e goes after Chloris, to save the second cheese."

Xanthe smiled assent. Her father raised his voice and called to the
juggler:

"Well, my little friend, show what your actors can do.--You young
people, Mopsus and Dorippe, for aught I care, can dance as long as the
monaulus sounds, and Semestre stays in the house."

"We want first to see what the hens can do," cried the dark-haired
girl, clinging to her lover's arm, and turning with Mopsus toward the
exhibition, which now began again.

There was many an exclamation of astonishment, many a laugh, for, when
the little man ordered his largest cock to show its skill in riding,
it jumped nimbly on the donkey's back; when he ordered it to clean its
horse, it pulled a red feather out of the ornaments on the ass's head;
and finally proved itself a trumpeter, by stretching its neck and
beginning to crow.

The hens performed still more difficult feats, for they drew from
a wooden box for each spectator a leaf of a tree, on which certain
characters were visible.

The scrawl was intelligible only to the conjurer, but was said to
contain infallible information about the future, and the little man
offered to interpret the writing to each individual.

This trainer of hens was a clever dwarf, with very quick ears. He had
distinctly understood that, through Semestre, he was to lose a nice
cheese, and, when the housekeeper returned, ordered a hen to tell each
person present how many years he or she had lived in the world.

The snow-white bird, with the yellow head, scratched seventeen times
before Xanthe, and, on reaching Mopsus, twenty-three times, which was
perfectly correct.

"Now tell us this honorable lady's age too," said the conjurer to the
hen.

Semestre told Chloris to repeat what the little man had said, and
was already reflecting whether she should not let him have the second
cheese, in consideration of the "honorable lady," when the hen began to
scratch again.

Up to sixty she nodded assent, as she watched the bird's claw; at
sixty-five she compressed her lips tightly, at seventy the lines on her
brow announced a coming storm, at eighty she struck the ground violently
with her myrtle-staff, and, as the hen, scratching faster and faster,
approached ninety, and a hundred, and she saw that all the spectators
were laughing, and her master was fairly holding his sides, rushed
angrily into the house.

As soon as she had vanished behind the doors, Lysander threw the