cock-of-the-roost

Updated: May 20, 2025

The cock-of-the-roost sits aloft like Jupiter on an unsharable seat, holding your fate between two thongs of inconstant leather. Helpless, ridiculous, confined, bobbing like a toy mandarin, you sit like a rat in a trap you, before whom butlers cringe on solid land and must squeak upward through a slit in your peripatetic sarcophagus to make your feeble wishes known.

O. Henry - The Four Million