ividual
mentioned above is so sore on this point, that, the moment I get as far
as that, he leaves the room, and my equation remains unstated.

There is a great deal of human nature in hens. They have the same
qualities that people have, but unmodified. A human mother loves her
children, but she is restrained by a sense of propriety from tearing
other mothers' children in pieces. A hen has no such checks; her
motherhood exists without any qualification. Her intense love for her
own brood is softened by no social requirements. If a poor lost waif
from another coop strays into her realm, no pity, no sympathy springing
from the memory of her own offspring, moves her to kindness; but she
goes at it with a demoniac fury, and would peck its little life out, if
fear did not lend it wings. She has a self-abnegation great as that of
human mothers. Her voracity and timidity disappear. She goes almost
without food herself, that her chicks may eat. She scatters the dough
about with her own bill, that it may be accessible to the little bills,
or, perhaps, to teach them how to work. The wire-worms, the bugs, the
flies, all the choice little tidbits that her soul loves, she divides
for her chicks, reserving not a morsel for herself. All their gambols
and pranks and wild ways she bears with untiring patience. They hop up
by twos and threes on her back. They peck at her bill. One saucy little
imp actually jumped up and caught hold of the little red lappet above
her beak, and, hanging to it, swung back and forth half a dozen times;
and she was evidently only amused, and reckoned it a mark of precocity.

Yet, with all her intense, absorbing parental love, she has very serious
deficiencies,--deficiencies occasioned by the same lack of modification
which I have before mentioned. Devoted to her little ones, she will
scratch vigorously and untiringly to provide them food, yet fails to
remember that they do not stand before her in a straight line out of
harm's way, but are hovering around her on all sides in a dangerous
proximity. Like the poet, she looks not forward nor behind. If they are
beyond reach, very well; if they are not, all the same; scratch,
scratch, scratch in the soil goes her great, strong, horny claw, and up
flies a cloud of dust, and away goes a poor unfortunate, whirling
involuntary somersets through the air without the least warning. She is
a living monument of the mischief that may be done by giving undue
prominence to on