t them, they will hide under the
corn-stalks as carefully as if a sheriff were on their track. They will
not go to their nests while you are about, but tarry midway and meditate
profoundly on fixed fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute, till you
are tired of watching and waiting, and withdraw. No, you did not know it
all before. The world is in a state of Cimmerian darkness regarding
hens. There were never any chickens hatched till three weeks from a week
before Fast Day. How should you, my readers, know anything about them?
Be docile, and I will enlighten you.

Hens must have a depression where the bump of locality should be, for
they have no manner of tenderness for old haunts. "Where are the birds
in last year's nests?" queries the poet; but he might have asked quite
as pertinently, "Where are the birds in last month's nests?" Echo, if
she were at all familiar with the subject, would reply, "The birds are
all right, but where are the nests?" Hens very sensibly decide that it
is easier to build a new house than to keep the old one in order; and
having laid one round of eggs, off they go to erect, or rather to
excavate, another dwelling. You have scarcely learned the way to their
nook above the great beam when it is abandoned, and they betake
themselves to a hole at the very bottom of the haystack. I wish I could
tell you a story about a Hebrew prophet crawling under a barn after
hen's eggs, and crawling out again from the musty darkness into sweet
light with his clothes full of cobwebs, his eyes full of dust, his hands
full of eggs, to find himself winking and blinking in the midst of a
party of ladies and gentlemen who had come lion-hunting from a farre
countrie. I cannot tell you, because it would be a breach of confidence;
but I am going to edit my Sheikh's Life and Letters, if I live long
enough, and he does not live too long, and then you shall have the whole
story, with names, dates, and costumes.

Another very singular habit hens have, of dusting themselves. They do
not seem to care for bathing, like canary-birds; but in warm afternoons,
when they have eaten their fill, they like to stroll into the highway,
where the dust lies ankle-deep in heaps and ridges, and settle down and
stir and burrow in it till it has penetrated through all their inmost
feathers, and so filled them, that, when they arise and shake
themselves, they stand in a cloud of dust. I do not like this habit in
the hens; yet I observe how a c