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To-day it is no longer the playful trick of a schoolboy; it is a matter of serious research. I happen to have the very subject that I need: a Turkey-hen, doomed soon to be the victim of our Christmas merry-making. I repeat with her the method of manipulation which I employed so successfully on the banks of the Aveyron.
She informed her niece that she wished her to go with her to a thicket on the other side of the wheat field which that young lady had advised should be ploughed for pickles, to look for a turkey-hen which she had reason to believe had been ridiculous enough to hatch out a brood of young at this improper season.
Nothing Claude had ever seen or heard or read or thought had made it all so clear as these untried wooden bottoms. They were the very impulse, they were the potential act, they were the "going over," the drawn arrow, the great unuttered cry, they were Fate, they were tomorrow!... The locomotive screeched to her scattered passengers, like an old turkey-hen calling her brood.
Man, intelligent and free, is an animal wholly unpremeditated upon this planet. Produced by unexpected combinations and haphazard transformations, in the midst of a general subordination of matter, he figures as a dissonance and a revolt! "Nature has engendered without having conceived him. The result is as if a turkey-hen had unconsciously hatched the egg of an eagle.
It was a cage, in which animals, naturally antagonistic, were living in a state of perfect concord. A dog and cat were dining sociably together from one plate, and, not far off, a turkey-hen was comfortably perched upon the back of a fox, who, so far from betraying any symptom of appetite for the turkey, looked quite oblivious of her proximity.
"Yes," rejoined Lucien, "that is the reason why they are called `turkey-buzzards." Francois' observation was a very natural one. There are no two birds, not absolutely of the same species, that are more like each other than a turkey-buzzard and a small-sized turkey-hen that is, the common domestic turkey of the black variety, which, like the buzzard, is usually of a brownish colour.
"I have heard," he says, "a turkey-hen, when at the head of her brood, send forth the most hideous scream, without being able to perceive the cause; her young ones, however, immediately when the warning was given skulked under the bushes, the grass, or whatever else seemed to offer shelter or protection.
And we one almost swears at oneself to admire what is execrable! It is incredible! An unreasoning beast would mourn at it. It is an actually impossible state of things. An Italian turkey-hen comes to Germany, where are academies and high schools, and old students and young professors sit listening while she sings in English the airs of the German Handel.
Man, intelligent and free, is an animal wholly unpremeditated upon this planet. Produced by unexpected combinations and haphazard transformations, in the midst of a general subordination of matter, he figures as a dissonance and a revolt! "Nature has engendered without having conceived him. The result is as if a turkey-hen had unconsciously hatched the egg of an eagle.
The following singular instance of the far-sighted watchfulness of the turkey-hen over her young is narrated by a French priest.
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