prove what I said at first. A hen, which has got a young family, is more crosser than anything else which can be compared with her under the sun in the United States. There never was a thing which can ruffle its feathers up backward and rage worse than a fool hen. A turkey gobbler will do it, but he don’t go off into a red-hot passion about it, and make a fool of himself, and get enemies all for nothing, like a hen would. A chicken in the spring time which was put to hatch in March, if it has good luck and don’t die of the pip, or gaps, or the choleramorbus, or get drownded or something, will be big enough to sell to the restaurant about in June. They will fetch $6 a dozen, and a chicken is more popular where it is a spring chicken that if it would live long enough to get as tough as Methuseler. They say that a spring chicken is a luxurious thing for to broil and mix up with toast. That’s what I have heard. Once in a great while we have spring chickens for dinner. Then we have the preacher, or else some company, and I eat at the second-hand table, and I can always tell by the savoiy smell a going on in the kitchen that broiled chicken ought to be good enough for anybody. But if I can’t get something to eat more substantialler than a smell I always fall back on roast beef. A chicken don’t gather shrewdness like a owl, and it never picks up any wisdom. It is aot a talented thing like a fox. If you call show me a more stupider thing than a hen I wish you would trot her out. The rooster has got what little sense there ever was in the family. It is one of the worst difficulties with a chicken that she don’t know its place. She won’t stay in the barn-yard, where she belongs, any way you can fix it; If your mother has got flower-beds in the front yard—and it’s a mighty curious mother which ain’t—every last chicken on the place will get in to scratch them, if it takes till next Christmas; and then good-by to the hyacinthes, and crocuses, and jerryranthems, and all thp.t kind of foolishness. Then is the rime you want to have two jackets on, or else to forget to come home early, if it was you which left the lattice gate open. Anyhow, that’s my advice. Also, a hen is hard-hearted and cruel, and will kill every little desolated stray chicken who tries to associate with her"own brood, and this is a good enough reason why she is like a step-mother. If a hen once gets a fair hold of a little chicken to shake it by the nape of the neck it will never kick again in this community more than twice. The frequentest bad habit which a hen has got is going off to the neighbors to lay; also it is too soft a thing for the neighbors; but it is generally chronic for a hen to do it, and the only way for to cure her is to cut her head oft' and boil her down into soup. She won’t go to the neighbors to. lay many times'after that, I don’t think. The coolest larceny on record recently took place in San Francisco. A young man from, the country was riding in a street car when a man next to him informed him that the back of his coat was dirty, and kindly offered to brush it off for him if he would take it off. He handed his coat to the accommodating man, and the latter coolly put it under his arm and left with it.