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As it was before the days of refrigerators, the fore part of the deck was devoted to live stock. Pigs grunted in one pen, sheep bleated in another, whilst ducks quacked and turkeys gobbled in coops on either side of them.
Several Aunties who lived "along Gran's street and along the next and over the field" had to be left out. As soon as postcard writing palled a sailor came along providentially, took him to see the hen coops, and let him find two eggs that had been laid. Marcella wrote long letters home; only to Wullie did she mention Louis, and even to him she said very little.
Many and many a pleasant stroll they had among the poultry markets, where ducks and fowls, with necks unnaturally long, lay stretched out in pairs, ready for cooking; where there were speckled eggs in mossy baskets, white country sausages beyond impeachment by surviving cat or dog, or horse or donkey; new cheeses to any wild extent, live birds in coops and cages, looking much too big to be natural, in consequence of those receptacles being much too little; rabbits, alive and dead, innumerable.
'No immediate danger Miss, said he, 'compose yourself; the ship will right up directly throwing all the light trash overboard chicken coops just gone over. "'Man, moaned a woman on whose face was blended an expression of benevolence and nausea, 'did you open those coops, and let out those fowls, that they may not drift about and starve?
How different to civilized persons who breed animals and poultry on purpose to devour them, who fatten fowls in coops, cruelly convert cockrels into appetizing capons, peg geese to the ground that their liver may supply an extra dainty for the table and protect the poetic love of pigeons in order to cook their little ones!
The bulk-heads of the captain's cabin were knocked down, and the sheep, pigs, and poultry, gingerly ushered into the hold, preparatory to the demolition of their several pens, styes, and coops, on the main deck.
At such prices as these the crew and emigrants would willingly have taken as much as the natives had for sale, if I would have allowed it; but I was afraid to let them have too much fresh fruit all at once, lest they should make themselves ill; but we took every fowl that we could get hold of, killing enough to serve all hands for dinner that day, and putting the rest into the coops, which had by this time become almost empty.
Those days a part of every ship was known as "the hen coops" where ducks, geese and chickens were confined. They came in due time through the butcher shop and the galley to the cabin table. The cook was an able, swearing man whose culinary experience had been acquired on a Nantucket whaler.
Then he coops him up in the White House, drops away absently, softly into ten thousand cities, forgets him, and sets him to work. The Prime Minister of England has a lonesome job of course, but he is the head of his own party, has and knows he has all the while his own special crowd, he is allowed and expected, as a matter of course, to snuggle up to.
Some of the coops were washed from the quarter-deck, and several of the poultry destroyed. In consequence of the vessel shipping so great a quantity of water, the pumps were doubly manned, and soon gained on her. The gale had not in the least abated during the night. The well was plumbed, and there was found to be a sudden and alarming increase of water.
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