s confined during the
performance of his vocal exercises to a narrow city yard surrounded by
brick walls which act as sounding-boards to carry the vibrations to
the ears of a sleeper who is already restless with the summer heat
and with the buzzing of early and pertinacious flies. To such a man,
aroused and indignant, there comes a profound conviction that the
urban rooster is far more vociferous than his rural brethren; that he
can sing louder, hold on longer and begin again more quickly than the
bucolic cock who has communed only with nature and known no envious
longings to outshriek the morning milkman or the purveyor of catfish.
And he who is thus afflicted perhaps may be justified if he regards
"the cock, that trumpet of the morn," as an insufferable nuisance,
whose only excuse for existence is that he is pleasant to the eye and
the palate when, bursting with stuffing, he lies, brown and crisp,
among the gravy, ready for the carving-knife.

But the man who is fortunate enough to dwell in the country during
the ardent summer days takes a different and more kindly view of
chanticleer. If he is waked early in the morning by the clarion voice
of some neighboring cock, he will not repine, provided he went to bed
at a reasonably early hour, for he will hear some music that is not
wholly to be despised. The rooster in the neighboring barn-yard gives
out the theme. His voice is a deep, but broken, bass. It is suggestive
of his having roosted during the night in a draft, which has inflamed
his vocal chords so that his tones have lost their sweetness. It is
as if a coffee-mill had essayed to crow. The theme is taken up by a
thin-voiced rooster a quarter of a mile away, and scarcely has he
reached the concluding note before a baritone cock, a little more
remote, repeats the cadence, only to have his song broken in upon by
a nearer bird who understands exactly the part he is to play in the
fugue. And so it passes on from the one to the other, growing fainter
and fainter in the distance as Shanghai sings to Bantam and Chittagong
to Brahmapootra, until, at last, there is silence; and then, "O hark!
O hear! How thin and clear!" far, far away some rooster sends out a
delicate falsetto note that might have come from a microscopic cock
who is practicing ventriloquism in the cellar. Instantly the catarrhal
chicken in the next yard begins the refrain again with his hoarse
voice; and then again and again the fugue goes round, never tir