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It was not very long after when Em came out at the back door with a towel thrown across her head, and in her hand a cup of milk. "Ah," she said, coming close to him, "he is sleeping now. He will find it when he wakes, and be glad of it." She put it down upon the ground beside him. The mother-hen was at work still among the stones, but the chickens had climbed about him and were perching on him.
But when, vigilant as a mother-hen, she sought to prepare her husband for a possible unpleasantness, she found him already informed; and her well-meant words were like a match laid to his suppressed indignation. "In all my born days I never heard such impudence!" He turned embarrassingly cool to Tilly.
The haste with which a nervous mother-hen called her family into the chicken house when she heard that cry of "Kee-you! kee-you!" always amused Jasper Jay, for he never tired of the game. Surprising as it may seem, now and then Jasper's hawk-call deceived even Farmer Green himself.
The word slavery is, to us, an awful word. Very much of our anti-slavery feeling is a perfectly natural instinct. You cannot see Java sparrows in a cage, nor even a mother-hen tied to her coop, without a lurking wish to give them liberty. On thinking of being "a slave," we immediately make the case our own, and imagine what it would be for us to be in bondage to the will of another.
She called to the children, and the little ones clustered round her skirts like chicks around the mother-hen. Only Etienne remained aloof, wrathful against his sister for what he deemed her treachery. "Women have no sense of honour!" he muttered to himself, with all the pride of conscious manhood. But Lucile felt more than ever like a bird who is vainly trying to evade the clutches of a fowler.
"That is the bit of Christianity I work for," she said as she led him out again, "a sort of mother-hen whose cluckings, scratchings, and incubations are run in a parish of five thousand half-starved people on less than £300 a year. Have you anything better to show?" "I want revolution," he said. "Choose your own time," she answered mildly. "Here every day we are facing a far worse thing."
An egg is a higher style of being than a piece of clay which an external modeler makes into the image of a bird. Well, the earth's history develops from within. It is like that of a wonderful egg which the sun's heat, like that of a mother-hen, has stimulated to its cycles of evolutionary change. Individuality of type, and difference from other beings of its type, is another mark of rank.
We may dispute upon the question whether the nestlings are ready to do without the mother-hen and to come out of the eggs, or whether they are not yet advanced enough. But the young birds will decide the question without any regard for our arguments when they find themselves cramped for space in the eggs. Then they will begin to try them with their beaks and come out of them of their own accord.
On the other hand, young chickens have lost, wholly by habit, that fear of the dog and cat which no doubt was originally instinctive in them, in the same way as it is so plainly instinctive in young pheasants, though reared under a hen. But this instinct retained by our chickens has become useless under domestication, for the mother-hen has almost lost by disuse the power of flight.
Mother Etienne, busy giving green apples to the pigs, bran to the rabbits, and corn to the pigeons, came back presently, and could not see the big Yollande beside the pond, only her children floating far, far away on the water. Surprised she drew nearer, called, but in vain. The mother-hen had disappeared. Then only did she understand the tragedy that had occurred. She called for help.
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