Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/650

632 spirit and made no resistance. Then the other hens began to eat the paste off her feathers, and the poor bird would deliberately walk up to her former subjects and stand patiently to be eaten clean. In time she recovered her beauty, but never her lost rank.

Nations, shorn of their prestige or territory in one quarter, often "seek compensation" in another, where their neighbors are weak; and brutes in human form, after being whipped in a drunken fight by other men, sometimes soothe their wounded pride by beating their wives at home. So it is with poultry. A cock, chased by one of higher rank, will often vent his spite upon the first half-grown cockerel that comes within his reach, and even bully hens around until he recovers from his own humiliation. From that allied weakness which makes men bluster most when in greatest fear, hens that are weak enough at other times, are savage toward young roosters, sure soon to become their masters. They chase them with noisy fury, and try in every way to intimidate them, carefully avoiding a trial of strength, however, as long as possible. When it comes, they collapse into shrieking submission, with laughable suddenness. When a hen simply ignores a young cockerel, he usually encounters much more serious resistance, and sometimes has to fight hard for victory.

Hens are harder to deceive, in some respects, than many women. They flock up to a rooster with eager freedom, when he is eating busily in silence, while they are very shy of heeding his most artful invitations to a feast, real or imaginary. When he eats they know there is something good, and that he is not thinking of entrapping them; but when he shakes his head up and down, picking up morsels in his beak and calling as a hen calls her chickens, they understand the amorous and deceitful ways of their lord too well to approach him rashly. Some cocks play comparatively few tricks, and they are much more trusted than others which are as insincere as seductive. Neither is the average fowl easily humbugged, on the other hand, by attempts to conceal a real feast. It is amusing to observe the calm, careless manner of a hen which has caught a mouse, as she walks off toward a secluded spot, making the same contented, nothing-to-do noise which is her ordinary note of idleness. This, of course, happens only when there is a chance that no other hen saw the mouse caught. But usually some quick-witted sister will at once "smell a mouse," and steal quietly up behind, not infrequently announcing her coming by snatching at the coveted dainty. The poultry yard is always on the alert for a valuable discovery on the part of one of its inmates, and ready to put a sort of highway-robber socialism into practice at a moment's notice.

The foregoing plain statements of fact are but a few of the many proofs which the writer has seen of the existence in