Dear reader, did you ever wrestle with a hen that had a wild, uncontrollable desire to incubate? Did you ever struggle on, day after day, trying to convince her that her mission was to furnish eggs for your table instead of hovering all day on a door knob, trying to hatch out a litter of front doors?
William II. Root, of this place, who has made the hen a study, both in her home life and while lying in the embrace of death, has struck upon an argument which the average hen will pay more attention to than any other he has discovered in his researches.
He says the modern hen ignores almost everything when she once gets the notion that she has received a call to incubate. You can deluge her with the garden hose, or throw old umbrellas at her, or change her nest, but that don't count with the firm and stubborn hen. You can take the eggs out of the nest and put a blooded bull-dog or a nest of new-laid bumblebees in place of them, and she will hover over them as assiduously as she did before.
William H. Root's hen had shown some signs of this mania, so he took out the eggs and let her try her incubate on a horse rake awhile, just so she could kind of taper off gradual and not have her mind shattered. Then he tried her at hatching out four-tined forks, and at last her taste got so vitiated that she took the contract to furnish the country with bustles by hatching out an old hoop skirt that had gone to seed.
Mr. Boot then made an experiment. We were one of a board of scientists who assisted in the consultation. The owner of the hen got a strip of red flannel and tied it around her tail.
The hen seemed annoyed as soon as she discovered it, No hen cares to have a sash hung on her system that doesn't match her complexion. A seal-brown hen with a red flannel polonaise don't seem to harmonize, and she is aware of it just as much as anybody is.
That hen seemed to have thought of something all at once that had escaped her mind before, and so she went away.
She stepped about nine feet at a lick on the start and gained time as she proceeded. When she bumped her nose against the corner of the stable she changed her mind about her direction. She altered her course a little, but continued her rapid style of movement.
Her eyes began to look wild. She seemed to be losing her reason. She got so pretty soon that she did'nt recognize the faces of her friends. She passed Mr. Root without being able to distinguish him from a total stranger.
These peculiar movements were kept up during the entire afternoon, till the hen got so fatigued that she crawled into a length of old stovepipe, and the committee retired to prepare a report.
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It is the opinion of the press that this is a triumph of genius in hen culture. It is not severe, though linn, in its treatment and while it of course annoys and unmans the hen temporarily, it is salutary in its results, and at the same time it furnishes a pleasant little matinee for the spectators. We say to those upon whose hands time hangs heavily these long-days, that there is nothing that soothes the ruffled mind and fills the soul with a glad thrill of pleasure like the erratic movements of a decorated hen. It may not be a high order of enjoyment, but it affords a great deal of laugh to the superficial foot to those who are not very accomplished, and who laugh at things and then consider its propriety afterward.
A FRONTIER INCIDENT.
Calamity is the name of a man who lives in the gold camp of Cummins City. He has another name, but nobody seems to know what it is. It has been torn off the wrapper some way, and so the boys call him Calamity.
He is a man of singular mind and construction. The most noticeable feature about Calamity is his superstitious dread of muscular activity. Some people will not tackle any kind of business enterprise on Friday. Calamity is even more the victim of this vague superstition, and has a dread of beginning work on any day of the week, for fear that some disaster may befall him.
Last spring he had a little domestic trouble, and his wife made complaints that Calamity had worn out an old long-handled shovel on her, trying to convince her about some abstruse theory of his.
The testimony seemed rather against Calamity, and the miners told him that as soon as they got over the rush a little and had the leisure they would have to hang him.
They hoped he would take advantage of the hurry of business and go away, because they didn't want to hang him so early in the season. But Calamity didn't go away. He stayed because it was easier to stay than it was to go. He did not, of course, pine for the notoriety of being the first man hung in the young camp, but rather than pull up stakes and move away from a place where there were so many pleasant associations, he concluded to stay and meet death calmly in whatever form he might come.
One evening, after the work of the day was done and the boys had eaten their suppers, one of them suggested that it would be a good time to hang Calamity. So they got things in shape and went down to the Big Laramie bridge.
Calamity was with them. They got things ready for the exercise to begin, and then asked the victim if he had anything to say. He loosened the rope around his neck a little with one hand, so that he could speak with more freedom, and holding his pantaloons on with the other, said:
"Gentlemen of the convention, I call you to witness that this public demonstration toward me is entirely unsought on my part. I have never courted notoriety.
"Plugging along in comparative obscurity is good enough for me. This is the first time I have ever addressed an audience. That is why I am embarrassed and ill at ease.
"You have brought me here to hang me because I seem harsh and severe with my wife. You have entered the hallowed presence of my home life and assumed the prerogative of subverting my household discipline.
"It is well. I do not care to live, so long as my authority is questioned. You have already changed my submissive wife to an arrogant and self-reliant woman.
"Yesterday I told her to go out and grease the wagon, and she straightened up to her full height and told me to grease it myself.
"I have always been kind and thoughtful to her. When she had to go up in the gulch in the winter after firewood, my coat shielded her from the storm while I sat in the cabin through the long hours. I could name other instances of unselfishness on my part, but I will not take up your time.
"She uses my smoking tobacco, and kicks my vertebrÆ into my hat on the most unlooked-for occasions. She does not love me any more, and life to me is only a hollow mockery.
"Death, with its wide waste of eternal calm, and its shoreless sea of rest, is a glad relief to me. I go, but I leave in your midst a skittish and able-bodied widow who will make Rome howl. I bequeath her to this camp. She is yours, gentlemen. She is all I have to give, but in giving her to you, I feel that my untimely death will always be looked upon in this gulch as a dire calamity.
"The day will come when you will look back upon this awful night and wish that I was alive again; but it will be too late. I will be far away. My soul will be in the land where domestic infelicity and cold feet can never enter.
"Bury me at the foot of Vinegar Hill, where the sage hen and the fuzzy bumblebee may gambol o'er my lowly grave."
When Calamity had finished, an impromptu caucus was called, and when it was adjourned, Calamity went home to his cabin to surprise his wife. She hasn't fully recovered from the surprise as we go to press.
