s.

Yet, if you take away selfishness from a chicken's moral make-up, and
fatuity from his intellectual, you have a very charming little creature
left. For, apart from their excessive greed, chickens seem to be
affectionate. They have sweet social ways. They huddle together with
fond caressing chatter, and chirp soft lullabies. Their toilet
performances are full of interest. They trim each other's bills with
great thoroughness and dexterity, much better indeed than they dress
their own heads,--for their bungling, bungling little claws make sad
work of it. It is as much as they can do to stand on two feet, and they
naturally make several revolutions when they attempt to stand on one.
Nothing can be more ludicrous than their early efforts to walk. They do
not really walk. They sight their object, waver, balance, decide, and
then tumble forward, stopping all in a heap as soon as the original
impetus is lost, generally some way ahead of the place to which they
wished to go. It is delightful to watch them as drowsiness films their
round, bright, black eyes, and the dear old mother croons them under her
ample wings, and they nestle in perfect harmony. How they manage to
bestow themselves with such limited accommodations, or how they manage
to breathe in a room so close, it is difficult to imagine. They
certainly deal a staggering blow to our preconceived notions of the
necessity of oxygen and ventilation, but they make it easy to see whence
the Germans derived their fashion of sleeping under feather-beds. But
breathe and bestow themselves they do. The deep mother-heart and the
broad mother-wings take them all in. They penetrate her feathers, and
open for themselves unseen little doors into the mysterious, brooding,
beckoning darkness. But it is long before they can arrange themselves
satisfactorily. They chirp, and stir, and snuggle, trying to find the
warmest and softest nook. Now an uneasy head is thrust out, and now a
whole tiny body, but it soon reenters in another quarter, and at length
the stir and chirr grow still. You see only a collection of little legs,
as if the hen were a banyan-tree, and presently even they disappear, she
settles down comfortably, and all are wrapped in a slumberous silence.
And as I sit by the hour, watching their winning ways, and see all the
steps of this sleepy subsidence, I can but remember that outburst of
love and sorrow from the lips of Him who, though He came to earth from a
dwelling-pla