And how angrily did they
drive it away should a chick from another brood heedlessly rush in
among them to get a taste.
One old hen in particular interested me very much. I noticed her first
because of her pretty bluish color and the dark markings around her
neck, but I soon came to pity her, for she made herself quite unhappy
and seemed to take no comfort in anything. She was usually tied to a
tree by the leg, and although her string was long it seemed always just
a little too short to reach the thing she wanted. To make matters
worse she had a bad fashion of rushing wildly around the tree and
getting her string wound up shorter and shorter until at last she could
not stir a step, but would hang by one foot foolishly pulling as hard
as she could. It always seemed to me that her chickens were more
disobedient than the rest, because they knew she could not get to them
nor follow them.
Joe sometimes slyly threw pebbles at this blue hen to scare her and
make her jump and pull at the string, when he thought his mother was
not looking. As pay for his sport he often got his ears cuffed, for
though his mother did not seem to notice how cruelly he teased me, she
would not allow him to frighten her fowls.
"Don't you know that a hen that's all the time skeered won't lay?" was
the lesson she tried to impress on him as she punished him.
Pages:
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85