heads drawn into feather mufflers, and looking, with their drenched and drooping plumes, like Militia Captains on parade day, when Barometers and water are reported "falling." There is not a crow of defiance, or triumph, or complacence; not a call-you have heard it, and I cannot describe it, unless it is like a laugh in a muff-to the 'women folks,' at the discovery of some rare delicacy, real or imaginary, in the freshly-raked earth; imaginary, for it must be confessed they are gay deceivers," some of them, and call very affectionately, when they find no corn. Observation, both of Cocks and Capitalists, enables me to say, that any "Rooster," having from three pecks to one and a half bushels of some current grain at command, can come into this neighborhood, and among eighty or so (counting chickens) of the feathered race, be THE courted, caressed, and clucked about, of the whole roost; but an awkward invention is 'but,' for an awkward necessity-let him take care of his corn.

Small lawyers very Johnsonian; red-visaged Bonifaces very Boswellian; officers of the Army all Brigadiers; "Martinets" of the Navy very peremptory, little Quakeresses very modest; mothers very bustling, and gossips very busy-all are represented among

that parti-colored, cackling, clucking, crowing rowd of Locomotive MILLS for the grinding of all sorts of produce, and called "for short" HENS.

These "small deer" are vocal but not musical, unless one has an ear for sawing and filing. Their language is too rich in consonants-too decidedly Saxon; and because, I suppose, no William the Conqueror ever broke shell, and thus made his debut into breathdom, it is without the softening accents of the Norman-French. Harsh as it is, however, no one can deny to it expressiveness, and, sometimes, eloquence: the great cry when an egg is laid is as good as an announcement in the London Times, thus: "Mrs. SPECKLED, of an EGG." The alarm, when a wing somewhat too broad sweeps over the Farm-Yard, is as significant as the old Saxon Tocsin The call of something" found," is quite as intelligible as the Town Crier with his bell. The defiant voice of the Cock is a challenge in honest vernacular, and the triumphant crow is a "hurrah in plain English. The Mother's incessant 'cluck, clucking, with her family, is veritable "baby-talk," while her tones, gathering the callow wanderers together, are as full of love as an old Ballad. And the notes of the chickens? There is not a rural sound softer and

sweeter than the home-note of the little creatures, when nestled at night beneath the Mother's brooding wing. Were it translated into the language of "Paradise Lost"-that subdued " yeep, eep, eep ❞—it would be, beyond a doubt, the word defined by some Webster yet unborn, "perfect happiness at home, and home once more!"

Chicken Pie.

THE transition from chickens on the perch to chickens in the pie, seems more natural and easy according to Whateley and Newman than it is according to Poultry. I abominate Chicken-pies as edibles, but, be assured, from no "fellow feeling." I love to see them, to think of them, but not to eat them T would as soon make a meal of reminiscences, or call for a Metaphor, "rare done," at dinner. They are suggestive; they are melancholy-Chicken-pies are; they bring to mind days that went down long ago at home; the capacious and burnished tin pan, wherein "mother"—your mother and mine-used. tc bake them aforetime; the old family table, round

which we five, and no more, used to gather, Christ mas Days and Thanksgivings; when to hold the lan tern at night, while some body robbed the hen-roost, was an era; when we used to run away before they were beheaded, because we couldn't bear to see it ;' when we just wanted to hold one a minute, 'to see how it would seem;' when a wing was a treasure, and we played' it was a bird, and 'poored' it, and offered it crumbs of bread every day, and wrapped it up in an apron, and hid it in the trundle-bed; when we--you and I-grasped the 'wish-bone' and wished, and both pulled, and both held a fragment; but yours was the larger, so you had your wish, as they all told us. Don't you remember? Can't you see it all? Ah! there's more beneath that swelling crust than every body dreams of, and the chickens are a small item indeed.

That mnemonic pie "minds" me, too, of the days when to find a Hen's nest was to have an ecstacy; the more eggs, the more ecstacy. Many a man-perhaps you have-has found name and fame since then, and it never quickened a pulse ! How the chip hat was doffed, preparatory to "the removal of the deposites," and the eggs transferred thereto; and no Roman, returning from flushed fields

of conquest, felt half so grand as you and I, when we counted the treasures, one by one, into Mother's checked apron, and had a vision of a little pie a-piece, baked upon our scalloped tins.'

6

Sometimes, after a driving rain, you rernember, we used to find a downy chick, drenched with water, in articulo mortis. The little handled basket, stained with strawberries summers before, was nicely lined with cotton-wool, and the gasping helplessness nestled therein, and the basket, with its precious contents, covered with a cloth, was set in a corner near the kitchen fire, to keep it warm. And what times we had, wetting up meal, and feeding, and watching, and 'tending! How many times we peeped under the cloth, just to see, as we said, 'how it is now.' Fierce altercation--sorry to say it—about the ownership of the tenant in the basket, would arise, and the titles tried by the usual test of who saw it first, who got to it first, who put it in the basket, whose hen laid the egg, or whose hen hatched it; and maybe, the while, the chicken would be dying. The right of possession occurs simultaneously to both; a plunge 's made for the basket; the cloth falls off in the mêlee, and the chicken lies there, among the white wool— dead! War is turned to weeping. I made a shingle