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would get up and visit the henroost to find out in which quarter trouble was brewing for them.
Set a hen on Sunday night, and all the eggs will hatch. If thirteen eggs are set, there will hatch from them twelve pullets and one rooster.
“Eat hog, and you become a hog,” said one old man to me. “The only feller in the world that‘d gain anything by it is the shoemaker, because, when he got turned into a hog, he could reach around to his back, and pull out a bristle when he wanted one.”
If the breast-bone of the fowl you have boiled is soft, it was young. If it is hard, it was old.
There is a saying that on the night before Christmas when the clock strikes twelve the cows kneel in their stalls. Some young girls in Hadley, years ago, sat up to discover whether this was true or not, At midnight they went out to the barn, and sure enough when the hour struck the cows knelt. At any rate, that was what the girls said.
A still older story told in the town with the same theme is that at midnight when the Christmas Day begins, all the cattle in the yards and fields might be
