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Updated: July 17, 2025
Above all, we are said to be indebted to the Romans for that inestimable breed of poultry in right of which we have for years carried off the leading prizes at every poultry-show in the county, and have even been enabled to make head against the exaggerated pretensions of modern Cochin-China interlopers. Such, briefly sketched, is my native Saxonholme.
As well might the geese who saved Rome be omitted from history as Martha Macdonald's Cochin-China hen which well, we won't say what just yet. That hen was frightfully plain. Why Cochin-China hens should have such long legs and wear feather trousers are questions which naturalists must settle among themselves. Being a humorous man, Angus had named her Beauty.
Yet the people of Cochin-China are always begging for gifts; and if they cannot get the things they ask for, they steal them. Are they generous? No, because they are covetous. It is impossible to be at the same time generous and covetous; for what goodness is there in giving away our own things, if we are wishing for other people's things? And now let us leave the people and look at the land.
But the people are not satisfied with idols in trees; they have pocket idols, which they carry about with them everywhere. These two kingdoms belong to the king of Cochin-China; yet all three, Tonquin, Cambodia, and Cochin-China, pay tribute to China, and therefore they must be considered as conquered countries. They are all very much like China in their customs.
Siam, as our readers know, is an important kingdom situated between the Burman Empire on the one hand, and Cochin-China on the other.
In some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind, cast by the wings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry. They no longer soar, and they attain only to a Shanghai and Cochin-China grandeur.
Camphor, being compounded, or having to undergo a preparation, comes all from China. That which grows in canes comes from Borneo, and I think none of that kind is brought to Europe, as they consume large quantities of it in India, and it is there very dear. Good aloes wood comes from Cochin-China; and benjamin from the kingdoms of Assi, Acheen? and Siam.
Such men as Bishop Berneux, the Abbe Retord, and Father Feron, missionaries in Cochin-China and Corea, all possessed that protective sense of humour which kept up their spirits and their enthusiasms. Father Feron, for example, hidden away in the "Valley of the Pines," six hundred miles from safety, writes to his sister in the autumn of 1858:
Mother Etienne had given to a Cochin-China hen, which she had christened Yollande, some white duck's eggs to sit on. The batch of fifteen eggs had all come out.
We believe that fire will burn to-morrow, because it burned to-day and yesterday; but we believe, on precisely the same grounds, that it burned before we were born, and that it burns this very day in Cochin-China.
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