n the
year before and still withheld by family affection from their natural
destiny of mutton. The Dryad looked forward with glee to my appearance
on the academic platform with three full-grown fowls roosting on the
back of my chair or stalking up and down the desk, picking up bits of
chalk and pencil whittlings, but such embarrassments were not to be.

Mike was the first to sicken. His name may have been against him or the
long confinement in the basket may have injured him. The table-scarf
may have been too heavy to admit of his standing and moving during the
night as a chicken should. He suddenly became crippled, as with
paralysis. One morning, although he breakfasted with abundant relish,
he insisted on hiding in my hand immediately after. I wanted him to run
about for exercise, and twenty times put him back into his box, but he
returned to me twenty-one and had his own way for a while, until Mary
played the kidnapper. Coming down stairs half an hour later I heard her
remonstrating with Mike, who was cheeping wildly.

"Faith, Mike, ye're that onraysonable I can't plaze yez any how.
There's Pat and Cluxley as good as clover in the kitchen, but I let yez
into the dining-room, and still ye're discontinted, and now I've let
yez into the parlor, Mike, and not the parlor is good enough. Whativer
is it that ye can be wanting?"

Poor Chicken Little! He heard my voice and started to meet me, but with
such hobbling, staggering, bewildered steps that, at last, the
threshold overthrew him. We did for him what we knew--and we knew
nothing--that day and the next, and he sang his tuneful tweety-tweet on
Monday night; but on Tuesday morning, a fortnight from his coming, when
I asked for my chicken, they brought me a ghastly little form lying
among primroses.

I might say that I met the loss of my tiny comrade with adult dignity
and composure, but

"Syr, for lying, though I can do it,
Yet am I loth for to goo to it."

The core of my grief is the sense that my blundering devotion cut
short, on the very edge of spring, that gallant little life which
brought help to me in my heavy hour, and which had in it all the
promise of a Chaucer chanticleer.

In deep humiliation, we forthwith gave Pat and Cluxley over to higher
intelligence than ours, to a neighbor's hen who had no narrow parental
prejudices, but amply gathered them in with her own brood. Pat was the
beauty of the coop, but in a day or so his legs began to waver