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Perhaps it is just as well not to work, or play, or read except in "the library of the grasshoppers" as do my own good, sleeping friends in Macao. The Hen That Could Lay and Lie. I had the following story from the bill of an old Spanish hen, an inveterate cackler, who used to fly over the neighbouring fence and wander, with happy, self-communing clucks about my vegetable garden.
After the tank comes, more leisurely, a squad of brooms. The street is dripping, every sewer opening clucks and gurgles with the falling water. There is something unbelievably humorous in the way that roaring Niagara of water dashes madly down the silent street.
A few minutes after they have retired to their respective rooms, the contemplative young man reappears with silent tread, and with a scornful glance at my surroundings, both human and inanimate, gathers up my loose effects, and bids me bring bicycle and everything into his room; here, I find, he has already prepared for my reception quite a downy couch, having contributed, among other comfortable things, his wolf-skin overcoat; after seeing me comfortably established on a couch more appropriate to my importance as a person recently from Stamboul than the other, he takes a lingering look at the bicycle, shakes his head and clucks, and then extinguishes the light.
Yes, you're caught!" she commented ungenerously. "I know exactly what you were saying. Shall I tell you? No, p'raps I'd better not. I'll tell you what you looked like instead, shall I? You looked exactly like that funny old speckled hen in the yard who always clucks such a lot.
And the polite cock waited upon them in the most gentlemanly manner, making queer little clucks and gurgles as if he said: "Allow me, madam, to offer you this kernel;" or, "Here, my dear, try that bit." And sometimes he pecked a little, with a loud quaver, evidently saying, "Come, come, children, behave yourselves, and don't eat like pigs."
But the animal has neither imagination, nor foresight, nor reason, nor a doctor. "No! not even a doctor! The chicken droops its head, overwhelmed, or the calf dies; the hen clucks and the cow lows for a time, and then these beasts continue to live, forgetting what has happened. "With us, if the child falls sick, what is to be done, how to care for it, what doctor to call, where to go?
"She is very well and wonderfully beautiful; at present she is having lessons in dancing and elocution, and turning the heads of her teachers. It is amusing or would be amusing, to any one else than me to see how the quiet family she is with clucks after her in perpetual anxiety, and how cavalierly she treats them.
But when morning came, little Blot lay frozen stiff under a coverlet of snow: and the tender-hearted children sighed as they dug a grave for the last of the unfortunate family of the Clucks. I have often wondered what the various statues standing about the city think of all day, and what criticisms they would make upon us and our doings, if they could speak.
The DAYONG then calls upon sixteen of the women to enter the room; they enter led by a woman who, pretending to be a fowl, clucks and crows, and says, "Why are you all asleep here? It has been daylight for a long time. Don't you hear me crowing? Wake up, wake up."
Upon the farm's drawn blinds the morning glowed; And down the valley, with little clucks and rills, The dancing waters danced by dancing daffodils. But if, consciously or unconsciously, Mr. Masefield in the composition of The Daffodil Fields followed the metre and the manner of Wordsworth in Resolution and Independence, in the story itself he challenges Tennyson's Enoch Arden.
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