hais that won't lay and
Leghorns that won't sit. On a large farm, where there are several barns
and as many sets of hens, the boy cultivates the fighting qualities of
the cocks by keeping them around together, and not letting them forget
each other. The turkeys--strange birds! so tender in youth a spring rain
kills them, so tough in age they roost in the tree-tops in winter, and
come down o' mornings covered with frozen sleet and looking as if they
enjoyed it--are objects of no interest to the boy; but for the geese he
has a kindness, not because they fight each other, but because they
fight him. "Can't you let them geese alone?" is the frequent exclamation
of the hired man in the stable to the boy in the mow. The boy is always
perfectly willing to hunt goose-eggs: he has a battle with the biting,
shrieking, wing-flapping goose every time he takes an egg from her nest.
When she begins to sit on her empty nest, it is his business to bring
back a part of her eggs and place them under her, which leads to a
pitched battle. The pea-hen is a different creature: she keeps her nest
a secret even from the peacock, never leaving it save on the wing, and
approaching it with the greatest circumambulation. Nobody but the boy
knows where it is. Should he take up her egg, though he might lay it
down exactly as it was before, she would never lay another egg there.
This he knows. He is acquainted with many things other people have no
idea of. He knows how a roost of poultry looks at morning dusk, when, if
you enter the barn, the entire roost turns one eye at you, and then for
an unknown cause simultaneously shakes its head. He knows how hens catch
mice in the hay-mow--how they gnaw the sucking pigs' tails to the bone
(the hired man says they need the meat). He knows how to obtain
bumblebees' honey, paying for this information with an ear like a garnet
potato, one of the sort that "biles up meller;" and he knows how to find
mushrooms. Life for a boy on an upland farm is to labor, to abstain, to
sweat and to be grievously cold (see Horace); nevertheless, there comes
a soft spring dawn when on the rich spots of the sheep-pasture he finds
a bushel of mushrooms, snow-white on their tops and pink underneath,
crisp, tender, rising full grown from the moist earth, and lifting
bodily away the chips and leaves that overlay them. He brings this
treasure home. He inverts the mushroom-cups in a clean frying-pan, fills
each one with butter and a pinch