stolen in infancy by gypsies, and his parents lived ever afterwards in terror for the rest of their children. But what was this compared to the life of the staging-house fowl? His whole life is spent in strategy. Every advance in his direction is a wile, each corner an ambuscade, and each conclave of servants a cabal. With every sun comes a Rye-House Plot for the wretched bird, and before evening he has had to run the gauntlet of a Vehm-gericht. His brother, suspicious yet all too confiding, would trust no one but the wife of the grain dealer who lived at the corner; and this single confidence cost him his life. So our bird trusts no one.
Indeed, now that I come myself to think seriously of the staging-house fowl, I would not hesitate to say that the washerman’s donkey has the better life. The donkey can remember childhood’s years as an interval of frivolity and light-heartedness; and even in maturer life it is free (with three of its legs), after the day’s work is over, to disport itself with its kind. But the case is different with the bird. Pullets of the tenderest years are sought out for broth; adolescence is beset with peril in hardly a less degree than puberty; while alas! old age itself is not respected. Like Japanese youth it fives with sudden death ever in prospect; but the hara-kiri in the case of the fowl is not an honorable termination of life, while the lively apprehension of it unwholesomely sharpens its vigilance. It has, moreover, nothing to live on and plenty of it; and this diet affects its physique, inasmuch as it prevents the increase of flesh, while the constant evasion of death develops its muscles — the thigh-bones assuming vulturine dimensions. The feathers, by frequent escap-
